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.

Book Review: I, Medusa

Young adult themes and adult tragedy mix in this innovative reimagining of an ancient tale

In Greek mythology, Medusa is a monstrous, powerful, and tragic figure. A beautiful priestess who was cursed by the goddess Athena after being assaulted by the sea god Poseidon, Medusa was transformed to have hair made of live snakes and was terrifying enough that people turned to stone if they looked at her. She was born from ancient Greek tales, but she also appears in modern films like Clash of the Titans or Percy Jackson. Even the dark comedy series Wednesday features Gorgons as a category of magical students (“stoners”) who keep their hair covered with cool hats to avoid turning classmates (temporarily) to stone. But we seldom get the backstory of this complicated character.

I, Medusa is a new origin story with Medusa reimagined as a Black adolescent in ancient times. The result is an intriguing exploration of exploitation and revenge, as well as symbolic reflections on modern day racism. The novel is a tragic coming-of-age story of a relatable, flawed girl who gradually learns how terrible the world can be. The story explores all of this without feeling morose or uniformly bleak. Instead, it offers a unique and unapologetic exploration of human frailty and societal complexity. 

Medusa, also know as Meddy, is the seventeen-year-old youngest daughter of two deposed but wealthy lower gods of the sea. She is raised in a posh but oppressive noble household on a secluded island with her loving older sisters Stheno and Euryale and her strict and sometimes cruel and abusive mother and father. Meddy is the only mortal member of the family and is tired of her isolated life on the island, especially since she knows the clock is ticking on her existence. She dreams of mapping her way to faraway adventures with her childhood friend, a household slave named Theo. Things change when her parents host a party for the sea creatures, nobles, and deities, in the hopes that their daughters will find wealthy suitors. Meddy gains the attention of Poseidon and, later, her rash and bold actions intervening against an abusive nobleman gain the attention of the goddess Athena. Athena invites Meddy to train as an acolyte at her temple far away in Athens. Meddy is delighted to finally see the world and she makes both friends and enemies among the other priestesses in training. However, Poseidon’s ongoing pursuit and seduction of Meddy lead to a series of unfortunate events that eventually cause her to get caught in the cruelty of the gods.

I, Medusa offers an exploration of human nature in all of its contradictory ways. The novel not only gives a sympathetic backstory for the famous character, but also offers an exploration of complexities of social relations and personal choices through its flawed, immature protagonist and the equally flawed peers and gods who surround her. The story is told in retrospect, beginning when Meddy is already a snake-haired killer who is using her powers to punish those who hurt young girls. As her past is revealed, Meddy emerges as a curious, headstrong young woman willing to take risks for what she believes in. She is raised as a proud noble, mindful of her rightful place in the world, even when others treat her with racist disrespect at Athena’s temple. However, Meddy is shown to be flawed as well. At times she is naïve, insensitive, and self-absorbed in a way that leads to repeated poor choices for the teenaged heroine. Although the novel is an adult story, it has young adult themes as we watch Meddy navigate parental pressures, peer quarrels, and her first crush on the sea god himself. This complexity adds intrigue to the narrative and makes it very much a page-turner that will leave readers both cheering in delight and shouting in frustration at the various twists and turns of the tragic adventure.

Meddy’s boldness is juxtaposed with her intense naïvete. A major plot element is that she seems to know nothing about sex. This seems unbelievable given the dynamics of her parents and presence of her immortal older sisters, and because she indirectly observes it in her own home with Poseidon and another person. However, her naïvete provides the basis for an important issue of consent that pulls together various ancient interpretations of the Medusa story. Meddy is not the only complicated character in the novel. With the exception of Poseidon, all of the characters are complex and well written. The goddess Athena is feminist, inspiring, and wise, and is supportive of Meddy’s bravery and boldness. However, Athena is also vindictive and hypocritical in her treatment of sexual assault against the women of her temple. Meddy’s sisters are loyal to her, even at the cost of their own wellbeing, but they are comfortable having slaves and are gradually indifferent to the slaves’ wellbeing. Their casual treatment of slavery is an ironic inclusion in the story. This is especially true since racism is explored in Meddy’s interactions with the acolytes at the temple who want to touch her hair and insult her qualifications to be there because her skin color is different. Meddy’s sisters love her deeply but they eventually employ cruelty as a form of physical and emotional defense. On the other hand, Meddy satisfyingly evolves through hardships from a naïve teen to feminist avenger as the story progresses.

Overall, I Medusa provides a lot to ponder in its various themes of misogyny, racism, family, and hypocrisy. This retelling of her backstory through the eyes of a young Black woman adds an intriguing interpretation of the ancient myth while adding real world symbolism to the story. With complex characters and painful tragedies, this origin story of Medusa is surprisingly and addictively entertaining.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• A tragic take on a coming of age
• Flawed characters
• Real world reflections

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

Film Review: The Bride!

A smart, visceral, unapologetic cry of rebellion

The rules of the game are ambiguous from the beginning. Speaking from beyond the grave, Mary Shelley addresses the audience directly, bored with the endless void of the afterlife where nothing ever happens, and frustrated at not having had enough time for telling the stories she still had in mind. This theme of a woman’s voice tragically silenced will reoccur through the film. What sets things in motion is Shelley’s impossible feat of self-necromancy, as if applying the forbidden arts of Victor Frankenstein to her own life’s spark to find a way back into the world of the living.

We’re brought to 1930s Chicago, with its blinding lights and its sordid dark corners, its charm and its promise and its disillusions. There Shelley has sensed a spirit that resonates with hers, another woman exhausted of playing appendage to a certain breed of men; and their joining, rather than a possession in the way we’re used to seeing in horror cinema, is a two-hour-long primal scream, a verborrheic burst of irrepressible wrath and ecstasy and dread and revulsion and despondency and grievance all at once. Through this new woman, whom death itself is powerless to silence, Shelley completes the story she confesses to us she’d been meaning to write for centuries: the tale of the Bride of Frankenstein.

A motif keeps playing on a loop across Western myths, a Freudian fixation we can’t seem to outgrow: in one iteration after another, the creation of Man is a worthy end in itself, but the creation of Woman has to satisfy an instrumental justification. When God builds Adam, it’s for his own sake (and my bifid usage of “his” here is fully intended), but when he builds Eve, it’s solely for Adam. So it goes with every artificial woman from Galatea to Alexa: she exists to be put in the service of someone else, to fulfill a function. Whereas Frankenstein’s creature’s curse is that no one is willing to love him, Frankenstein’s creature’s Bride’s curse is that her willingness to love is already assumed. That’s the whole point of her. Whatever she may want for herself isn’t part of the equation.

This Bride, however, won’t play along with the plan. After her death and reanimation, she may be a blank slate with no traces left of her former identity (and that’s exactly how Frankenstein’s Entitled Incel wants her), but she still has Mary Shelley whispering inside her head. Even more dangerously, she carries the names and stories of many other women that 1930s Chicago has killed. She’s bound to attract the wrong kind of attention soon.

The rules of the game are kept ambiguous. The setting of The Bride! never pretends to be our 1930s Chicago; it has the gangsters and the neon signs and the ubiquitous cigarette smoke, but it also has clandestine clubs with strobes and modern beats. It’s a world where Mary Shelley lived, wrote and died, but somehow Victor Frankenstein existed too, and his masterwork is known to other researchers of fringe science. So Shelley’s ghost is aware of us in the audience, and on top of that she can access a world where her fictional creation really happened, and there she reenacts Bride of Frankenstein (to the point of adopting its gimmick of casting the same actress as both Shelley and the Bride), with a stint under the false name Penelope, the name of a mythical character whose whole deal consisted in putting her life in pause for a man (and to further highlight the point, The Bride! features a real-life actress by the name of Penélope in the role of a woman who has been denied a career of her own).

To this erudite pile of allusions The Bride! adds a side wink toward the crime spree of Bonnie and Clyde plus explicit callbacks to the victim-turned-criminal-turned-revolutionary-symbol strain of social commentary that 2019’s incel hagiography Joker tripped over and fell on its face attempting—which has got to be a deliberate choice, given that writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal once played a woman murdered by the Joker, and then took the Batman from that same film and cast him here as the 120-Year-Old Virgin. The Bride! juggles a dozen flaming daggers of intertextual connections and metafictional layers while tap-dancing backwards in high heels.

Movies have always loved monsters. So it’s only appropriate that this time, the monsters love movies. This version of Frankenstein’s creature is infatuated with a star of musical cinema who has conquered the devotion of the masses despite living with a physical deformity. It’s easy to see how the creature takes the actor as an aspirational symbol, even though the nature of this affection is not appreciated in return. In another of the film’s many tricks that blur the boundaries between levels of fictiveness, we see the creature and his Bride superimposed on the screen within the screen, replacing the protagonists of whatever movie they’re watching. They see a glamorous world of conventionally beautiful people and dare to see themselves in it. The Bride! couldn’t be more unsubtle in its plea to the audience: this story is about you. Try seeing yourself in it. Try letting its spirit possess you.

The Bride! is a movie about the power of movies, and about the trope of the instrumentalized woman, and about the injustice of being robbed of your voice and the exhilaration of seizing it back. It’s the protest against heartless callousness that Joker wished it were. It’s the anthem to unhinged feminine power that Cruella wished it were. It’s supremely uninterested in pleasing everyone. It dances to its own rhythm.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Review: Stranger Things Season 5 Volume II & Finale

The Duffer brothers stick the landing, bringing a close to nine years of epic storytelling

Volume II of the Stranger Things final season dropped on Christmas day, and when we last left our heroes, we discovered that Will could tap into the hive mind and hijack its powers—Will the sorcerer, indeed! I've now watched these episodes twice,  and simultaneously so much and so little happens in them. The vibe is a little different from Volume I, as somehow there's even more exposition to get through. Rather than go through the plot, I thought I'd go through what really works, and why the epilogue to episode 8 was fantastic.

What works

Discovering what the Upside Down really is

After discovering some of Dr. Brenner's notebooks in the Upside Down version of Hawkins Lab, Dustin pieces together that everything they thought was wrong. The Upside Down is actually a wormhole to  Dimension X, the place Vecna was transported to by El. It was sort of a Chekhov's Wormhole, though, as the crew had discussed wormholes in Mr. Clarke's science class years before. We still don't learn exactly why the Upside Down is the way it is, all decaying matter and dark skies, but ultimately that's less important than just knowing it was never the ultimate bad place. It's just a tunnel to another dimension. On the other side of the gooey, fleshy wall surrounding the Upside Down is sheer space, as noted by Steve's BMW getting sucked into it and vanishing into the galaxy.

Bringing Mr. Clarke into the crew

Everyone's favorite science teacher is recruited to help build a telemetry device so they can locate Dustin and company, and watching him finally join was absolutely heartwarming. Without him, the kids never would have succeeded in the prior seasons, and his reward is getting to witness all the insane things that have led to this point. It's a very sweet payoff, and he adds a lot to the team. Also, I love that Mr. Clarke is always sleeping with a different member of the Hawkins High School staff. 

Karen "Walk 'Em Down" Wheeler proves she's a badass once again

Still recovering from vicious demogorgon slash wounds in the hospital, Karen saves the day yet again when Lucas, Robyn, and Vicki are cornered by demodogs. After ripping her IV out, she deftly places oxygen tanks into huge commercial dryers, triggering an explosion that takes them all out. Moms in '80s movies are rarely given such agency, and watching her stagger down to the basement to take care of the kids is truly epic. In the epilogue, we see a fully recovered Karen at the kids' graduation, her huge scars visible but worn proudly on display in a V-neck dress.

The epic Mindflayer kaiju battle

When the team finally makes it to Dimension X, they're set to face off against the corporeal forms of the Mindflayer and Vecna. A lot of folks online complained that the battle was too short, but the team literally spent 5 seasons getting to this point. I thought it was awesome, as it actually felt like watching a D&D game in real time, from Steve and Dustin stabbing the Mindflayer's belly to Nancy leading them into the trap where Robin and Lucas and Will could rain down fire from above. Also, Joyce getting to hack off Vecna's head with an axe was a gift she truly deserved. I don't think anyone suffered more than her throughout every season, given her constant panic and stress.

Being the first TV show to license Prince's music

The two needle drops of "When Doves Cry" and "Purple Rain" were not only incredibly appropriate, the Duffer brothers somehow managed to convince Prince's estate that their show was worth granting the green light—no doubt because of the viral success that seemed all but promised. Having the record literally be the detonation devices for the destruction of the Upside Down is a fantastic choice, and El and Mike's final conversation set to "Purple Rain" is absolutely heartbreaking.

Why I choose to believe El is alive

A lot has been said about El's fate, but I think the Duffer brothers did it exactly right. By leaving El's death open to a different interpretation—namely, that she survived thanks to one final illusion by Kali—it gives everybody what they need. Some people are fine with a final sacrifice by a hero, while others (like myself) can choose to believe Mike's ending, that she escaped and is living far away, safe. I choose to believe she's still alive because it's what her character deserves, and at heart, I'm an optimist. But more importantly, I like that we, as the audience, get to choose our ending. It's like D&D itself! I personally don't need a ton of deaths to make a finale more meaningful.

What didn't work for me

There are too many characters

By season 5, we're dealing with upwards of a dozen folks that we have to check in on (somewhat) equally, and that starts to make things cumbersome. I wouldn't trade Robin and Steve for the world, but the subplot of Nancy and Jonathan's relationship was given way too much screen time for a duo that most folks couldn't care less about. (There's a reason no one was buying the Jonathan Byers Funko-Pop.) Will's coming out scene, meant to be a vulnerable and tender moment for his immediate family and ride-or-ride friends, ends up giving his speech to a room full of people, including his science teacher, his friend's girlfriend he's never met, and Murray, everyone's favorite mean weirdo.

The Marvelification of Stranger Things

Season 1 of Stranger Things was the little show that could, made by an unknown duo of brothers with a super small budget. As the fame of the show grew, so did its budget, and by season 5, we had something that felt visually and thematically more like X-Men or The Avengers. Superpowers, excessive CGI, different dimensions—it all feels a little too much. The grandiose nature of the final season, for the most part, felt light on the nostalgia (the show's bread and butter) and heavy on the special effects. To put it another way: light on the bowl cuts and heavy on the white-out eyes of Will Byers. Vecna is the big bad in Stranger Things, but his motivations aren't entirely clear to me. He was abused, clearly, but he feels more like a Thanos than anything else, unfortunately. By giving him such a broad impetus, I think the show really missed out on a meaningful villain.

Too much plot, too little room to breathe

A product of both the extraneous characters and the Marvelification is the fact that the plot was fairly thudding. In Volume II, nearly every other scene sees characters grabbing objects and telling us the plot, "Imagine this record is Will, and this one's Holly." Everything felt jam-packed, with no room for characters to just be. It's more than just a sense of urgency, though, because it felt like something was missing. I read that most of the episodes went through some pretty extensive scene-cutting, and I think it's definitely apparent. The only time characters really have heart-to-hearts is when they're on the way to a battle. Maybe it's because the show finally lost a bit of the childlike wonder that made it so special, because the kids are all in their 20s now.

Overall

Season 5 is definitely worth watching, and I think it's a fitting conclusion to the near-decade-long run of the show. It suffers from the issues I mentioned (and more), but if you really loved the characters and the story, I think the ending pays off. When I looked up after the epic battle in the finale and saw that there were still 45 minutes left, I wondered if there was going to be another stand-off with Dr. Kay and her army.

Instead, I thoroughly enjoyed the slow, thoughtful ending and watching our kids graduate. The scene of everyone putting up their D&D books on the shelf was heart-wrenching as they literally were closing the book on their childhoods.

Show endings are hard, because not every show knows at the outset how long it's going to last. While not perfect, the Stranger Things finale sticks the landing and leaves the viewer with a tale well told and a happy ending. And that's all we can really ask for.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Film Microreview: Anaconda (2025)

The Ouroboros of sequelitis eats its tail

Because every last bit of IP must be undusted for quick profit, this time we have a movie that just doesn’t bother pretending it’s about something more than squeezing another IP, and in the process successfully denounces itself. This “spiritual sequel” to 1997’s Anaconda both acknowledges that the original was ridiculously over the top and strives to beat it by being a hundred times more ridiculously over the top. It’s an impossible beast: a remake that is about how absurd it would be to film that remake. But it doesn’t have a commentary to make on its premise; this is no Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation. Its gimmick consists in pointing at itself and smirking at the audience: Hey, isn’t it silly that Hollywood keeps remaking everything? Ha ha. Joke’s on all of us for buying the tickets.

Anaconda doesn’t try to comment on the tension inherent in its assignment, on the dual task of telling a story that is about its own inadequacy for telling that story. It doesn’t take the example of its worthier predecessors, like 2005’s Bewitched, a metafictional comedy about rebooting Bewitched, or 2021’s The Matrix: Resurrections, a neat rebuke to the executives who forced it into existence and simultaneously a beautiful case for its own existence. The whole point of the new Anaconda is that there would be no point in a new Anaconda, and when it goes ahead and does it anyway, it doesn’t know how to justify itself.

The in-universe excuse for the reboot is that two childhood friends who always dreamed of making horror movies have a midlife crisis and suddenly decide to fly to the Amazon jungle and film a new Anaconda before they get too old to try things. Not the worst of premises, but it feels strange to watch Jack Black, of all people, play the responsible, mature half of the duo, while the magically ageless Paul Rudd is simply impossible to believe as an unemployable D-lister. These two characters have been stung by the nostalgia bug, and constantly reminisce about their school days, when they made zero-budget films for the pure love of the craft. But their inclination for artistic purity doesn’t extend beyond their lines; the actual plot devotes a lot of attention to who owns the legal rights to remake Anaconda.

(Curiously, the new Anaconda is so disconnected from the plot of the original that you wouldn’t need those rights in order to film this one. It’s the kind of mildly tangential allusion The Asylum gets away with selling all the time.)

Much like the self-serving abomination that was Space Jam 2, the new Anaconda takes care to remind viewers again and again that it’s a Sony property. Accordingly, the defining ethical question that propels the plot is whether you respect Sony’s property. The other themes alluded to in the script (illegal gold mining, cruelty toward animals, substance abuse disorders, the pursuit of happiness) are secondary to the sacred status of corporate ownership rights.

Barely tolerable as a buddy comedy, toothless as a horror thriller, self-defeating as a metafictional exercise, the movie we get feels like something captured by its titular monster: a regurgitated, half-digested lump that is hard to ignore but much harder to look at.

Nerd Coefficient: 3/10.

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

Anime Review: Kaiju No. 8 — Season 2

A shift from character and comedy to action and intensity

After an entertaining and engaging first season filled with the right combination of comedy and action, Kaiju No. 8 successfully earned a nomination for Anime of the Year, joining powerhouses like Frieren, Solo Leveling, and The Apothecary Diaries. Season 1 gave us the unusual hero origin story of Kafka, an older, ordinary, working-class person who gets a last chance to chase his childhood dream of becoming a kaiju hunter. But when an unexpected attack turns him into a kaiju, he has to fight to remain a hero while keeping his newfound intermittent transformation a secret from the rest of the defense force. In season 2, Kafka’s kaiju secret is out and he must find a way to rebuild trust with his teammates and the rest of the defense force as they all take on a terrifying new enemy who seems unstoppable. While the first season focused on relationships and character motivations, the second season is primarily action. The pivot from character introspection to action results in a season 2 that is fast-paced and entertaining, but not as fully comedic or relationship-driven as season 1. However, the relatively short season 2 and the cliffhanger ending make it clear that viewers are still in the building portion of the larger story arc.

In season 1, thirty-two-year-old protagonist Kafka became part of a found family of much younger new recruits competing for a spot on the Kaiju Defense Force. Kafka’s best friend and confidant Reno supported Kafka as he used his kaiju transformation to secretly help his comrades out of lethal situations. However, an unexpected attack in a major battle forced Kafka to reveal himself publicly as he risked his life to save his team. Season 2 begins with Kafka’s role in the defense force redefined to include tests to use his kaiju powers to help in the fight. However, his fear that he might irreversibly lose control inhibits his ability to fully use his hidden strength. He also gets the bad news that repeatedly transforming will dramatically reduce his life expectancy. These new obstacles arise just as the unusually intelligent Kaiju No. 9 plots to destroy all humans in the country. Whereas season 1 focused on kaiju as mindless beasts, season 2 introduces thoughtful, strategic, super-strong monsters who are intentionally destroying people in coordinated mass attacks. As the human body count grows, Kafka has to decide if he can rise to the challenge.

Although season 1 was reasonably violent, season 2 is far grimmer as it brings viewers into the bleakest moments of the narrative. There are still some very funny moments, but comedy is no longer the primary story element. The original squad of diverse personalities is disbanded in season 2 as the original team of recruits is split up and sent to different squads. Some previous regular characters mostly disappear from the story as new characters compete for screen time. Although the cruel and creepy Kaiju No. 9 appeared in season 1, it now takes on a lead role as the main villain coordinating a team of similarly intelligent and homicidal monsters. As a result, the on-screen body count is specific and violent rather than vague and abstract. Additionally, the previously sassy and strong Shinomiya has a personal loss that drives her to greater seriousness in the ongoing battle.

All this intensity makes the 11-episode season seem very short, as the fast-paced stories fly by and end in an abrupt moment of mounting tension. Fortunately, despite the more serious tone, there are still some very funny elements that balance out the intensity. New character Gen Narumi is the pink-haired squad leader who is hilariously video-game-addicted and social-media-obsessed. His superficial immaturity stands in stark contrast to his cold-blooded killer skills on the battlefield, and the juxtaposition of both elements makes for great scenes in season 2. Shinomiya’s interactions with Narumi are entertaining as she moves from intimidated to irritated with Narumi’s immaturity. Additionally, the previously serious vice-captain Hoshino gets lots of funny moments. The season starts with a standalone short film called Hoshino’s Day Off, in which the members of the original squad secretly follow the vice-captain around on their mutual day off to see what he is up to as he engages in a series of suspicious activities. The short film (which was previously released in theaters) is a fun break from the carnage and a last look at the old squad working together during a comedic adventure. Also, each episode of season 2 has a post-credits scene featuring Hoshino as a late night television host interviewing various characters. One micro-episode references Narumi’s social media obsession, and another segment comments on the poor amount of screen time given to previously regular characters. The micro-episodes are a self-aware and amusing palate cleanser after the intensity of the primary stories.

Beyond the battle intensity and the still present comedy, season 2 has some moments of introspection. Kafka and Mina have a quiet lunchtime together for the first time in the series and reminisce about their childhood fears and dreams. There is also a poignant moment when Kafka admits to Shinomiya that he hasn’t looked at his phone messages because he is afraid of what his former teammates think of his monster status. Those quiet moments are a reminder of why Kaiju No. 8 retains its appeal even as the narrative tone shifts from comedy to intensity. Although the season ends in a moment of mounting action, it will hopefully lead to a worthwhile payoff if fans are willing to endure the wait for season 3.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

Highlights:

• More intense action, less comedy
• Lots of hero angst but reduced focus on relationships
• Strong new character, less time for prior regulars

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

TV Review: Alien: Earth

What are little (robot) girls made of?

After half a century of increasingly questionable sequels, prequels and crossovers, there aren’t many scares left to extract from the iconic xenomorphs of Alien. But what can still be done with them is probe from new angles the questions the first film raised with regard to the rise of corporatocracy and the ways humans keep finding to predate on each other. In the case of the new TV series Alien: Earth, the most noticeable theme is the futility of subjecting life to a regime of property rights. You don’t truly own that which you can’t control, and you can’t control that which can set its own goals apart from yours. Even less can you be simultaneously a parent and an owner. You either help life grow or make it serve you.

Alien: Earth expands the worldbuilding of its franchise by adding more players to the dystopian corporate ecosystem: alongside Weyland-Yutani, i.e. the devil you know, we meet the newcomer Prodigy Corporation, which specializes in producing AI systems. We follow its immature founder, a narcissistic jerk with the most punchable face in the galaxy, for a handful of days preceding the planned launch of a service that promises to make human beings immortal by transferring their minds to artificial bodies. So far, this technology only works on children, because their minds are malleable enough. However, their new bodies have to be adult-shaped, because robots don’t grow. As you may imagine, this is a very disturbing, even traumatic experience for the first batch of kids recruited as testers.

Meanwhile, a Weyland-Yutani spaceship carrying specimens of xenomorph and other assorted adorables crash-lands on a city that happens to belong to Prodigy, so a legal battle ensues over who has the right to salvage however much is recoverable from the disaster. As it happens, Marcy, one of the kids who were put in those shiny robot bodies, has a brother who works as a first responder in that city, so she pleads with the Prodigy boss to be allowed to lead a rescue mission at the crash site. Her excuse is that it would give them a useful opportunity to test their new bodies in harsh conditions, but what she really wants is to reconnect with her brother, because the mind transfer project is an industry secret and, for all he knows, she’s dead.

Mayhem erupts soon enough, and a pants-coloring fright is had by all. Many throats are cut open, many limbs are impaled, many liters of blood are inadvisably conveyed from people’s interior to the same people’s exterior. Anyway, the Prodigy team manages, at no small cost, to get hold of a cargo of several xenomorph eggs (and other assorted adorables). You already know how the xenomorphs work. Much of the fun of the season lies in learning how each of the rest of the critters go about making breakfast out of any passing human. The breakout star is one spry little fellow that the Xenopedia tells me is called Trypanohyncha ocellus, but I’ve seen more fun people call it Optipus, and I personally prefer to call it Tentoculus. It’s adorable in exactly the wrong ways.

Once the team and their loot return to Prodigy headquarters, it’s time for the real drama. Some of the former kids are suddenly thrown into adult-sized responsibilities, while others are left to deal with adult-sized trauma on their own. It becomes clear that every step this company makes is calculated to feed the ego of the boss, who likes to project a personal image of a chaotic manchild so smart that everyone bores him, but his actual choices reveal the self-destructive reach of his arrogance. A game of mismatched agendas begins between full humans, humans with robotic bodies, and full robots, with the ending episodes adding a hundred more dimensions to the two original Alien films’ commentary on twisted forms of parenthood.

There are thin parts to this plot, but you easily forget about them when you watch the fantastic performances that this show boasts. The actors who have to play child characters in adult bodies prove great at speaking like children, moving like children, emoting like children. And the self-proclaimed genius who put them in that situation is deliciously detestable, ultimately revealed to have been a mistreated child who had to make adult decisions too soon but didn’t learn to break the cycle, and grew up to inflict a more sophisticated form of violence upon his substitute children. And I don’t even mean the obvious violence of separating a mind from its body (the transfer process requires killing the child), but the easier to disguise violence of turning people into instruments.

What with all the drama you can see this story has to offer, the most interesting relationship is the one that develops between the former kid Marcy and the xenomorphs. Her advanced electronic brain figures out how to communicate with them, and they become unexpected prison pals. It certainly helps that her body has no meat for it to munch on, but from her side of the dynamic, what connects them is that they’ve both been forcibly pulled out of the natural stream of life, and now they’re lost and vulnerable among people whose only sincere intention is to use them. Whereas the Alien movies showed us a being that usurps the role of offspring to prey on its lifegiver, the Prodigy Corporation is an impostor parent that preys on its children.

Finding innovative ways to address the core questions that define a franchise is a challenging trick to pull off. Alien: Earth passes stellarly the prequel test that Alien: Romulus failed and that Andor taught the master class on, in that it doesn’t resort to shoehorned references to tickle viewers’ nostalgia buttons. Instead, it creates its own space in the franchise and grows from there.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

TV Review: Wednesday Season 2, Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Review: Wednesday Season 2, Part 1

Clever, funny, horror mayhem and lots of family drama

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

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

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

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

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

Highlights:

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

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Review: Jurassic World: Rebirth

Herrrrrrrrrrrre we go again

It takes chutzpah to give the name "Rebirth" to a sequel that fails to make the case for why your franchise shouldn't stay dead. It takes even more chutzpah to admit as much in your movie's actual script: as our expert characters explain, people used to queue enthusiastically to see a good dinosaur show, whereas now they can't be bothered, and the only reason these bizarre abominations haven't been put out of their misery is that they're super expensive to make and the company still hopes something useful may come from them.

At least this time there's encouraging news: Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard are mercifully out of the picture, and in their place we get actors who can act. But the spectre of those two still haunts Jurassic World: Rebirth, because the dialogues haven't gotten any better. Fortunately, the latter half of the movie is mostly action set pieces, so there's not much talking to cringe at, but the beginning, when the characters are convincing each other that returning to the land of people-eating monstrosities isn't an obviously bad idea, is full of tortured technobabble and predictable jokes.

The script sticks so faithfully to established movie tropes that the cast can be neatly classified as follows:

• Family of innocent bystanders who of course won't get eaten because they're adorable;
• Trio of heroes who of course won't get eaten because their names are on the poster;
• Suddenly introduced crew who of course will get eaten because someone has to.

That being said, the actual confrontations with various types of dinosaurs are put together with proper care for the rhythm of dramatic tension, so there are many moments when one truly fears for the characters who can't die. Also, after a shipwreck splits the cast in two teams, the editing maintains a good sense of when to cut between their respective subplots. The flow of action is consistent and engaging. As survival adventures go, this one is quite enjoyable. But the movie doesn't do the core part of the assignment, which was to justify its own existence.

When 2015's Jurassic World introduced the concept of hybrid dinosaurs, it was a clever allegory for the arms race that was taking shape between increasingly unimpressed moviegoers and increasingly desperate moviemakers. But the sequels that followed haven't known what to do with that idea, and became further incarnations of what that first reboot wanted to criticize. The moments of Spielbergian awe at the majesty of primeval colossi have ceded the stage to instinctive revulsion at uglier and uglier experiments that make for curious action figures but don't have a narrative reason for being in the story.

Rebirth closes off the opportunity that the ending of Fallen Kingdom created and Dominion squandered: the repercussions of a world where dinosaurs are running loose and interacting with today's ecosystems. The new status quo declares that, actually, dinosaurs aren't compatible with the environmental conditions in most of the planet, and they've settled in a narrow band of territory near the equator, where it's hot enough for their tastes. OK, I can buy that. But the excuse to visit them this time is too contrived: a pharmaceutical company needs living tissue samples from the biggest dinosaurs because something about their massive hearts can provide a treatment for coronary disease. Can you use DNA from their fossils? No, it has to be from living animals, for reasons. Can you make your own clones and take the tissue samples from their embryos? No, it has to be in the restricted island where every government forbids to go, for reasons. Can you use blue whales, which are actually twice as big as the mosasaur? No, it has to be from the scary ones that eat people. For reasons.

So the plot makes zero sense, but at least the characters aren't annoying and the action is competently directed. If only the script hadn't yielded to the temptation of adding yet another dinosaur hybrid for no reason. What could have been a thrilling ending to the adventure ends up delivering a titan-sized eyesore that turns out to be too easy to get rid of. There's even a prologue that foreshadows this monster, with a deadly accident that could have served to comment on the dangers of our modern way of life (a lab is destroyed because someone was eating a chocolate bar), but that plotline goes nowhere. If you can get past the mediocre dialogues, lazy comedy, and shoehorned character motivations, Rebirth clears the bar of not being terrible, which by this point seems to be all we get to ask of a Jurassic sequel.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Book Review: Humans a Monstrous History

A book that looks at the history of monsters in human society and civilization, and comes to insightful conclusions about their role in the narrative of our culture

Monster.

Let’s start this review of Humans: A Monstrous History by not with the book itself, but the dictionary. What does the dictionary say a monster is? Here are some of the definitions:

• one unusually large for its kind
• an animal or plant of abnormal form or structure
• one who deviates from normal or acceptable behavior or character
• a threatening force
• something monstrous

And where does the word come from? What is the word’s etymology?

Middle English monstre, from Anglo-French, from Latin monstrum "omen, monster" from monēre "to warn."

The word monster, as you can see, is freighted with meaning, multiple meanings, and always has been. Thus monsters have always been with us, and this is one of the arguments in Surekha Davies’s book Humans: A Monstrous History.

I don’t normally lead off with the cover of a book, especially not a nonfiction one. But this is an exception that deserves further discussion. Look at the book image again. That shiny oval in the center is meant to invoke a mirror, with a suite of silhouettes of various monstrous forms as its. The author, right on the cover, is presenting her point of view and her concluding argument in visual form. We are the monstrous, or more accurately, a world where we can see all of us as monsters means that no one is monstrous.

To get to that final concluding argument, and working that thesis is the whole premise and mission of the book.

Davies takes us on a history of monsters, or as the jacket says, a history through them. This is really a look at how monsters have been seen and siloed and othered throughout human history. Although she does have some side discussions about other societies now and again, especially to contrast with the Western tradition, her study is mainly in that Western mold and that Western perspective. That doesn’t meant it’s all familiar; the author goes all the way back to Herodotus and forward through history. Gerald of Wales, a Norman/Welsh noble, looked down upon the English race as an abject sort, showing that racism can have unexpected axes, but has always been present in some way or another. There are always people to monstrify. There is always an out-group, it seems, and Davies has some good discussion about the role of others and their monstrification in society. There is a lot of discussion of people such as Antonietta Gonsalvus, the daughter of a “wild man” of the Canary Islands, and similarly afflicted with Ambras Syndrome, and thus hairy all over, including the face. Davies makes the point that, since such people seem to blur the boundaries between animals and humans, existing in that monster space, they are disquieting precisely because they make hard and fast lines impossible.

Monsters really are a way to put up a mirror to ourselves. In the process, Davies goes a lot into race and how groups have been sawed off of the norm. The Spanish colonial system of caste in North America, for instance, shows not only how people are divided and subdivided again as being more or less human (that is, Castilian White), but Davies also goes into how some of those boundaries and castes were far more porous than advertised. This just goes to her point that the identity of a monster is in the end often just a social convention or decision. Monsters and monsterhood can be situational, in time and space. A discussion of persecutions of Jews, up to the Holocaust, comes in as well.

So in that context, the most provocative group that Davies discusses in terms of monsterhood is women. I confess I had never thought of women in quite this way, but Davies lays out the case for the monstrification of women quite plainly. “Monstrous births,” both real and fake, are just part of this otherization of women and classification of them as monsters throughout history. This book made me think of the gorgon Medusa in a new light. This book is so rich with examples but it also provoked me and made me think of others she did not include in her thesis. Honestly, to list and discuss every example would have been impossible. Davies is selective. There is one "monster" I think she should have included, which I mention below when we get to the more science fictional aspects of the work.

This ties into a discussion of trans people and how they are being monstrified right now as of the time of the writing of the book and this review.

What this has to do with science fiction and thus this review space is, well, plenty. Science fiction, as the author points out, has dealt with the monstrous since its very beginnings in Frankenstein, with the titular character’s creation. And science fiction was an early proponent of embracing monsters. Monsters like Dracula, Caliban, King Kong and plenty of antecedents before the modern day. When the author gets to the modern-day depictions and ideas of what monsters are, her science fiction generally leans a lot on Star Trek. Data comes in for discussion, especially the episode “Measure of a Man,” which is all about the humanity (or non-humanity) of the android. Since we have already seen the whole idea of the not-quite-human as being a definition of monster before, the fact that Data is not quite human literally makes him potentially a monster in this context, to the author’s eyes. And for that alone, there are those who would seek to control him. Davies also makes an interesting point about Lore, Data’s double. In some ways he is very much more human than Data —he lies, uses contractions, mimics human speech and behavior more effectively than Data— and thus is very much more uncanny valley in the process. Lore is much more of a monster than Data ever is.

Davies goes on to talk about some other SFF properties, from Men in Black to, particularly, District 9 and how the plight of the protagonist, Wikus, and his slow transformation, his monstrification, makes him an outcast and distrusted in real time. It is a case study for the processes that she has described throughout the book. Battlestar Galactica, with its Cylons that can pass for humans and even interbreed with humans, particularly come in as well. Although she doesn't mention it, it is telling that many of the female Cylon "monsters" are very much concerned with motherhood while the male Cylons are not interested in fatherhood. Also consider that the most memorable of the Cylon infiltrators are female: Sixes and Eights.

However, I think she missed a trick in not discussing Spock. She does mention Star Trek: The Original Series in the context of the gender and race makeup of the bridge crew, and makes some points about monsters and boundaries in the process. But Spock is even more like Data in the sense of being a potential monster: he is half human, for one thing, which ties into earlier discussions in the book about the boundaries of humanity (Kirk’s words about Spock upon his death in Wrath of Khan come to mind). But the point is, even if Davies doesn’t discuss him, Spock and his transgressive nature, and on the bridge at that, as first officer to Kirk, fit in entirely with Davies’s thesis and is another data point in her favor.

The book ends with our present and looking toward the future. She points a finger at the new kinds of monstrifcation, including poverty, the use of LLMs and AI, and the anti-trans and anti-DEI campaigns. She concludes that, by having us embrace and see the people being called monsters right next door, the ones right within us, we can take steps to make this a more just and equitable society. If we are all monsters, none of us are.

With sound arguments, excellent and entertaining writing, and a fascinating dive into history, myth, and literature and art, Humans: A Monstrous History accomplishes Davies’s goal of presenting her thesis and ideas that the way to a more equitable world is for us to embrace the others. To embrace the monsters that are in fact us (remember, once again, the cover of the book). Monsters are warnings, just like the etymology states—warnings of what happens when we exclude and make the monster outcast.

--

Highlights:

• Excellent and crisply written and accessible
• Deep dive into history, culture, and science fictional aspects of monsters in human society
• Strong central theme and thesis
• Provokes thought and consideration of even more examples and ideas than in the book, extending the conversation and thought for the reader

Reference: Davies, Surekha. Humans: A Monstrous History [University of California Press, 2025].

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

Film Review: The Gorge

What can be more romantic than jumping over the pit of hell to meet the right one?

As the old song goes:

he was a mercenary manhunter with PTSD-induced nightmares and nothing to live for
she was a trained sniper with a world distance record for the perfect shot
can I make it any more obvious?

Speed's Sandra Bullock warned us that relationships born from dangerous situations don't have the best odds, but life in this century has become a 24/7 dangerous situation, so we may as well fall in love and hope for the best. If you've been assigned by a super-secret agency to stand guard by the edge of a cursed pit full of unknown horrors, all on your own, for an entire year, and the only human being available to talk to is the other expert sharpshooter stationed in the tower at the other edge of the pit, what are you going to do? Have romantic dinner by candlelight in the evening and fire bazookas at the hungry hordes from the abyss in the morning, that's what you do.

It's nothing terribly innovative to juxtapose the blossoming of love and the ever-present specter of death, but it hits differently after a worldwide pandemic. Whether intentionally or not, The Gorge captures the feeling of isolation during quarantine, the encroaching boredom of having the same books and the same walls to look at day after day after tedious day, and the hunger for human connection that can't be fulfilled because what awaits outside is death. In those months of mandated seclusion, it truly felt like there was an all-devouring gap between us and our neighbors, and crossing that forbidden distance was always followed by a period of heightened dread: Did I get infected? In how many days will I know? Have I become a danger to others? It's a miracle to find the love of your life in such circumstances.

But there's another way of reading the themes of The Gorge, if you'll allow me a small spoiler. As our two lethal lovebirds investigate what created that rotten hellscape, they run into some wartime secrets that their respective governments have been remiss about handling. The winning parties of World War 2 have spent decades trying to keep the titular gorge from spreading its filth to the rest of the planet. It won't do to just contain this relic from Nazi times; it needs to be eliminated. As long as that threat remains, there's a sense in which World War 2 is still being fought today.

Which seems fitting for our times, when somehow, after all these years, we still have to deal with leftover Nazi garbage sprouting around us like mutant weeds. In The Gorge, the whole problem began because the winning parties (Americans, Brits and Russians) tried adopting the enemy's methods. Well, look at us now. The curse has touched us, and we were the ones who invited it in.

As combat thrillers go, some of the tension in The Gorge is lost by the audience's knowledge that both leads are professional assassins who can survive a fight with tree-themed zombies with only a few scrapes to show for it. But as a welcome tradeoff, there's an element of competence porn in the way these two quickly synergize their skills into an efficient killing team. There's no "come with me if you want to live," no unforced errors caused by panic, no one assigned to the role of damsel in distress. When they save each other's lives, it's presented as partners in battle doing their business, not as the Designated Awesome coming to the rescue of the Designated Clumsy. I was surprised by how much more I could enjoy a scene of continuous machine gunfire versus the doubleplusundead when I didn't have to worry about anyone making a rookie mistake.

While watching, I needed to remind myself that there's a level at which this type of overanalysis can kill a story, and it's evident that this movie has been a victim of that. Of course world governments would be more deeply involved in keeping the gate to hell in check. Of course such a location would be patrolled with more than just two guards. Such criticism misses the point of the story. Despite the intense barrage of popcorny action (and there's more than enough of that, with lots of chases and headshots and explosions, and a particularly nail-biting scene with a slowly ascending jeep), I find it moving that The Gorge is essentially about the life-saving choice that our historical moment needs: finding the courage to reach across the open maw of chaos to hold the hand of a loved one.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Anime Review: Hell’s Paradise

Fascinating characters and deep philosophical explorations balance the intense violence of this unusual tale 

After hearing much acclaim for this gruesome anime, I finally decided to try out Hell’s Paradise although I’m not normally a fan of very gory or intensely nihilistic fiction. However, Hell’s Paradise lives up to the hype and delivers fascinating characters, meaningful emotions, and intriguing backstories in its very violent first season. 

Hell’s Paradise is set in a fictional historical time period and is primarily the story of Gabimaru, an emotionless assassin taken from his murdered parents as an infant and trained from childhood by a cruel ninja leader to be a high level killer with no emotional attachments. Gabimaru’s efficient and ruthless killing, along with his lack of emotion lead to his nickname, “Gabimaru the Hollow.” As a reward for his overwhelming successes at killing, Gabimaru is given his leader’s daughter as a wife. Gabimaru initially treats her with emotionless indifference, however his wife is unexpectedly emotionally strong, intellectually thoughtful, and intentionally kind in a way that slowly brings Gabimaru back to his humanity. Of course, this kind of happiness can’t last. Gabimaru is sentenced to death for trying to leave the assassin group so he can stop killing and live quietly in his marriage. He is jailed and separated from his wife (whose fate is unclear throughout the story). However, despite his death sentence, he remains alive because repeated violent and horrific executions fail to kill or even injure him and he becomes bored to the point of despondence. This leads some to believe he is a demon. After multiple attempts at killing him fail, Gabimaru and several other condemned prisoners are given a chance for a pardon, but the cost is high. They must journey, each with an assigned asaemon (guard/executioner), to a fabled paradise island and bring back a substance known as the Elixir of Life. The prisoner who successfully brings back the elixir will get a pardon but everyone else will be executed. Gabimaru is suddenly motivated to live, and accepts the offer in the hopes of earning a pardon so he can be reunited with his wife. 

All of these detail are just the premise. The main plot of Hell’s Paradise is composed of the experiences of the prisoners and their guards as they navigate the unimaginable terrors of the island along with their own internal demons. Gabimaru is assigned a young woman named Sagiri as his guard. She is lethal, quiet, and introspective, but also periodically insecure—not because of her skills but because of the constant sexism and gaslighting she faces. Her internal journey to balance, rather than suppress, her emotions becomes entangled with Gabimaru’s unsteady journey to and from emotional deadness. Over time, the two build a strange connection. The initial exploration of the island is portrayed through the experiences of Gabimaru and Sagiri, but the story soon shifts to the intriguing backstories of the other prisoners, some wrongfully condemned, and the asaemon guards, many with complex motivations or unexpected viewpoints. These include loud and powerful Chobei and gentle but lethal Toma, the criminal and guard pair who are secretly brothers. The anime also follows the poignant friendship between the reformed criminal guard Tenza and innocent child prisoner Nurugai. 

The overall vibe of the story feels like a combination of shows like Lost, Jujustsu Kaisen, and Squid Game. It has the mysterious island setting of Lost along with the intriguing character backstories that lured Lost viewers in the first two seasons. It has the intensely artistic animation style of Jujustsu Kaisen (MAPPA is the same animation house that does both series) and it has the fantastical, supernatural creature element, in which unexpected, strange, or grotesque creatures create an ongoing atmosphere of uncertainty for characters who are constantly surprised by new antagonists with randomly unknown levels of strength. And, if that isn’t stressful enough, there is the Squid Game-style lethal competitiveness where the prisoners are pitted against each other in a race for both the elixir and survival. But, what makes all of this stress worth it are the primary characters. Each one is intriguing, tragic, likeable, and complicated, making the show more than just a bloodbath or an adrenaline rush of adventure. Each individual’s race for survival is an extension of the character’s struggles that began long before they arrived on the mysterious island. 

Hell’s Paradise is also a dizzying philosophical exploration of conflicting concepts. The fabled paradise of the island is actually a hellscape of terrors hidden in serenely beautiful plants and flowers. The titans of the island, the Tensen, continuously shift genders, sometimes mid-conversation or mid-conflict. The trees are human beings. The only child on the island is hundreds of years old. Throughout the story, characters ponder a range of conflicting philosophies in an ongoing struggle to understand their unbelievable experiences. In fact, each episode has a title and theme which reflects the ongoing inherent or interwoven dichotomy (“Heart and Reason,” “Gods and People,” “Dreams and Reality”). 

Be warned that Hell’s Paradise is not a teen shonen anime. The show has adult content in terms of both violence and sexuality. Those less familiar with the discussed philosophical theories, may want to research some of the referenced concepts, although it is not essential to do so. Gabimaru and Sagiri start as the primary protagonists but gradually merge into the ever-changing ensemble, and, as the story progresses, it turns out many of the core elements of the journey may not be what they seem. The effect is, at times, intense, heartbreaking, and profound. However, the next season of Hell’s Paradise is still a year away. So, there is still plenty of time to become immersed in this violent but uniquely addictive adventure.

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The Math

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Highlights:

• Fascinating characters with intriguing backstories
• Extremely bloody
• Thoughtful philosophical explorations amid fast-paced fight scenes.

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

Book Review: The Dark Between the Trees, by Fiona Barnett

 No number of completed risk assessments can keep you safe.

Cover design by Dominic Forbes

As an academic myself, I love books about academics going on adventures, but for the same reason I’m also hyper-alert to misrepresentations about academia. My teeth itch every time a book blithely assumes that the bulk of our job responsibilities are teaching; that we have ‘summers off’ (hah!); that it’s a straightforward matter to get a ‘new job’ at ‘the local university’; that a normal age for a new professor is 25 (hah, try 40!); and that field trips are wild jaunts into the unknown (oh god, the paperwork!).

What The Dark Between The Trees manages to do is provide everything that any horror writer who's ever dabbled in the Ivory Tower could dream of – drama, danger, discovery, mystery, magic, beasts and witches and unholy mysteries that lie well beyond the reach of any scholarship or human comprehension – while also getting the nature of academia exactly right.

Dr Alice Christopher is a historian, who has always been fascinated by an event that took place in Moresby Wood during the English Civil War in 1643: the ambush and defeat of a troop of soldiers, of whom a third were killed and the rest fled into the woods. Only two came back out again, and only one survived after to tell a chilling tale of impossible landscapes and shadowy monsters. Now, after decades of trying to find funding to do a proper on-the-ground investigation of this location, Alice has finally secured a very small grant, sufficient to lead a very small research team on a very small trip to explore the spot. With her come her PhD student, Nuria, weeks away from submitting her thesis; two members from National Parks department, and a representative from the Ordinance Survey. That last is quite important because maps of Moresby Wood are hard to come by, and the two that do exist -- one from 1731 and another from 1966 – don’t agree with each other. (For the avoidance of doubt, this is foreshadowing.)

The narrative proceeds across the two timelines. Alongside Alice’s team, we get interspersed paragraphs following the troop of soldiers, starting with their desperate retreat into the woods. The events of the two groups parallel each other: They each camp under an enormous oak tree in a clearing; they each wake the next morning to discover that the tree is gone. They try to make their way out of the wood, and instead find that the geography is changeable. They tell stories about local legends associated with the woods: a family of charcoal burners who went in and never came out; a monster named the Corrigal, whose nest lies in the heart of the forest. Their unity becomes fractured, riven by doubts in the leadership – an internal stress exasperated by existing battle wounds (for the soldiers), or the failure of GPS equipment (for the researchers), and the terrible weather (for both). Then people start disappearing and dying mysteriously, perfectly fine one moment, and the next moment gone – or, worse, cut in two with no warning beyond a shimmer in the air. (I should mention – there is a lot of blood in this book.) 

Things progress from bad to worse, until eventually . . . well, let’s just say that a book with centuries-separated timelines and a creepy forest that seems not to worry about reality and sanity has options when it comes to allowing those timelines to interact. 

The plot and world-building (well, Forest-building) are largely vibes-based. The details of why Moresby Wood is so weird are never really clarified; the strangely veiled identity of those ambushing soldiers 1643 goes unrevealed; the eventual fate of many of the characters remains ambiguous; and the nature of the mysterious shimmer that slices people in half is left as an exercise for the reader. And yet, oddly, these narrative choices didn’t leave me unsatisfied. In the same way that trying to render something as incomprehensible as Moresby Wood compatible with a mere map only betrays a fundamental misunderstanding about its whole deal, trying to render something as misty and vibey as The Dark Between the Trees into a concrete set of events and actions also misses the point. It’s not that kind of book. Read it for the experience, not for the story.

But also, read it for the pitch-perfect rendition of UK academic research. This level of accuracy  can only come from someone who has been there. Take, for example, the PhD student Nuria. Her second supervisor is an academic nemesis of Alice’s, which means that any time Nuria disagrees with Alice, her opposition is seen in the light of a larger feud that really has nothing to do with her. (This type of thing absolutely happen: A PhD student in my programme had to avoid taking certain classes to satisfy her coursework requirements because they were taught by her supervisor’s extremely toxic ex-spouse, both of whom, bafflingly, still remained members of the same department.) Or take the other three members of the team, who represent non-academic ‘stakeholder’ project partners: yes, the involvement of the Ordinance Survey works well to support the plot point about disagreeing maps, but it also reflects a growing pressure in UK academia to demonstrate ‘impact’, or a demonstrable benefit or change that one’s research can effect outside the university context. I can just imagine Alice writing her ‘Impact and Knowledge Exchange’ section of the grant bid now: In partnership with the Ordinance Survey, this project will prove vital to supporting the badly-needed modernisation of existing maps of the Moresby Wood area. Currently, the most recent map is half a century old, and ...

And then, of course, there are the risk assessments. Because, as every University insurance administrator knows, if you’ve filled out the risk assessment, then nothing bad will happen! I can only hope my next research trip does not bring me near Fiona Barnett, because somehow I doubt the University of Glasgow’s SafeZone App is going to prove sufficient to protect me from her vision.

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Highlights

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

Highlights:

• Vibey vibes

• Unfathomably scary Woods

• Historical mysteries that do not illuminate the present

• Pitch perfect academics

Reference: Barnett, Fiona, The Dark Between the Trees, [Solaris 2022].

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