Project Hail Mary pulls off a disturbing misdirection trick

Ryan Gosling’s pretty face and inoffensive goofiness will keep your mind off the billions of deaths happening offscreen

It’s the kind of clever switcheroo you only notice in hindsight. After leaving the theater with a spring in your step, feeling uplifted about the survival of a faceless rocky alien spider (a flawless masterpiece of puppetry that should get its own Oscar category), you start piecing together the plot pieces that Project Hail Mary frustratingly left scattered between flashbacks, and it finally dawns on you: Hey, the buddy comedy was fine, and Ryan Gosling is always a delight, but wasn’t the human species supposed to be facing extinction while we were having wholesome, family-friendly fun in space? Didn’t that mysterious German lady talk of losing something like a quarter of the world’s population in the best case scenario?

When the movie starts and our hero Ryan Gosling Ryland Grace wakes up with amnesia, his ship has already been traveling for several years since the discovery that the Sun was losing brightness; the wars over food must have devastated Earth in the meantime. The script merely alludes to the stakes and promptly shifts its attention to Grace teaching his new alien pal to dance and bump fists. The quick pacing of the scenes in space doesn’t give us time to reflect on the mass panic and the disintegration of society that must be going on while, a dozen light-years away, Grace sings karaoke. The movie is very effective at what it’s doing. It’s its choice of what things to do that lands as strange.

The problem Grace is trying to solve is that some strange microbes are eating the Sun, and with the diminished energy output, human agriculture is doomed to collapse. It turns out that other stars within the visible portion of the universe are being consumed too, except, for unknown reasons, the star Tau Ceti, which still keeps its normal brightness. The only hope (the titular “Hail Mary”) for the survival of life on Earth is to send a ship to Tau Ceti to figure out how it’s avoiding the plague of star-killing microbes. But while the ship gets there, which even with a miraculous superpotent fuel is going to take some years, Earth is left to fend for itself as best it can. This is a profoundly intense drama that the movie inexplicably insists on looking away from. Don’t think of the entire nations fractured by starvation—hey, isn’t this spider alien cute?

For roughly half of the runtime, we watch Grace deal with his amnesia and the unexpected presence of a second ship sent from a planet facing the same problem. Here we have potential elements for great character work, but the movie is so obsessed with making us feel good that we don’t see the full impact of the situation on Grace’s psyche. We eventually learn he was forced to come on this trip without enough fuel to return to Earth, effectively killing him in the hope that he’ll find a way to save the whole species. This could have provided a prime opportunity to explore important questions, like the universal human experience of disorientation at our state of thrownness into the world, and the comfort it brings us to find fellow travelers to figure out this mystery with, but this movie is too afraid of thinking sad thoughts. The unmissable allegory for the human condition (i.e. we open our eyes without any instructions, destined already for death) is swept aside for the good old art of visual spectacle.

On that front there’s nothing to complain about: Project Hail Mary looks breathtaking. But there’s a noticeable disconnect between the parts of the plot that desperately pull in opposite directions, the background tragedy of a world falling to pieces and the foreground coziness of a likeable guy learning to make a friend. There’s a bare outline of character growth, going from an initial state in which Grace was against going on the mission because he didn’t feel goodhearted enough to sacrifice his life for anyone, to a culmination state in which Grace has met someone he’s willing to sacrifice himself for. But the magnitude of that growth gets lost amid the movie’s anxious hyperfocus on vibes.

Project Hail Mary ought to carry itself with more weight, be more aware of the complex themes it has on its hands. But every time it starts getting too close to seriousness, it runs back to the reassurance of just having a good time at the movies. You’re not here to think too deeply about the obvious implications of the story; you’re here to watch the impossibly handsome Ryan Gosling give you one of his trademark comforting smiles. Here, have another joke. Forget about the hard truths of cosmic loneliness. Just gape at how gorgeous the stars look. Are you not entertained?

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Film Review: In the Blink of an Eye

45,000 years of nothing much happening

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

TV Review: Star Trek: Starfleet Academy (opening episodes)

Gen Z’s Star Trek hits the sweet spot for youthful adventure mixed with Gen X cynicism

Star Trek has grown significantly from the original 1960s adventures of Captain Kirk and the crew of the starship Enterprise. Over the decades, new versions of Star Trek ranged from the bleakness of Enterprise, Picard, and Discovery to the optimism of the original series and Strange New Worlds, to the timely philosophical insights of The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, to the very funny humor of Lower Decks.

In the background of the adventures, many of our favorite heroes gave passing references to where it all began, Starfleet Academy. But we seldom got a deep dive into life at the academy. Now, just in time for its sixtieth anniversary, Star Trek is going back to the beginning by showing us the start of the hero’s journey for the next generation of explorers in its latest offering, Starfleet Academy. On the Trek continuum from bleak to hilarious, Starfleet Academy is definitely on the optimistic and humorous end of the spectrum. Those who prefer their Star Trek rather serious will be disappointed, because Starfleet Academy feels much more like a live action version of the always humorous Lower Decks. If you haven’t seen Lower Decks, you should, because Lower Decks is funny, clever, and sharply witty in its references to core Star Trek themes and tropes. Starfleet Academy has a bit more seriousness than Lower Decks, but mostly retains a fun, playful tone that is still in touch with the traditional Trek values of diversity, loyalty, heroic empathy, and scientific curiosity.

[Mild spoilers for the first episode] Set centuries into the Star Trek future, Starfleet Academy begins as the story of a single child. Caleb Mir is six years old, living with his mother Anisha (Tatiana Maslany). In her struggle to find food, Anisha accepts aid from a man (Paul Giamatti), not realizing he is a pirate who ultimately killed a Federation officer. Although she cooperates with the Federation, the commander Nahla Ake (Holly Hunter) gives her a cruel punishment, sentencing her to fifteen years in a hard labor camp and putting Caleb in state custody. Feeling betrayed as her son is torn away from her, she warns Caleb not to trust the Federation. As a result, the child tricks Ake and escapes, and grows up as a distrustful street urchin who tries in vain over the years to locate his mother. Meanwhile, Ake is devastated by losing the child she promised to care for, and to whom she promised to bring for visits to the betrayed Anisha. She resigns from Starfleet for fifteen years, but is eventually lured back to lead the newly reopened Starfleet Academy when the long lost Caleb (Sandro Rosta) is caught and incarcerated for stealing. Regretting what happened years ago, she urges Caleb to join the academy instead of being sentenced to prison. Caleb, who is a technology expert, reluctantly accepts enrollment in exchange for Ake’s promise to help locate his mother, who has disappeared from the Federation’s prison system.

Starfleet Academy is being reopened for the first time after a cataclysm known as the Burn. The new cadets will be the first class at the revived academy. Over the past years, officer training had been taken over by the War College, a conflict-focused institution that becomes a rival to the exploration-focused Starfleet Academy. At the academy, Caleb quickly falls in with an eclectic group of new cadets with their own interesting backstories, including Jay-Den (Karim Diané), a gentle-hearted Klingon; SAM (Kerrice Brooks), an earnest and nerdy photonic (hologram); Darem (George Hawkins), an egotistical shapeshifting Khionian; Genesis (Bella Shepard), a clever, success driven Dar-Sha strategist who is Darem’s rival; and later, Betazoid siblings Tarima (Zoë Steiner) and Ocam (Romeo Carere). The young people are supervised by academy instructors, including the eccentric Captain Ake. Ake is a half-Lanthanite who has been alive for centuries and has an attachment to quirky, ancient objects such as old-fashioned eyeglasses and hardback books. She often walks barefoot and helps the kids revenge-prank the neighboring school. Her cranky second in command is the part Klingon, part Jem-Hadar, Lura Thok (Gina Yashere). There is also the returned holographic Doctor (Robert Picardo) from Voyager, and the wise and cynical instructor Jett Reno (Tig Notaro) from the time-traveling Discovery. As the young people settle into the structure and adventure of life at the academy, an old villain returns to wreak havoc, and Caleb has to learn a quick lesson about working with his new allies.

Starfleet Academy does a good job of starting with only two perspectives: the young, rebellious Caleb and the ancient, quirky Ake. The story initially focuses on those points of view and then gradually adds new characters. This technique allows viewers to enjoy the dynamics of this new setting before adding too many new perspectives. If viewers don’t remember the Burn, its story starts in season 3 of Discovery [Editor’s Note: If you haven’t seen Discovery, the short version is that all the dilithium in the galaxy exploded and warp travel became impossible for a whole century]. Fortunately, knowledge of the event is not essential to enjoy Starfleet Academy. The series is set in the distant future, which allows lots of creative freedom regarding technical aspects of the traditional Trek lore. Therefore, a willing suspension of disbelief is helpful for enjoying the story. After the destruction from the Burn, the Federation largely fell apart, with many members abandoning the alliance. The reopening of Starfleet Academy offers opportunities to rebuild those connections with the help of the young cadets.

Starfleet Academy is character-focused and youthfully Gen Z, with a healthy counterbalance of Gen X cynicism from the instructors. Ake refers to the cadets as “kids” despite the fact that many of them are adults by our contemporary standards. This is Star Trek for the Fourth Wing, TikTok, Instagram generation. It’s Trek’s addition to academia-based speculative fiction. Starfleet Academy leans into character tropes with a modern take on traditional group dynamics that have been showcased in pop culture since The Breakfast Club. At times, the clichés feel heavy-handed and a bit predictable, and if you’re not in the mood for hijinks, this may not be the best Trek experience. Even for those of us who are older, we probably still remember college days of cramped cozy dorm life, late night conversations, building lifelong relationships, and struggling with both schoolwork and family expectations. Starfleet Academy leans into those awkward dynamics while maintaining the steady leadership from the older generation. Some YA stories paint the adults as clueless or as adversaries, but here they are treated as smart, fully fleshed-out characters whose wisdom and cynicism are amusingly relatable.

Over the years, many Star Trek series have initially struggled to find their footing, including the ultimately beloved The Next Generation. The franchise suffers from the burden of expectations, and each new series feels the pressure of comparison while trying to do something new. Despite some predictable moments, abrupt character arcs, and outright silliness, the show delivers upbeat adventure and likeable characters who each have enough backstory and angst to let viewers know a reckoning is coming for each one as the series progresses. Additionally, the casting is superb with, Oscar Award powerhouses like Holly Hunter and Paul Giamatti, as well as the amazing Tatiana Maslany, the nostalgic return of Robert Picardo as the holographic doctor, and Stephen Colbert as the deadpan funny dean heard over the academy’s public address system. But the most memorable character is Gina Yashere’s Lura Thok, who steals every scene she is in with her hilariously perpetually irritated attitude.

Despite the new generation vibe, Starfleet Academy is full of easter eggs and nods to both major and minor Trek elements. Long-time fans will catch the signage for Boothsby Park named for the former academy groundskeeper (seen in The Next Generation), the presence of a background character who appears to be a descendant of a species whose racism drove themselves into near-extinction in The Original Series episode “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” and the quietly funny presence of an exocomp during a conversation between Lura and Ake.

Starfleet Academy is clearly targeted to a new generation, but it has enough Gen X energy to provide a much needed counterbalance. Besides, the show is filled with many classic Trek references that will appeal to a range of viewers looking for something fun. The pilot episode is called “Kids These Days” and the following episode is called “Beta Test” (also a reference to the arriving Betazoids). Both of these signal that the Starfleet Academy story is a new concept that is just beginning a journey for both a new and older generation.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

Highlights:

• A Gen Z adventure with nods to classic Trek
• Predictable tropes and clichés
• Enjoyably quirky characters and Oscar-caliber actors in a humorous context

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

Book Review: Nobody’s Baby by Olivia Waite

Cozy noir-style space mystery featuring a gender-bending detective and lots of queer characters

You are aboard the HMS Fairweather, a spaceship that has been travelling from Old Earth for 350 years in search of a new home. The approximately ten thousand people on board regularly back up their memories in their own personal memory book so that, when they die, their new bodies will have access to their full memories. When someone dies, they are “reborn” at approximately twenty years old. There are no children on board and people are not supposed to be able to reproduce on ship.

So where did this baby come from?

Enter Dorothy “Dot” Gentleman, ship detective.

Her nephew Ruthie (short for Rutherford) and his partner, John, have found a baby in a basket on their doorstep. Dot quickly finds the baby’s parents, but the real mystery is that no one remembers having a baby at all! So now we have a memory crime, where people’s memories have been tampered with. Memory crimes are Dot's specialty.

If you are looking for a cozy sci-fi mystery with noir vibes that has mild gender bending and queer characters, look no further. Nobody’s Baby is the second book in the Dorothy Gentleman series by Olivia Waite. In book one, Murder by Memory (2025), Dot found herself awakened inside another passenger’s body and had to solve the mystery of how several memory books had been destroyed.

For me, the fun of this series is in the society that Waite creates abroad the Fairweather: no one should be able to die, and people’s needs are provided for, but they’re still incentivized to have jobs or run businesses to entertain themselves or to make a bit of money for their future.

Book one introduced a set of jobs related to the curation and protection of memories. Dot’s nephew works as a librarian who helps protect the memory books of the Fairweather’s passengers. His partner, John, is a memory bartender: he can mix you a drink that will bring back memories of a summer storm or fall in New York. He works at the Antikythera Club, the by-membership-only hideout for the ship's artists and literati.

In book two, we learn about “flickers,” movie-like stories crafted by a single projectionist wearing a “skimmer,” a device that lets them project a story from their brain onto a screen. We are introduced to an entire set of society that makes these movies, the devices that make them possible, and their fans. There are also more prosaic jobs: for example, Dot has a crush on a woman named Violet who runs a cozy yarn store.

So, come for the mystery, but stay for larger theories on how this future society works. In a society like the Fairweather, where everyone can live multiple lives aboard a generation ship looking for a new planet, how do people relate to each other? What rules do they create to keep their society healthy? What happens when you find yourself in a situation where the rules don't fit?

Peregrine, the foundling, falls into a gap in the ship’s laws. The ship has no procedure for creating a new identity onboard. They have written laws for once they reach a planet, but planetary identity does not come with a memory book or a right to new embodiments. Dot firmly believes in the Fairweather’s system, but can also see where the system needs to be bent to prevent a greater wrong. She tells us that “Paperwork is law and order. The papers are what make us a society and not just a gaggle of desperate people sharing a geography. We set up a system because a system can be permanent, where human beings are not.” Not everyone agrees: the system doesn't always serve people, and there are some who begin to think that the system is more important than the people. So what does this mean for Peregrine?

On Peregrine’s behalf, Dot must petition the Fairweather’s Board of Directors to officially grant the baby a right to a memory book and new embodiments. She must also convince them, since Peregrine’s birth parents do not remember having him and do not want a child, that Ruthie and John should get parental rights. And she must get justice for Peregrine’s mother, who was robbed of her memories of the baby.

The Fairweather may be a society where where you can live forever and you want for nothing, but people are still people: they are greedy and jealous and, sadly, will look for ways to hurt each other. But we can enjoy Dot's expertise in unravelling the mysteries.

You could probably read this book without first reading Murder by Memory. But the first book is novella length (103 pages) and the second not much longer (144 pages), so why would you deny yourself the pleasure of more Dorothy Gentleman?

Nerd Coefficient: 7.5/10. An absolutely enjoyable experience.

Highlights: 

• Cozy mystery with a likeable detective
• Lots of queer characters
• Fun space-noir vibes
• Interesting questions about memory and society building 

Reference: Waite, Olivia. Nobody's Baby [Tordotcom, 2026].

POSTED BY: Christine D. Baker, historian and lover of SFF and mysteries. You can find her also writing reviews at Ancillary Review of Books or podcasting about classic scifi/fantasy at Hugo History. Come chat books with her on Bluesky @klaxoncomms.com.

TV Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season 3

Intense action, flawed characters, nostalgia, and just enough humor as Strange New Worlds enters its third season.
 

Fast pacing, jump scares, messy emotions, wry witty humor, questionable choices from beautifully flawed characters, and likeable new members of the ensemble cast. All of this composes the opening four episodes of Season 3 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Historically, the third season of a Star Trek series is often when the show leans into bold awesomeness after an uncertain, exploratory start in the first season and a second season of settling into the characters and storytelling. However, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds benefitted from being a spin-off of another strong Star Trek show, Discovery. As a result, Strange New Worlds began in comfortable awesomeness from season one, telling the story of the earlier crew of the legendary starship Enterprise, and reimagining iconic characters (Spock, Uhura, Chapel, and even James Kirk) and presenting new (La’an, Ortegas) or underused pre-existing (Pike, Una, M’Benga) characters, who are all shown in their early, uncertain, but much more fully explored selves. Season 2 added a range of clever quirky storytelling devices, including a hilarious partial animation crossover (with Star Trek: Lower Decks) and song-filled musical episode. However, the second season ended on a more serious note in “Hegemony I,” with a return of the Gorn, the human eating, monster-like enemy race that hunted them in the first season. As several beloved characters are trapped in a Gorn invaded non-Federation world, Pike (Anson Mount) is forbidden by Starfleet from interfering due to the risk of triggering a war with the old enemy.

Hegemony, Part II

When the Enterprise is attacked and outgunned, with close friends still captive, Captain Pike must make a critical and potentially devastating decision. Season 2 of Strange New Worlds left us with an old-school cliff-hanger finale that is immediately picked up in the opening moments of season 3 and launches us straight back into the action. The transitional moment between the two seasons is a nice call back to The Next Generation’s “The Best of Both Worlds” part I and II. That jaw dropping moment when Riker responds with unexpected confidence when faced with an impossible choice involving his own captain is contrasted with Pike, in a similarly impossible situation, having a true internal decision paralysis crisis. This is one of the storytelling elements and character explorations that makes Strange New Worlds so intriguing: optimism, compassion, and boldness are balanced with the characters’ frailty, imperfection, and sometimes flawed judgment.

Wedding Bell Blues

The theme of Season 3 seems to be nostalgia and “Wedding Bell Blues” gives us another call back to a classic Trek episode, “The Squire of Gothos,” in addition to an overt nod to a particularly creepy episode of the original Twilight Zone: “It’s a Good Life.” A broken-hearted Spock (Ethan Peck) finds himself in an unexpectedly positive situation but has to grapple with what is real and what is not. Altered reality stories are one of the most entertaining ways Star Trek plays with our minds with a twisted, waking dream scenario. “Wedding Bell Blues” leans into the strangeness with humor and a nostalgic twist at the end.

Shuttle to Kenfori

After the relatively light, although mind-twisting, adventure of “Wedding Bell Blues,” the narrative returns to monsters and violence in “Shuttle to Kenfori.” Pike and Dr. M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) go on an unsanctioned away mission to find a rare but potentially life saving drug and, in the process, encounter a formidable old enemy as well as unexpected terrors when they land. This episode leans into the usual horror adventure narrative with plenty of jump scares and moderate gore. But, in true Star Trek form, the story uses the setting to show Pike processing troubling revelations about two people for whom he cares deeply, even as he comes to terms with what it means for someone to become a monster physically and psychologically.

A Space Adventure Hour

The often parodied style of original Star Trek television series (in everything from Saturday Night Live to Black Mirror) has become so iconic that the cold-opening moments of “A Space Adventure Hour” let you know we are in for a humorous, nostalgia filled treat. In this episode, directed by Star Trek icon, Jonathan Frakes, La’an (Christina Chong) and Lt. Scott (Martin Quinn) are drafted into test driving a new concept called a holodeck. Running a program of such stunning magnitude puts the ship's engines at risk so Scott is assigned to make it happen without blowing up the ship and La’an is assigned to do a walkthrough of a sample strategy based program. In a multi-level metaphysical piece of storytelling, La’an decides to create a murder mystery inspired by Amelia Moon, a beloved storybook detective from her childhood. However, instead of landing in an isolated mansion or on a luxury train, she ends up in 1960’s Hollywood near the set of “Space Adventure Hour,” a hilarious take on the original Star Trek. This episode is fun on so many levels for long time Trekkies. We get to see the holodeck in its infancy, unapologetically wreaking havoc with the ship’s safety. Viewers also have a fun foreshadowing of Captain Picard’s frequent Sherlock Holmes adventures on the holodeck in The Next Generation. To set up the look of the players, Scotty uses the transporter patterns of the most recent travelers. So, most of the show’s lead actors get a chance to play completely different characters in this comedic take on 1960’s Hollywood, including Strange New Worlds’s James Kirk (Paul Wesley) doing a very funny and very meta imitation of William Shatner’s James Kirk from the original series. And, we get to see a young version of Scotty in all of his stressed out engineering persona as the holodeck mystery takes on dangerous implications for the safety of the crew. But, most of all, we get a hilarious and poignant celebration of why Star Trek is beloved and iconic. In the character of a Hollywood agent, Uhura (Celia Rose Gooding) gives a timely monologue on why Star Trek remains an indelible, and still relevant, part of our real life culture.

With intense action, twisty mind games, and unapologetic, self-aware humor, the opening episodes of Season 3 feel like a nostalgic letter to long time Star Trek fans. The jump scares, plot twists, and character angst, are balanced with the strong ensemble chemistry of flawed but relatable characters. And, as always, we have the series’ enduring moral core to guide us (hopefully) as we all continue to explore what lies ahead.

--

Highlights:

• Action and jump scares balanced with humor and nostalgia
• Character angst and dysfunction
• Perfect ensemble chemistry

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

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

Book Review: Arkhangelsk by Elizabeth H. Bonesteel

When we fly through the galaxies, will our worst side come with us?

As human civilization broke apart in vaguely defined wars, scattered groups tried to preserve what they could of human history and culture in colony ships sent in all directions, without means to communicate with one another or any coordinated plan. As far as each group knows, they're all that's left from Earth. One of those ships, the Arkhangelsk, found a barely inhabitable planet where a new beginning could be attempted. The colonists have to live underground, though, because the surface is lethally cold, lethally irradiated, and lethally low in oxygen. Those who need to briefly walk outside for work reasons must wear thick protective suits and carry their own oxygen. After a couple of centuries, they've made their little society work, even if they're dangerously short on genetic diversity and their rusty machinery is held together with bubblegum and prayers. This community has sworn off the petty divisions that tore apart humans on Earth, and is committed to a nonviolent approach to law. Life is rough and precarious, but it still goes on. Even as they face one impossible challenge after another, they're proud of the fragile survival they've managed to snatch from the hostile conditions of their new home.

So it's understandable that their entire conception of their place in the universe goes out the window when another colony ship comes knocking at the door.

The new ship left Earth much later, after the wars ran out of steam and civilization had a chance to restart. The crew didn't even know that the Arkhangelsk had succeeded at colonizing a planet; the reason they arrived there was to build a relay antenna. Like the members of the first trip, they carry their own cultural memory of what Earth is like and what the lessons of history are. When they make contact, purely by blind luck, with the descendants of the Arkhangelsk, the first point of conflict, albeit implicit, is about their differing views on the true character of the human species. Those who arrived first believe that they need to constantly watch out for the worst impulses of the human heart; those who arrived later believe that humans have demonstrated the capacity to drag themselves up from rock bottom. There we have a microcosm of every point of inflection in human history: two cultures with incompatible principles, trying to interact and understand each other. Is mutual destruction a natural tendency or a choice that can be avoided?

We follow two narrators through the novel: Anya, an officer of the peace in the underground colony; and Maddie, the former doctor and now emergency captain of the newcome ship. Both carry the weight of tragic losses that have come to define them until the moment they meet each other. Amid the unforgiving hardships necessary to keep the colony functioning, Anya's little daughter was the only bright spot in a dull, directionless life. After losing her to one of the diseases typical of a population going through a genetic bottleneck in a radioactive planet, Anya has been merely going through the motions of a job that gives her no satisfaction and that her neighbors resent her for. Currently she's investigating a row of disappearances that most witnesses suspect to be suicides; the tacit consensus is that, although the colony strives hard to stay alive, there's very little to live for. So whenever there's news that another inhabitant has walked out and vanished in the snowy wasteland, the prevailing attitude that Anya finds is that no one blames them. Meanwhile, reluctant captain Maddie has been struggling to complete her mission after a navigation accident pulverized half her ship and most of her crewmates. Thrown by circumstance into a position of leadership she's still quite unprepared for, she now has to convince the Arkhangelsk colonists that her team comes with peaceful intentions, even as her mission is to help Earth send many more ships their way.

The most enjoyable part of reading this novel is the complicated interplay between two factions that are sincerely trying to present themselves as friendly yet keep giving each other the wrong impression. From the colonists' perspective, the visitors could be carrying all the evil ideas the Arkhangelsk ran away from when they left Earth, but also a potential solution to their genetic bottleneck. From the visitors' perspective, the colonists have cultivated exactly the kind of close-mindedness that doomed Earth in the past, but also valuable metallurgic expertise that could help repair their ship. As both groups proceed with as much mutual fear as mutual need, the slow-motion trainwreck of their diplomatic efforts raises questions that go deeper than culture shock and point at humanity's stubborn failure to learn from history. Will the world wars that ended civilization erupt anew in this remote settlement? Is survival the highest imperative, for the sake of which the rest of our common interests must be surrendered?

This novel has answers, but they're by no means final. The cosmic irony of the human condition isn't that life stops right at the moment when we think we've got it figured out; it's the much more unnerving fact that, when we think we've got it figured out, it keeps going.

Reference: Bonesteel, Elizabeth H. Arkhangelsk [House Panther, 2022].

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

On the gentle fantasy of Linoleum

A mindtrip to the Moon and back

You've seen this movie before: a moderately successful family man with a big house in a placid suburb realizes he's unhappy with his life, so he takes a sudden detour for a seemingly immature but actually deeply important self-exploration. His wife, a career woman hyperfocused on being taken seriously, finds his antics increasingly irritating, while their teenage daughter has begun an unusual friendship with the new neighbor, a sensitive boy with an authoritarian father. This situation will not end well.

You've seen this movie before. It's called American Beauty and it premiered in 1999. At first it was highly praised for its critique of hollow bourgeois aspirations, but over the years it has been reevaluated and criticized for its simplistic melodrama and its uncritical centering of the male perspective. And when Kevin Spacey's history of sexual misconduct was exposed, the movie turned radioactive. No one dares touch it. Which is a pity, because American Beauty, underneath all its creepiness and its self-serious attempts at edginess, did have a few valuable things to say about the search for happiness.

Enter the 2022 movie Linoleum. It was never advertised as a remake, but it so cleverly deconstructs the plot of American Beauty that it might as well have openly acknowledged the extent of its debt. Similarly set in the late 1990s, it proposes a more empathetic alternative to the earlier movie's cynicism. And from this point on I'm going to need to spoil the secrets of Linoleum.

Imagine if the plot of American Beauty were told by the protagonist of the 2005 movie Stay, and you'll get the gist of what Linoleum is doing behind the curtain. And that's the last warning before full spoilers.

The ending of Linoleum reveals that the husband, the husband's father, and the neighbor's son are symbolic incarnations of one single person, an old man with dementia whose memories are chaotically remixing themselves in his last moments. He's been telling himself a story where the events of his youth, his adulthood and his old age are reenacted by different characters at the same time. At the core of his jumbled memories is the night his real father tried to kill him and instead died in a crash.

What this does for Linoleum's intertextual relationship with American Beauty is expand the perspective we're being asked to consider. American Beauty is a very selfish story, one in which the husband's worldview provides the dominating voice that defines the terms in which the plot is meant to be understood. In Linoleum, the fact that the core characters are the same person means that their separate perspectives are equally significant. This is not only the story of a middle-aged man seeking to reignite his enjoyment of life, but also the story of a boy struggling to find his own path beyond his father's shadow, and the story of an old man who is losing the sense of who he is. These parallel looks at three stages of the same life story complete the theme that American Beauty could only portray at one moment: the chain of circumstances that feed our satisfactions and our regrets.

While the husband's chosen method of correcting the course of his life in American Beauty is to become a jerk and a sexual predator, in Linoleum the unhappy husband embarks on a more wholesome pursuit: he's going to build a rocket in his garage. He has always wanted to be an astronaut, and he can't let his better years go by without achieving that dream. Now, let's remember that this plot point is part of the deathbed hallucination, so it should be interpreted as a stand-in for whichever aspirations the actual protagonist may have had. Being an astronaut is the stereotypical dream of every child, and in the movie's narrative it's used to represent the yearning for personal self-realization. So the literal text of the story shows us a man building a rocket in his garage, but the meaning of the story is about daring to dream big, about aiming for the stars.

Another way Linoleum improves upon American Beauty is in the character of the wife. In the first movie, she's an obstacle in the husband's quest for meaning. We're meant to agree that he's right to despise her, because everything about her personality and her goals is fake. Clearly, this is a very male-centric way of writing a marriage in trouble. Linoleum opts for a more nuanced look. This husband (again, inside the badly remembered story) genuinely loves his wife, but they've gradually lost the capacity to respect each other's wants. There was a time when they dared to dream big, but the big things that were supposed to come to their lives never did, and now they feel stuck. The epiphany that begins the reparation of their relationship is the wife's refusal to live by someone else's expectations. The fact that she also turns out to be a multiple character in the hallucination gives her equal rank of thematic importance as the husband.

Live enough years and you'll become intimately familiar with regret, with the longing for the road not taken. The ending of American Beauty resolves this problem by offering its protagonist a terrible choice that he ultimately rejects. And at that moment his life is ready to end. Linoleum refrains from pretending that we're ever ready to end; it doesn't even try to resolve the problem of regret. What it does propose is that, from a broad perspective, regret is a matter of how we remember our lives. And if we end up remembering differently, we may find unexpected forms of contentment.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Film Review: Fly Me to the Moon

🎵 Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars... 🎵

My father has recalled to me how, just shy of five years old, he watched the first Moon landing on television. He was stunned at how he could be seeing such a momentous event live, and he would dart back and forth between the television and his window, where he could see the Moon in all its austere glory in the skies above Lawrence, Kansas. I have watched space launches on my smartphone, but I can’t imagine that even begins to approximate the feeling of seeing a Moon landing broadcast live. It is so spectacular, so literally out of this world, that a certain sort of contrarian would inevitably want to say that such a landing never happened, that the American government faked it for propaganda (in a sense, it was propaganda, as Richard Nixon wanted something to distract the world from the quasi-genocidal quagmire in Vietnam, but those astronauts landed there all the same). Those involved in such a momentous achievement understandably do not take kindly to such denials, such as when Neil Armstrong punched a denialist on camera. But that, of course, has not stopped the fiction about such possibilities, as they let us vent our anxieties about our distrust of governments and other such things. Today, we shall be discussing an odder example of such fiction: a romantic comedy about faking the Moon landing. That, ladies and gentlemen, is 2024’s Fly Me to the Moon, directed by Greg Berlanti, from a script by Rose Gilroy, from a story by Bill Kirstein and Keenan Flynn, produced by Apple Studios and These Pictures.

This film is powered by its two leads: Cole Davis, the fictional director of the expedition to the Moon, played by Channing Tatum; and Kelly Jones, the savvy marketer hired by NASA to spice up its image in the face of the volatile political issues of the 1960s, played by Scarlett Johansson. The film's promotion is clearly banking on its stars’ presence nearly as much as by its gonzo presence, and it is the characters that make the film as enjoyable as it is. Of the two, I think Johansson has the more compelling role, being given more to do. Tatum’s Davis is drawn well, realized well, but ultimately is a fairly simple character: a driven professional who wants to complete a massive project with integrity, fairness, and honesty.

It is Johansson’s Jones where the writing of the film really shines. She is assigned by NASA, under pressure from the Nixon administration, to create a fake Moon landing to be broadcast on television just to make sure everything goes smoothly. Before that, we see her in her New York office spinning up falsehoods in the name of Mammon. At the beginning, she is a person utterly without any centering morals, who makes her way through the world by telling people exactly what they want to hear. She is the sort of person who would, in today’s world, be a LinkedIn influencer, someone who bloviates on and on about leadership and mindset to the detriment of anything of substance, let alone systemic issues with the economy. It is a triumph of the writing of this film that she becomes more than odious, and indeed quite compelling. This is a character who, by all rights, I should hate with the scalding fury of a rocket engine, but I found myself completely charmed.

There is a dichotomy that powers this film, like two poles in a dynamo: the fight between truth and lies. Davis is a man committed to truth in the proudest traditions of Western science at its best. He wants to explore, discover, and wow the world fairly. On the other hand, Jones makes a living by lying, and she is as cunning and as vicious as Edward Bernays (the man who made women smokers by branding cigarettes as ‘torches of freedom’—but who refused to work for Nixon!). The entire movie is driven by the conflict between the two. The conventional romantic comedy plot is given depth by having the third-act falling out be sparked not by a trite misunderstanding or coincidence, but rather a real clash between values as the whole falsehood threatens to collapse in on itself. It is clever plotting, too, balancing genre with theme, putting the romantic comedy plot in an environment where it makes logical sense.

There’s another character, Lance Vespertine, played by Jim Rash, who I’m conflicted about. The man reminds me of Roger De Bris, the flamboyantly gay theater director played by Christopher Hewitt in Mel Brooks’s 1967 film The Producers. Vespertine is, likewise, something of a diva, a director who has hit the job of a lifetime, even if he’ll be killed if he reveals it to anyone; and is stated in the film to be gay. Rash, his actor, is gay in real life, which adds some verisimilitude, but he is reminiscent of many stereotypes of gay men in the performing arts, with his diva-like personality and his flamboyant outfits (which I must admit are quite the works of art in their own right). Rash, so far as I can tell, enjoyed playing the character, and to his credit, and the writer’s, he gets some of the best lines in the film. I am straight and so am not the most qualified to judge, but it stood out to me, especially given how little has seemed to change from a film literally from 1967 (two years earlier than the film is set!).

You also get a minor but entertaining performance from Woody Harrelson, who plays the G-man, usually dressed as a literal man in black, who is keeping tabs on the whole charade. This is a static character, only fair for someone who is clearly in a supporting role, but he is hammed up in the most delicious way possible. He adds to the film, and he also gets great lines.

The soundtrack is great, a lot of it period music. There are two different versions of Fly Me to the Moon, the tune penned by Bart Howard and made famous by Frank Sinatra (of course, Sinatra’s version is used prominently). There is also a truly inspired usage of Sam & Dave’s Hold On, I’m Coming during a climactic scene in the third act. The music immerses you in this particular time and place, just as the fashion does, and the unpleasantly but accurately portrayed social mores, none of them exploitative but all of them clear.

Fly Me to the Moon is a very strange beast, a romantic comedy that is also something of an alternate history and a film about fictional characters themselves fictionalizing a real historical event. There are layers here, especially when you realize there was never a real Cole Davis or Kitty Jones (Jones is easier to explain as an absence from the history books, but Davis would be prominent just behind the astronauts themselves). But, like the Apollo program itself, a mad dare that cobbled together a wide variety of disparate elements ended up creating something worthwhile with its own profundities. It won’t be as profound a watch as a live Moon landing, but it would be an entertaining watch in its own right.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

´The Ark' makes a plea for mutual trust to save humankind

This story proves you don't have to be a ruthless cynic to apply game theory to hard survival choices

Future Earth has gone to hell in a stinking, toxic, burning handbasket. Entire continents are up in flames, the atmosphere is either unlivably hot or fatally poisonous, and what's left of human governments is as good as finished. Superstar tech bro Jeff Bezos no, sorry, Elon Musk no, sorry, Steve Jobs no, sorry, Will Trust (really, that's his name) has funded a space colonization project that will send a dozen generation ships in various directions to search for the next home of our species. The first of these ships, the Ark 1, has been traveling for about five years until it suddenly reanimates its frozen occupants. A mysterious accident has killed their commanders and damaged the engines, and the few people left have to figure out what happened, where they are, how they're going to survive for the remainder of their journey, and how they're going to rebuild society from scratch.

With this premise, it sounds like the newest Syfy production The Ark should be a delight to watch. And at times, it is; these characters have to improvise on the fly with every bit of brains they've got in order to deal with brutal life-or-death choices under unforgiving circumstances. But often, especially in the first couple of episodes, it's difficult to get into the tone that the series wants to adopt. The urgency of the stakes, literally the survival of the human species, doesn't quite fit with the light-hearted dialogues, the melodramatic characterizations, and the silly brand of humor that fill the scripts. But if you manage to get used to the tone, you'll be rewarded with a profound demonstration of how civilization can be saved if the ages-old exchange of hostilities is abandoned in favor of an exchange of goodwill.

Unfortunately, there are multiple hiccups to overcome before full enjoyment is possible. The social dynamic between the ship's crew members is too dependent on the needs of each episode, shifting from animosity to camaraderie to resentment to intimacy with little time to let the characters (or the viewers) process the change. Although this uncertainty helps communicate how fragile this new society is in its first steps, it makes it very hard to follow whose loyalties we're supposed to believe. It's like the writers tried to emulate the cutthroat power dispute from Battlestar Galactica but wanted to also keep the ban on crew conflict from Star Trek plus the chaotic management style from Futurama.

This problem is of a kind with the overall tonal mismatch. One gets the impression that one writer was in charge of plotting a heavy drama with constant crises and impending doom, and then another writer was tasked with painting a coat of rom-com whimsy over it. Of the focus characters, the most notable (and hardest to swallow) are Alicia Nevins, the adorkable teen genius with no speech filter and advanced degrees in everything; James Brice, the imprudent pilot and resident eye candy who somehow only seems to own tank tops; Cat Brandice, the dating advice vlogger conscripted as the galaxy's least professional ship counselor; and Spencer Lane, the protagonist's Designated Foil whose entire role in the show consists in whining about having a woman boss.

So, what's actually good about The Ark? The plotting. This series is a brilliant example of how to write an unfolding story with interweaving parts where solving one problem leads to discovering more problems that lead to unexpected solutions that open yet more problems. This is an incredibly solid structure that maintains an unbroken momentum from one episode to the next. The Ark doesn't have the most consistent characters in space opera, but it does boast an expert command of the chains of consequence that make up a story.

The other great achievement of The Ark is its moral stance. Whereas the big space opera franchises seem to have forgotten how to write a thrilling climax that doesn't rely on who pew-pews harder, The Ark is set on a civilian starship with no weapons, so the big resolution has to rely on the decency of human nature, not on brute firepower. In the season finale, the protagonist argues that the dog-eat-dog methods that one can find both in warfare and in corporate competition are exactly what ruined Earth, and the survivors of humankind shouldn't take that habit with them into space. Instead, she's willing to try openness, sincerity, empathy. That's a way more interesting approach to watch, and the writers do it justice by concocting a way more interesting problem to solve. The crisis in the last episode, which our protagonist doesn't overcome with battle tactics but with kindness and generosity, illustrates beautifully how to survive an iterated prisoner's dilemma, a well-known thought experiment in game theory that serves as a microcosm of everyday life in a society. Nonviolent heroes FTW!

Often it seems like these contentious times have made us forget how to live as humans. By every objective measure, the survival strategy of our species is not perpetual hostility, but cooperation. The Ark makes a powerful case for the position that, if we want to found civilization again, our best chance for it to endure is to build it on the recognition of our common vulnerability and the willingness to be vulnerable with each other. Watching that noble message bear fruit is well worth all the cheesy dialogues.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

Review: For the First Time, Again by Sylvain Neuvel

The Take Them to the Stars trilogy concludes with a massive setup and a deflated resolution

The centuries-long saga that started in A History of What Comes Next and continued in Until the Last of Me is coming to an end with For the First Time, Again. Now author Sylvain Neuvel brings his superstrong, supersmart, human-looking aliens into the 21st century, and the pressing question that drives their cat-and-mouse game is: Does Earth stand any chance against the rest of the alien civilization that the antagonist succeeded in inviting at the end of the second novel?

Let's recap: the Kibsu are an alien species composed of two lineages, male and female. They can mate with humans, but the offspring is always an identical clone of the alien parent. Since the dawn of our history, the Kibsu women have been secretly nudging us toward developing advanced mathematics, metallurgy, and finally rocket science; for the same length of time, the Kibsu men have been hunting the Kibsu women, trying to avenge their ancient betrayal and get their hands on the machine that can signal their homeworld to let them know here's a whole world ripe for conquering.

The protagonists of this final showdown are Aster, the last daughter of the Kibsu, given up for adoption and raised with no knowledge of her cosmic mission; and Samael, the last son of the Kibsu, murderer of Aster's mother and now her remorseful rescuer. Once they meet each other, they start living on the run from Earth authorities, learning to tolerate each other's peculiarities and trying to prevent the disaster that will come if the rest of their species decides to visit us.

The narration style in this closing entry in the series improves noticeably compared to the previous two. Aster's inner monologue sounds genuinely like that of a Millennial kid who understands the world in the language of grunge rock albums and Bruce Willis movies. Her snark is sharp without crossing the line into annoying, and her gallows humor is exactly the right hue of believable given her absurd circumstances. The chapters told from her perspective are a head-spinningly quick read, but the author was wise enough to intercalate some chapters focused on Samael, whose pensive, calculating personality provides the necessary counterweight that keeps the novel's rhythm from entering chaotic meltdown.

The author is aware that the dynamic between Aster and Samael is so interesting that their world-saving mission can afford to take a backseat. On one hand, it was the right choice to foreground the interpersonal push-and-pull between a hunter and a prey forced to become allies. With a genius teenager and a psychopathic assassin as narrators, this novel had to give inner feelings the center stage. On the other hand, the incongruity in the scale of stakes hurts the ending's impact. The moment when our protagonists succeed in sending a decoy that will throw the enemy off Earth's location is written too matter-of-factly; it arrives without due gravitas and ends before the reader has had time to process the experience. The dramatic sacrifice of a hard-won helper is framed in a way that makes Aster look monstrously uncaring. The crucial consequence of all their effort, the event that should have been the climax of the book, is relegated to what is effectively a post-credits scene (I didn't know that was possible with the written word, and no, I don't welcome it).

As if to tie the final bow on the frustrating way this series proposes great ideas that it can only halfway develop, the believability issue that I pointed out in books 1 and 2 reaches critical mass in book 3. I'm talking about the characters' impossible talent to just board a plane whenever it's convenient to the plot. It gets worse in this book because it's set right after 9/11, when video surveillance metastasized to total state paranoia. These are the two most wanted fugitives on the planet, and somehow they routinely make it past several international security checkpoints without even an aside from the author that would at least do us the courtesy of handwaving how they haven't been arrested a dozen times before the novel's midpoint.

Scattered hints here and there give the impression that the author may be planning to continue this series and finally explain what drove the mysterious aliens to look for other worlds to settle in. While the ending we get here is final enough for the story's immediate purposes, it does leave an aftertaste of unsatisfaction with regard to larger questions. This series could serve as a case study for a discussion on when to place the start and the ending of a plot and which events in it are the ones most worth narrating. All three entries are set in the modern day, with interludes that give very short glimpses into the remote history of the Kibsu, and one can imagine a universe where the author chose differently, starting with an unbroken focus on the remote history (which in itself could have filled half a dozen novels) and building to a truly epic finale set entirely in our time. I have to concede that the fragmentary structure of these novels as they are reflects very appropriately the protagonists' incomplete knowledge of their own past, but that effect is achieved at the expense of punishing the reader's curiosity. As a whole, Take Them to the Stars was a potent idea that deserved a less rushed treatment.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Reference: Neuvel, Sylvain. For the First Time, Again [Tordotcom, 2023].

On the American nightmare of 'Hello Tomorrow!'

See the 1950s not as they happened, but as they wish they had

Welcome to postwar America, a land of ambition, opportunity, and pie-in-the-sky dreams. Everything is possible if you can affo— erm, imagine it. Why put off until later what you can purchase today? Fortune favors the brave, and today's name for fortune is the free market. At the push of a button, happiness can be yours in affordable installments; all you need to do is believe hard enough. So, what more could you desire in this cornucopia of pastel and chrome? Sign on the dotted line, and you can boast your very own piece of the Moon.

The new Apple TV+ series Hello Tomorrow! is a funhouse mirror version of the mid-century prosperity boom that cemented American world dominance. All the miracles that technology was supposed to bring to our daily lives are made real here: robot waiters, self-heating popcorn, personal jetpacks, smell-o-vision, hovercars, self-adjusting neckties, lunar telephones. The lifestyle of domestic leisure that the Space Age failed to deliver is presented in full, oversaturated color, with a populuxe glee that would make George Jetson nod with pride.

Although daily life in this world is as bright and comfortable as the real 1950s merely hoped to be, it's built on the same soul-crushing cutthroat grind, and the character types created for this story are fascinating examples of the coping strategies required to survive in consumerist utopia. If the production design of Hello Tomorrow! is award-worthy, the casting is pitch-perfect. The roles played by Haneefah Wood and Alison Pill carry the weight of being the only sensible women in a world of excitable manchildren, whereas Susan Heyward and Dagmara Domińczyk play more cynical characters who have learned to game the system in their favor. Hank Azaria as a compulsive gambler with odd Freudian superstitions represents the weary worker who does the exact minimum required by his job while despising every day of it, while Dewshane Williams as a compulsive people-pleaser with a creepy practiced smile represents the fully absorbed worker who has sincerely bought into the myth of self-made success via hard effort. Matthew Maher as a compulsive rule-enforcer who implausibly speaks in misspellings represents the lawful acquiescence that keeps the dehumanizing machinery running, and Billy Crudup as a compulsive fraudster who can't refrain from phrasing everything in ad copy represents, paradoxically, the most honest portrait of how business is actually done.

If marketing, as I've said before, is the Dark Side of rhetoric, Crudup's character has the vilest, most despicable job in the galaxy: he's a salesman. A very skilled one. Even if he weren't a silver-tongued smoke peddler, even if his polished spiel about offworld luxury property were true, his strategy of tugging on people's deepest aspirations to get them to part with their money would suffice to instantly detest his manipulative personality. Crudup does a fantastic job of expressing the layers of pretense that envelop this conniving trickster who always needs to keep in mind which version of the lie he's telling to whom. In the real world, selling real estate on the Moon has no legal basis, but that hasn't stopped many a self-proclaimed entrepreneur from trying, nor will this be the last time shameless speculators point to the Moon to make their case. What this salesman has figured out is that lunar property is the kitschiest form of conspicuous consumption, a mark of distinction for the whole planet to watch with open envy. Something to literally look up to.

It is precisely the concept of "looking up to" that drives the best character dynamic in the show: that between the con man played by Crudup and his son, played by Nicholas Podany, a spectacularly cast role that explores with passionate earnestness the whole range that goes from American optimism to American heartbreak. If every story about the future is actually saying something about the present, every alternate history is actually telling something about reality. The shiny future didn't fail to come because we didn't invent personal jetpacks. The world of Hello Tomorrow! has all the technological delights that industrialized capitalism promised American workers, those same workers who grew up traumatized by the Great Depression and apparently swore to never look poor again. Our fraudster protagonist doesn't want to be an honorable father; he wants to seem one. He doesn't want to do honest business; he wants to be seen performing it.

American mid-century prosperity was real, but it was supported by a gigantic effort in aesthetics. We're currently plagued by nostalgia for the 80s, which in turn dealt with nostalgia for the 50s. But what is remembered about the 50s is what got photographed, filmed, advertised, not the actual experiences of the people on whose backs that prosperity rested.

Carl Sagan is often misquoted as having said, "that which can be destroyed by the truth deserves to be." It's fittingly ironic that the popular attribution of the phrase is likely mistaken. In Hello Tomorrow!, that which can be destroyed by the truth is too shiny and pretty to let go. Success, prestige, glamour is what America promises, what the protagonist of this series trades in. He's not selling plots of land; he's selling a vision of self-realization that consists in vacuum-sealing oneself from the undeserving rabble. Just like he's become isolated from everything that was genuine in his life, he's inviting others to buy the same isolation. His inability to open up to his son is a microcosm of the anxiety that underlied 1950s America, a place where your honesty limits your achievements, where you may have no more than the shirt on your back, but as long as it's sufficiently starched, you can dream of the stars.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Microreview: Endurance by Elaine Burnes

Imagine Star Trek Voyager, but done right

In a future solar system, subject to the same greedy competition that has always plagued newly explored territories, the equivalent of a luxury cruise is a sightseeing trip around the planets. One company involved in private space travel, Omara Tours, has arranged a special itinerary to take advantage of a rare alignment of Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Its cruise ship Endurance, captained by veteran explorer Lyn Randall, is approaching the moon Enceladus when a mysterious space anomaly instantly transports it and a handful of nearby ships 4 light-years away, to the Rigil Kentaurus system. There's no hint as to what caused the jump, there's no one nearby who can help, and it would take thousands of years to try to return to Earth. What comes next is trying to survive in the middle of nowhere.

Elaine Burnes's novel Endurance wears its Star Trek influences on its sleeve, most notably in the social interactions within the spaceship, but the setting of the story is all its own. Earth is still recovering from a catastrophic war plus environmental collapse that led to a new start from scratch in the form of a feminist revolution. Spaceships have artificial gravity, matter recycling, and talking computers, but there aren't teleporters or warp drives or alien civilizations. So the novel sort of feels like it lives in Star Trek, but only as far as the worldbuilding needs to draw from it. While openly inspired by Star Trek, it's far from derivative.

There isn't a conventional antagonist here. The core conflict isn't between the protagonist and an enemy, but between the protagonist and the harshness of the universe. To be sure, Captain Randall has numerous inner demons, but instead of defining her, they organically inform the way she makes hard decisions for the safety of the people under her responsibility. Much of the plot resembles those classic pulp stories where smart engineers had to solve a technical challenge to save the day. Unlike most pulp adventures, Endurance keeps a finger on the pulse of human desires and fears. The point of figuring out the mystery isn't just the intellectual satisfaction; the point is always the characters' reaction to being stranded and helpless in the void. Without losing sight of the nerdy intricacies of interstellar jumping, Endurance gives primacy to its character's inner lives and relationships.

Although enough loose ends are left for an implied sequel, Endurance satisfies on its own. From among the hundreds of already existing novels about travelers lost in space, this one achieves the right mix of physics and humanism to build a well-rounded story. The various everyday complications of space survival are enhanced by the context of personal histories, unresolved regrets, and lingering suspicions that prevent this seemingly simple premise from ever getting boring. As Burnes's first foray into science fiction, Endurance proves unmissable.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: Burnes, Elaine. Endurance [Mindancer Press, 2022].

Review: The Mimicking of Known Successes by Malka Older

When things are broken, you can wait ages for them to go back to normal, or you can adapt

Argentinean literary critic Ricardo Piglia described, in one of his many essays, his personal theory of short fiction: every plot contains two plots. This is most evident in the detective genre, where the protagonist's tale (the investigation) is about unveiling an earlier tale (the crime). So reading detective fiction (and, according to Piglia, all fiction) is a dual task: to follow the protagonist's thought process is to simultaneously discover the two stories contained in the text.

By that standard, Malka Older's new novella The Mimicking of Known Successes is twice as ambitious as the typical detective mystery. Set in a network of metallic platforms where future humankind clings to survival among the clouds of Jupiter, it presents, instead of two, four stories to unveil: an investigation on the sudden disappearance of a university professor, the scholarly endeavor to reconstruct the last years of life on Earth, a rekindling romance between our detective and an old flame, and the project to bring homo sapiens back to a livable ecosystem. Once put on the page, these four stories become four mysteries that drive the reader's curiosity: What happened to the missing professor? What made humans leave Earth? Why did the two lovers break up years ago? And how can catastrophic historical failures be repaired without causing more damage? Upon reading it, one can intuit that the biggest structural challenge of this book must have been to write it in such a way that pursuing each separate question leads to answers for all the others.

To give proper praise to the way Older weaves these questions around a unifying theme, it's necessary to spoil at least part of the answer. This is a story about the dangers of misplaced nostalgia and the need to learn new forms of compatibility. Here Older resorts to a helpful literary device by which the larger conflict mirrors the inner conflict; that is, the civilizational question about the compatibility between human beings and their environment is explored in parallel with the personal question about the compatibility between the protagonist and her former lover. And for both conflicts the resolution is the same: you need to stop wishing things could return to the way they used to be. A totally new compatibility is possible if you're willing to adapt.

This is the meaning contained in the book's title: there's little to be gained from just repeating what worked before, because when the circumstances no longer allow that outcome, you become stuck. And Older reinforces that theme with her faithful, but not subservient, homage to Sherlock Holmes. The narrative style is clearly inspired by Watson's observations of Holmes's work, but doesn't try to replicate it. The floating colonies built in Jupiter are prone to atmospheric disturbances that make radio waves unreliable. So this is a cold and foggy world of scarves, coats, and cozy fireplaces, where people have to rely on telegrams and travel by railway between isolated structures because there's no solid ground. The result is a book that evokes the flavor of Victorian detective novels, but doesn't share their worldview—a happy synergy of genre, aesthetic and setting.

It is remarkable to find such complexity in so brief a wordcount. Although the plot flows with effortless readability, it rests on an intricate scaffolding that enables all the literary elements to bolster one another's strengths. The intriguing backstory emerges in hints scattered through the blend of colloquial and erudite prose, a sign that this civilization has lost continuity with Earth culture; the first-person narrator laments the impossibility of pairing recovered accounts of life on Earth with their physical referents; the core argument about the pitfalls of yearning for a lost past resonates with the narrator's characterization, the villain's masterplan, and the contemporary reader's circumstances. Like the platforms linked by railways, all the parts of the story are meticulously interconnected. The Mimicking of Known Successes is not only a potent environmental and political parable, but a major achievement in storytelling technique.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Reference: Older, Malka. The Mimicking of Known Successes [Tor, 2023].

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

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

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

'Star Trek: Picard' season 2 is aimless and inconsistent

Its examination of the neofascist dangers of the 2020s breaks down into pointless nostalgia and superficial psychoanalysis

Season 2 of Star Trek: Picard bites more than it can chew. In the span of ten episodes, it tries to explore xenophobia, eugenicism, the weight of self-blame, repressed trauma, the tragedy of finitude, the tension between open and closed societies, the human yearning for intimate connection, the fear of loneliness, the responsibilities that come with parenthood, immigration policy, the purpose of life in old age, the narcissism inherent to the search for a legacy, authoritarianism, temporal paradoxes, suicide, and the uncertainty about the turbulent direction of humankind in the 2020s. Unfortunately, the show doesn't manage to say anything insightful about any one of its myriad themes.

The season begins by proposing a knock on the door: the Borg, old enemies of the United Federation of Planets, all of a sudden ask to join it. However, Admiral Jean-Luc Picard chooses to self-destruct his ship before allowing his old tormentors a foot in the door. This encounter sets up the argument between inclusion and exclusion that will continue in later episodes, and it gains heightened resonance by virtue of the characters who participate in it: captain Ríos, a Latino who gives commands in Spanish; Seven of Nine, an ex-Borg who was given a second chance at humanity; Elnor, a refugee from a destroyed world; Agnes and Raffi, chronic loners; and Jean-Luc himself, a techno-organic creature whose existence was illegal in the Federation just months before. This crew is composed of identities that, either in the real world or in the show's setting, have at some point been rejected, ignored, and excluded. And this is the crew that chooses to reject the Borg's open hand. This is the crew that consciously chooses death instead of risking further openness. So it's fitting that this is the moment when cosmic trickster Q steps in and shows Jean-Luc the flipside of that mindset.

Even before the revelations in the season finale, the thought of welcoming the Borg into the Federation shouldn't have been off the table. Star Trek has an established tradition of dissolving enmities: we've seen Earth gladly cease hostilities with the Klingons, the Xindi, the Andorians, the Romulans, the Orions. The Federation grows stronger each time it makes rivals into allies.

Q creates an alternate timeline where the fascist Confederation has a darker way of dissolving enmities: the eradication of every species that is not humankind. This world's version of Jean-Luc Picard is a mass murderer who serves supremacist ideals and gleefully performs televised executions. This reality is everything Star Trek has always warned against, which is why it's disappointing that we only spend one episode there.

To be fair, Star Trek had already shown us several examples of galactic history gone wrong in the Mirror Universe. But there was always the implied relief that those horrific events didn't happen to us, didn't affect our history. Our history was meant to be the peaceful Federation. The choice in this season of Picard to have the bad future happen in our universe makes the dystopia feel much more threatening. The cruelty and hopelessness of the Mirror Universe can no longer be relegated elsewhere. The potential for endless horror is right here.

Literally right here: one of the most compelling plotting choices of this season is to set the point of divergence in the real world's present. It's Earth in the 2020s where the future is decided. It's you and me watching Picard. It's up to us to decide whether our future will be an egalitarian utopia or a fascist nightmare. However, the show doesn't do anything interesting with that enormous idea. Captain Ríos suffers a random teleport mishap that conveniently puts him in the crosshairs of ICE, but his ordeal through arrest and imprisonment has a perfunctory air to it. The subplot where Ríos is in danger of disappearing forever in immigration jail has an obvious thematic link to the kind of future our heroes are trying to prevent, but the episode occurs in isolation from the rest of the story. The draconian proceedings of US immigration policy feel like they should, but really aren't, related to the flow of historical events at the center of the plot. By turning the capture and rescue of Ríos into a side quest completely untethered from the main mission, the show missed its best chance for relevant commentary.

There's nothing wrong per se in a story having a large number of themes. The problem with season 2 of Picard is that those themes have little to do with one another, and sometimes lead to contradictory messages. For example: when we learn that the crucial event that must be preserved in today's Earth in order to avoid the dystopian future is the participation of a certain ancestor of Jean-Luc's in a space mission (making this the millionth story to fall for the Great Man myth of history), we meet Tallinn, an alien secret spy tasked with protecting said ancestor until she flies to space. In the final episode, Jean-Luc tries to prevent Tallinn from sacrificing herself to complete her mission (in fulfillment of an Unnecessarily Cryptic Prophecy), and Tallinn protests that her life is hers to risk, and Jean-Luc has no right to interfere with her choices. However, interfering with someone's life and even guiding their choices to keep them from risk is exactly what Tallinn has been doing to Jean-Luc's ancestor for years. The point made in this discussion comes too close to mirroring the evil future's implied stance that some deaths are more acceptable than others. Moreover, the thematic thread about Jean-Luc's need to stop holding himself responsible for everyone else conflicts with the thematic thread about our historical responsibility to protect the future. These two messages didn't have to clash, but they have that result in this particular intersection of plots.

This incoherence reocurrs in regard to Jean-Luc's inner conflict. Q points out that his choice to leave his personal past intact and not prevent a chain of events that resulted in his mother's suicide shows growth on Jean-Luc's part. However, serenely accepting a painful reality is the opposite of what our team of heroes have been trying to accomplish the entire season. If it's a valid ethical choice to alter the past so that billions of people won't live in misery, why is it praiseworthy of Jean-Luc to not save his mother and himself? Tallinn asserts that we don't get to choose what losses we have to bear, which is an argument worth considering, but it comes off as a weak argument when presented in the same story where the main mission is to fix a cosmic loss. With these conflicting positions, the season comes off as uncertain of what it wants us to care about.

The key issue Q hoped his old frenemy would dare to face turns out to be family trauma, but there's no causal or even symbolic connection between Jean-Luc's mother and Jean-Luc's 21st-century ancestor. Q effectively assigned Jean-Luc one mission while intending him to complete another, and the narrative disjointedness feels too big at times, like two separate plots competing for centrality. The scenes we spend dealing with his difficult memories come at the expense of his time travel mission, not in the service of it.

This failure to achieve cohesion is especially regrettable when it comes to Jean-Luc's personal growth. The moment Q's actions affect is the self-destruction of Jean-Luc's ship (i.e., a suicide); the moment he expects Jean-Luc to not affect is his mother's release from confinement, which allowed her to hang herself. By helping Jean-Luc relinquish his guilt for his mother's suicide, Q means to prevent Jean-Luc's own suicide. And yet again, the method of execution has no relation to the ultimate goal. The switch to a dystopian timeline is something entirely apart from Jean-Luc's personal problems, and Jean-Luc's reward for fixing the galaxy is a trip back to his time at the cost of Q's suicide, which muddles whatever statement Q was trying to make.

The other big threat in this season, the emergence of a new Borg Queen in the 2020s, feels similarly undercooked. The writers don't take advantage of the chance to present the dangers of absolute control and enforced conformity that the Borg symbolize as a mirror for the similar tendencies reemerging in our real world. What would it look like for the Borg to come in contact with a culture that has already experienced the Trump era? That would have been a fascinating change of perspective, because in Star Trek the Borg have always served as a contrast to the Federation, but this season suggests that we, the humans of Earth, have the potential in our nature to become the same type of heartless all-devouring conquerors that the Borg are. That obvious low-hanging fruit is inexplicably left untouched.

Another missed opportunity occurs during the Borg attack on the Picard mansion, where our heroes retreat to the tunnels beneath. Those tunnels fulfill a double role in the backstory: they're the place where the young Jean-Luc learned that his mother's mental health was deteriorating, and also the shelter where the French resistance hid from the German occupiers. That history presented a fertile narrative possibility in connecting a refuge in the mind to a refuge against fascism. But once again, the writers didn't do anything with a thematic resonance that was crying out to be used.

Finally, the whole Soong situation makes no sense. It's already beyond tiresome to have Brent Spiner be the only face of the Soong family, but his role in this season is another instance of the Great Man myth. The new Borg Queen describes the forking road thusly: will humankind go the way of Picard, or the way of Soong? It's an extremely narrow view of how history works, an oversimplification of ongoing cultural trends that the writers should have been more aware of if they were going to set the story in our present day.

Yes, humankind in the 2020s is very much at risk of becoming the opressive regime of the Confederation. But this season of Picard only uses our present day as set dressing. The resolution of the threat Q created has nothing to say about our current situation, and repeats the familiar mistake of making a huge societal problem hinge on the choices of one individual.

It's even more frustrating to watch the season finale of Picard on the same day that Strange New Worlds premiered. In this new entry in the franchise, captain Christopher Pike recounts the difficult journey that Earth had to go through before becoming a Star Trek utopia. Using real footage from the violent conflicts of the past couple of years, Pike reaffirms the established canon that says 21st-century Earth had a world war motivated by eugenics. That's the immediate future Star Trek is saying awaits us. So what should we glean from our heroes' success at preserving the timeline in Picard?

This season had good material to work with, but didn't make the effort to make the best use of it. The writers knew that the season's themes had great significance for our current times, but didn't develop them beyond the barest box ticking. And the details added to Jean-Luc's backstory overcomplicate a character we already had a clear feel for. This portion of Picard's story is more notable for what it wastes than for what it adds to the ongoing Star Trek saga.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 5/10.

Bonuses: +2 for Kirsten Beyer, who seems to always elevate any script she has a hand in.

Penalties: −1 for too much empty fan service, −1 for a contrived resolution to Kore's journey, −1 because it's incongruous to devote so much attention to Jean-Luc's childhood without acknowledging his troubled relationship to his brother.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

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