Happy 60th Birthday, Star Trek

Going where no TV series has gone before

If there’s a Major League of SF TV, it’s an honored place where only the truly memorable names are enshrined. The full list of the Best of the Best is perpetually subject to revision, but a few entries are beyond dispute. The Twilight Zone. The X-Files. Doctor Who. Orphan Black. Babylon 5. The Expanse. Future versions of this list, I daresay, will surely include newer masterpieces like Sense8, Severance and Andor. And at the top of the very top sits the endlessly influential and inspiring TV franchise that predicts a future where diversity and collaboration are our biggest strength: the simultaneously silly, profound, comforting, irritating, topical and strange Star Trek.

The Star Trek franchise is far from perfect. Too often it has failed its own message. Fans can name exactly which episodes were so outrageously sexist or racist that they shouldn't be shown when introducing new people. Whether a given producer would be respectful to the actresses he hired has been a lottery. And yet, we continue to stubbornly love this ongoing story, despite its many stumbles. Much like the republic for which it stands, we love the promise of Star Trek more than its track record in fulfilling it.

It’s a simple but potent idea: that the future will be open to everyone. Star Trek shows us a prosperous. peace-loving, educated civilization that welcomes people of all origins, all languages, all body types. The United Federation of Planets has built a culture that prefers dialogue instead of aggression, learning instead of fear, cooperation instead of avarice. It was a daring, necessary idea in the ’60s, when the US was going through a crisis of identity regarding its place in the world and its foundational ideal of equal rights for all; and it remains a daring, necessary idea now that xenophobia, patriarchy and willful ignorance have returned with a vengeance. Against those forms of hatred, Star Trek presents us with a potential future worth striving for.

The themes that recur in all iterations of the franchise form a generally consistent stance. We should meet the universe openly, without suspicion or malice. We should value curiosity together with skepticism. We should explore the vast space within us as deeply as that outside us. We should beware those who manipulate religion to control others. We should cultivate the integrity to live by our values, but paired with the prudence to not impose them by force. We should feel at home in the universe wherever we are. We should invite our enemies to become our allies. We should not take our freedom for granted, but we should also trust that good actions will inspire many more. We should embrace the precious diversity that surrounds us.

In a science fiction ecosystem too often dominated by big guns and flashy fights, Star Trek has stayed firmly, unapologetically humanistic. Star Trek recognizes the historical abuses of science and still defends the worth of science as a tool to improve our lives. It takes note from the calamities of history and asserts that they are not inevitable. The stars and the worlds that live under their light are not there to be conquered, but to be met with respect, as equals. And the search for knowledge, if done honestly and fairly, will protect us from our most shameful impulses.

The type of plot that characterizes a Star Trek episode is most often a moral parable where thorny questions are translated into personal drama. This is a franchise that doesn’t feel intimidated by big ideas. The nature of personhood, the extent of our mutual responsibility, the proper counterweights to political power, the uses of mythmaking, the value of reason when faced with irrational forces—Star Trek has space for everything. Such confidence in the power of truth has sustained the same ongoing story for 60 years and is capable of keeping it alive for many more. Now is a doubtful moment for all things Paramount, but if the history of Star Trek proves anything, it’s that the fans’ love for it is a force that should not be underestimated.

It’s with that love that I say to you, Star Trek: Thank you for all the mind-blowing concepts and the fun moments. Thank you for taking a stand against exclusion, prejudice and narrow-mindedness. Keep pointing the way to a future where everyone has a fair chance to grow and keep learning. Keep reaching for the wonders that are out there in the infinite realm of imagination. Keep boldly going.

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

TV Microreview: Ann Droid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Review: Batman: Caped Crusader season 2

Quoth the Joker: “Good. This is good.”

The reimagining of the era-defining Batman: The Animated Series returns for a second season, and much like the second movie in the Nolanverse, this time the story explores what happens to Gotham’s rotten underbelly once Batman starts removing ordinary mobsters from the board. What happens, as you’ll remember from The Dark Knight, is that a more devious, more sophisticated breed of evildoers emerges. And, as is customary in this show, Batman’s extensive repertoire of enemies is remolded with interesting twists.

Take the Mad Hatter, for example. The classical version of this character is a creepy little goblin who uses neuroelectric technology for mind control. But here we get something harder to fight: a sweet old lady with a talk show. She doesn’t need fancy gadgets to influence people because she has the power of mass media. This version of the Mad Hatter never meets Batman in a fight, but her presence is strongly felt throught the season each time she’s on screen poisoning the public conversation.

We also meet Roxy Rocket, who instead of a mere henchwoman is portrayed here as a tragic antiheroine on a mission of revenge. Also out for revenge is the Spectre, whose deadly, unstoppable wrath may or may not be divine, but is definitely not of this world. There’s the Mad Monk, a predatory cult leader who has made Batman the focus of a mass obsession. As promised in the trailer for this season, Harley Quinn returns, faced with both the weight of her own actions and the threat of a villain who seems tailored for her professional talents. The dual character of Rose/Thorn makes an appearance in an episode that plays with ambiguous interpretations about which side of her is real. And we see a version of Mr. Freeze reinvented as a rather unconventional artist who enjoys turning people into icy sculptures.

But the presence that haunts the season from start to end is the horrifying gaze of the Joker, who gets the most radical transformation away from the archetype we’ve learned to expect. Although the Riddler enjoys a long stay under the spotlight as Gotham’s new mob boss, the show pulls off a funny move of metatextual awareness and turns the Riddler into a mere appetizer for the main course that is the Joker, which, after all, is what the Riddler has been for decades in the public’s ranking of villains.

This Joker is a complete surprise. Story after story has trained us to expect a very specific vibe from this character: an irreverent prankster whose perverse sense of humor conveys a deep disdain for the social order. He’s colorful, loud, annoying in a way that’s impossible to ignore. This Joker is none of that. He doesn’t bother dressing up his psychopathic impulses in clownish antics: he’s pure, naked malevolence. He’s elusive, silent, shady to the point that he thinks of himself as an equal to Batman. He still has his trademark poison gas that kills people of laughter, but he himself never cracks a smile.

How can a character be so polarly opposite to the standard Joker and still be an incarnation of him? If he views society as one big joke, he’s keeping the punchline to himself. That makes his personality all the more sinister: you know he’s privately enjoying the chaos, but he’s not going to explain what it is that he finds so funny.

Beyond the visual delight that is the retro aesthetic of this art déco Gotham, with its black-and-white TV shows, clunky machine guns, and ubiquitous fedoras, the main attraction of the show is the inventivenes with which it makes the same old villains you think you already know feel fresh again. For a hero approaching 90 years since first publication, this is a much needed and much welcome transfusion of new blood.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

TV Microreview: The Boroughs

Stellar cast, creepy monsters, zero mysteries

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

TV Review: The Miniature Wife

A small shift in perspective makes all the difference

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Review: Paradise season 2

A welcome jump in quality over season 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

TV Review: The Beauty

Caution: Side effects include painful rolling of eyes and death from boredom

Through The Beauty’s clumsily structured first season, we follow cartoonishly greedy pharma bro Byron, whose only personality trait is a massive black hole where humanity is supposed to reside. In these times of corporate sociopathy elevated to aspirational fame, the problem with a character like Byron isn’t a lack of realism (hell knows the real world has more than its share of narcissistic buffoons), but the fact that his evil is played as a joke. As necessary as it is to counter the ego of the über-rich with relentless ridicule, The Beauty strikes the wrong tone: we should be laughing at this villain, but actor Ashton Kutcher’s contagious charisma invites the viewer to laugh with him.

Byron’s newest business plan is a drug that completely remakes the human body with some genetic technobabble. One injection cures all diseases, fixes the metabolism, stops natural aging, and—here’s the selling point—makes the patient look impossibly sexy. I marvel at the difficulties this show’s casting director must have had in selecting only the hottest of the hottest supermodels for the dozens of extras that showcase the wonders this drug produces. Just a little problem: the miracle beauty drug ends up raising your body temperature until you literally explode. Not that that’s going to deter Byron from his goal of squeezing the world out of a fortune.

(This gruesome detail has a distant basis in reality: in the 1930s, one of the first anti-obesity pills contained 2,4-dinitrophenol, a molecule that interferes with the body’s ability to extract energy from its reserves. As a result, more and more fat needs to be burned in order to maintain basic biological functions, which of course reduces the amount of stored fat, but all that extra burning causes internal overheating that can easily get lethal. The molecule was banned.)

Watching The Beauty, it takes a while to piece together exactly how things started to go wrong for Byron’s company. In the season’s many ineptly misplaced flashbacks, we eventually discover that it was one of his lab technicians who leaked the miracle drug to the world before Byron was ready to start charging for it. It turns out that The Beauty^® is sexually transmissible, which creates a snowballing problem: each formerly normal, newly super-attractive person jumps at the chance to seduce lots of partners, each of which is in turn transformed and then proceeds to similarly propagate the molecule. So now lots of people are becoming beautiful without paying Byron, and also, lots of people are randomly exploding like Tetsuo from Akira all over the world, which threatens to bring a massive PR crisis at Byron’s doorstep.

What does Byron do to contain the epidemic of gorgeousness? Why, he hires a professional assassin, as you do. In fact, this is how we start the story: we follow two FBI agents who have been investigating a series of mysterious deaths of beautiful people across Europe. Things get complicated when one of the FBI agents has a one-night stand and is transformed into another sex bomb. Now she has to get to the bottom of this medical mystery before she blows up too.

It‘s strange that so much of this show happens in secret. We’re not shown how the press reacts to high-profile people exploding, or how the common people feel about the rumors that surely must circulate concerning an STD that makes you hot. It’s especially out of character for someone as egocentric as Byron to never give an interview about his vision for humanity.

The Beauty has the ingredients for a compelling story, but has no idea how to cook them. It has nothing to say about the social harms of lookism and the pharmaceutical exploitation of people’s insecurities that The Substance didn’t say better. Its embarrassingly preachy dialogues sound copy-pasted from incel forums. Each episode rehashes the same yucky sequence of a new victim receiving the molecule and being painfully transformed via convulsive contortionism. When the best character in the show, Byron’s delightfully vitriolic wife, is given the treatment against her will and then attempts suicide, Byron’s change of heart feels hollow because he had never shown any concern for her before. And his hired assassin turns a target into his apprentice for no comprehensible reason.

The Beauty is an uninspired The Substance wannabe with far less bite, a juvenile sense of humor and zero awareness of the times. Yes, we know that obsession with beauty is dangerous. The show doesn’t have any more points to make after that, and it gets tiresome to watch a string of tertiary characters frantically throw themselves at the walls for ten minutes while the drug works its Cronenberg-lite magic. One wishes they could skip the grimacing part and blow up already.

Nerd Coefficient: 4/10.

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

TV Review: Starfleet Academy

A more than worthy successor to Discovery, somewhat undercut by mixed messaging

Starfleet Academy is proof that a six-decade-old ongoing story can still find ways to feel fresh if it dares try the unusual. Prodigy already showed how the same elevated ideals that sustain the Federation can be adapted for child protagonists, and Lower Decks brought much-needed levity to the franchise’s sometimes suffocating self-importance. The newest iteration, set in the 3000s after the United Federation of Planets has been broken apart and reforged, blends the thrill of space adventure with the angst of teen drama. But the most unusual aspect of Starfleet Academy isn’t even the soap opera side of it; it’s that, extremely rarely for a Star Trek series, it’s driven more by the internal exploration of characters than by clever plot-solving. So I think it may be a worthwhile exercise to analyze the show in the same manner: by focusing on the characters.

Caleb. The show’s protagonist had a childhood traumatized by the Federation, after his mother was sentenced way too harshly for having been at worst an accessory to murder. This defining incident shapes all his relationships: he’s learned to expect to end up alone, so he’s reluctant to bond. This is made evident from the big gestures, like the way he lashes out at his new friends each time they get too close, to the small ones, like his habit of hoarding food (which is a real behavior in children who were abandoned). This issue gives him both a clear direction and a weakness: he has a mission to find his mother, but everything else is secondary to it, so he doesn’t allow himself to experience life. He can’t commit to his girlfriend because he feels too emotionally exposed with her (it doesn’t help that she’s a literal mind-reader), and he can’t participate in a Klingon bonding ritual because he’s still waiting for the family he lost. This is interesting characterization, but it gets resolved too neatly by the end of the season.

Genesis. Our favorite obsessive overachiever has a simpler but harder drama to deal with: as the daughter of a Starfleet admiral, she enters the Academy having already a mountain of second-hand expectations dumped onto her. She’s definitely talented, as well as a quick learner and a natural leader, but she can’t bring herself to believing that her successes are her own, even after she’s proven multiple times that she can improvise resourcefully, notice the details that matter in a moment of urgency and somehow always know the right thing to say to comfort a friend. That’s her tragedy: she treats everyone with much more care and understanding than she’s willing to give to herself.

Darem. This one is fascinating to watch evolve. We first meet him as an arrogant child of aristocrats (we eventually learn he’s literally engaged to a princess), used to being the center of attention and not above hurting others to get his way; over the course of the season, he realizes he doesn’t need to keep putting up an image of flawlessness for parents who don’t even care enough to answer his calls. This frees him to start searching for who he is in reality, and it turns out he’s a loyal friend with a bottomless capacity for empathy—that is, unless you’re dating his crush, in which case he can still be a pain to deal with. His newfound willingness to make fun of himself still needs more practice.

SAM. What can I say about this bubbling avalanche of positivity, our beloved Queen Sam Samallina of Samonita? On one hand, she has an unquenchable thirst for life, an earnest curiosity for a universe she can’t get enough of. On the other hand, she has an entire species’ fate in her hands, being an envoy from sentient holograms with the assignment to study us squishy organic beings and report on whether we’re still a danger to artificial lifeforms. That’s a massive responsibility for someone only four months old, which comes back to bite when she suddenly has to deal with violent trauma without having the emotional resources that come from actually having lived. In a beautiful case of metaphor turned literal, she almost dies because she’s literally too pure for this world. After she quickly-but-not-really (there’s some serious time dilation involved) gains the maturity she needs to maintain a stable personality, she becomes an even more compelling character to watch: now she has enough perspective to critically examine both the person she used to be and the way her friends responded to that version of her.

Jay-Den. Once again there’s only one Klingon in Starfleet, and this time he’s a pacifist studying medicine. This is a refreshing change from the repetitive way this species has been portrayed in Star Trek. Of all the colorful and strange cultures we’ve seen across the decades of this franchise, Klingons have been among the ones that make the least sense. I always wondered how their civilization lasted all the way to the space era without exterminating itself. Now that we’re in the 3000s, the Klingons’ situation is much different: they’ve lost their empire, they’re reduced to a handful of clans, and their collective survival is in question. Jay-Den’s family drama (about being a son of hunters who eschews violence) gets resolved fairly early in the season, and from then on he’s relegated to something of a background role, which is a pity because he’s just the sweetest and his romance subplot is adorable.

Tarima. Ah, Tarima. What shall I do with you, you Manic Pixie Dark Phoenix. This was the character I struggled the most to understand. Her backstory is that, in a species of born telepaths, she’s an exceptionally (even alarmingly) gifted one, and the medical treatments she’s had to live with in order to keep her powers within safe limits have prevented her from fully knowing herself. Frustratingly, this also prevents the audience from getting a sense of what her deal is. She’s reserved, but impulsive, but apprehensive, but uninhibited, but distant, but bold. To be fair, her best scenes are those where her directness cuts through Caleb’s tendency to lie to himself.

Captain Ake. As a centuries-old being who has seen everything, it makes sense that she has little patience for Starfleet’s excessive love of formality and protocol. I love the way she commands respect as a captain without bothering to perform the part. Because the show is mainly focused on the younger characters, we learn about Ake’s personal drama late in the season (she once made a tactical decision that cost her son’s life), but the additional fact that it was her fault that Caleb grew up without his mother gives us enough to chew on in the meantime. The only regrettable moment with her is the finale, where it feels like the Federation comes off as too implausibly clean-handed for the times of hardship that followed the Burn.

With equal parts romance, comedy and technobabble, Starfleet Academy is remarkably well directed, acted and written (I want to single out Kirsten Beyer, who is proving to be by far the best writer in New Trek), although it shares with Discovery a questionable plotting choice: in the 3000s, with the Federation in pieces and the galaxy in dire need of new leaders, why try to remake the same old Federation that already failed, instead of coming up with something different and more suited to the new political reality? Aside from that oversight inherited from its predecessor series, this is a laudable step forward for the franchise, especially after recent disappointments like the nostalgia vomit that was Picard season 3, the inconsistent mess that was Strange New Worlds season 3, and the unforgivable calamity that was the Section 31 film. More of this, please.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

TV Microreview: Wonder Man

‘To thine own self be true’ is a superpower

Much like the 2005 movie Bewitched, the MCU series Wonder Man tells the story of the remake of an old production about a superpowered character, with the twist that the lead actor chosen for the role happens to actually have superpowers. Now, before you get too excited: just because Marvel decided to make a superhero story about the making of a superhero story doesn’t mean that it’s finally casting a critical gaze on itself. The show’s acknowledgment of the problematic cultural footprint of the superhero business doesn’t go beyond the briefest lip service. Don’t expect the level of awareness you find in The Boys, for example. Far be it from Marvel to bite its own hand. But what you do get in Wonder Man is a sweet character treatment of a talented, hopeful artist learning to get out of his own way, joined by a more mature artist who has used his talents in disgraceful ways and gets a chance to put them in the service of a nobler purpose.

First we meet Simon, a son of Haitian immigrants who first learned as a child the usefulness of putting on a performance when life got too cruel. After watching the old Wonder Man movie, he became enamoured with the art of fiction. Now he’s a struggling D-list actor who overthinks his roles and stresses out his agent because he can get annoying to film with. When he hears that there’s a Wonder Man remake being produced, he drops everything in pursuit of the lead role. But his complicated acting style is the least of his troubles: he also has superpowers, and they’re very hard to control, which would ban him from the acting profession if it became known. His arc is about deciding which side of him it’s wise to let people see.

Then we have Trevor, whom we met in Iron Man 3 and then in Shang-Chi. He’s trying to rebuild an acting career that he can be proud of, but his past misdeeds keep catching up with him. Under threat of sending him back to prison, the Department of Damage Control recruits him to gather information on Simon, who is considered extremely dangerous, but as the two become friends, Trevor ends up reevaluating his priorities and risking his own future to save Simon’s. His arc is about recognizing the one moral thing he can finally do, and daring to do it.

Together, Simon and Trevor are a lovely duo, the aspiring artist pushing the older one to rediscover his goodness, the veteran artist nudging the younger one to be more authentically himself in his craft. These two form the beating heart of the story, and the scenes where they nerd out about their love of acting are a pure delight. Fittingly, the theme of acting resonates with their respective problems: on Simon’s part, with the constant pretense that it takes to keep his superpowers hidden; and on Trevor’s part, with his secret mission to infiltrate Simon’s life. Their mutual game of masks is resolved when each realizes that there’s a time for vulnerable self-disclosure, and there’s a time to put on an elaborate act for the right reason.

It’s refreshing that, for once, a Marvel superhero doesn’t have to save the world from an all-devouring cataclysm. There’s also value in finding that there’s something worth saving in yourself.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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.

TV Review: The Copenhagen Test

A deadly game of stories inside stories, masks behind masks

You probably don’t need to be told about the less than cordial relationship that US society has with its immigrant members. Real life provides daily reminders. Even though the country itself is a plurinational entity built of and by immigrants, the prevailing attitude among the white people in power is that the rest of ethnicities are on permanent probation. In the new spy TV series The Copenhagen Test, that seemingly incurable paranoia in the American psyche is the shadow hanging over our protagonist Alexander, a son of Chinese immigrants who has done more than should be asked of anyone to demonstrate his patriotic loyalty to the US, but who somehow keeps having to earn the country’s trust again and again. This is the story of a good man begging for some basic respect from a system that doesn’t deserve him.

At some point in the past, Alexander was in the US Army. Because immigrants are never done proving their allegiance, during an overseas rescue mission he was subjected to a secret test: there was only one available seat left in a helicopter, and he had to choose between saving a foreign child or an American adult. He had received explicit orders to prefer the American, but he took the correct option (it’s not the option the test prefers, but it’s indisputably the correct one): he saved the child. This moment has cascading consequences for his career. Because he was falsely led to believe he left someone to die, he lives with PTSD and repeated panic attacks, which he hides from his superiors. Because he supposedly didn’t show enough loyalty to the US, he’s been removed from field missions and assigned to an office job. And because his Chinese parents anxiously raised him to be more American than baseball and hot dogs, he feels like an impostor.

So we have a protagonist with more than enough inner complexity to lead the show. And that’s only the backstory; we still haven’t gotten to the part where an enemy faction puts nanobots in his head to turn him into a live streaming camera. That doesn’t help his chances now that he’s applying for a spy job.

Against all odds, he gets the job, at a super-extra-ultra-secret agency that watches the other US agencies (we’re told it was created during the Bush Sr. presidency, which means the immediate context for the project must have been the fallout of the Iran-Contra scandal). Alexander’s bosses are aware of the nanobots in his head, because he’s a walking radio emitter, and instead of kicking him out, which would alert the enemy, they decide to use him as a triple agent: he’s working for the US, but everything he sees and hears is still being broadcast 24/7 at the enemy, but he’s going to broadcast an edited version of his life in order to lure and catch the enemy. He’s not 100% sure his bosses aren’t planning to eliminate him in the end, and his bosses aren’t 100% sure he wasn’t complicit in hacking his own head, but they’re going to need to act like they trust each other if they want to reach any solution.

What follows is a fascinating pantomime, meticulously designed between Alexander and his bosses to give misleading information to the enemy without alerting either the enemy or the rest of the spies at the agency. And the architect of this believable fiction is a brilliant character: Samantha, an English lit graduate who was previously hired by the agency to concoct cover stories and predict threat scenarios. If you’re wondering why spies would need the services of a dramaturge, consider this: when you’re a spy, your entire life is a performance, and you need to be alert to subtextual clues in everyone else’s performance. You need to prepare against the most outlandish villain plans and push the right buttons to influence others’ behavior. Spycraft is about controlling information delivery and ascertaining human motivations, and that’s exactly where a creative writer excels.

So The Copenhagen Test isn’t the type of spy story that boasts shiny gadgets, cocktail suits, or acrobatic stunts. Its plot is more contained, less reliant on spectacle and more demanding of the viewer’s attention. Under Samantha’s direction, Alexander becomes a decoy of himself, letting his eyes and ears perceive only what his bosses curate, while being careful not to let the enemy notice that he knows he’s been hacked, or that his bosses know. As the story progresses, he starts suspecting that even his bosses are hiding stuff from him, so he adds another layer of pretense: he has to do all of the above plus conduct his own investigation without letting his bosses notice that he’s doing it.

With me so far? Great, because that’s only half of the complications.

The other half is another brilliant character: Michelle, an infiltration specialist who was originally hired by the agency to play the role of love interest for Alexander. But she has her own agenda in this whole mess, and she has ways of communicating with Alexander outside of either faction’s notice, so the visible faces of their relationship multiply thusly: the corny romance story they enact for the enemy’s eyes, the simultaneous digging into his loyalty that she does for the agency, the private messages they exchange when they’re in a place that blocks his head’s signal, and the extra level of subterfuge that she deploys in those moments, when she believes that he believes that she’s really on his side.

The result of this kabuki-grade dance of innuendo and misdirection is that Alexander, Samantha and Michelle play at all times the parallel roles of scriptwriter and actor and spectator. As I often say on this blog, the best stories are those about stories. And The Copenhagen Test uses this example of a man’s loyalty being under constant test to suggest a uncomfortable idea: if there’s no difference between being a patriot and acting like one, then patriotism is simply a performance, and our identities as citizens and as political subjects are stories we continually tell each other. The whole edifice of society and its reciprocal responsibilities rests on a sustained belief reenacted daily.

The show gives us a dark parallel of this idea in the figure of the villain, whom we meet rather early in the season. He was a spy from the communist bloc in the ’80s, who betrayed his country for the promise of immigration to the US, but was discarded once he was no longer useful. Once again we see the theme of a society that weaponizes its membership: whereas the American government has failed Alexander by refusing to believe he’s American enough, it also failed the villain by luring him into believing he could be. This self-sabotaging pattern on the part of the US is also related to the loyalty test in Alexander’s backstory: the rules of the test are based on the unquestioned assumption that American citizenship endows a human life with greater inherent worth.

That, in a nutshell, is the conceptual trap that makes American exceptionalism possible: the belief that people’s worth can be given and removed, instead of just acknowledged. It’s the lie that Alexander still accepts, the motivation that drives all of his mistakes: the promise of a society where people don’t aspire to be respected, but to be usable. Alexander’s parents are perpetually stressed about not coming off as true Americans, so they overcorrect to the point of self-negation. His bosses don’t care if he behaves morally or if he hates himself for the choice they forced on him years ago; they only care about how much use can be made of him. And as long as he agrees that that’s the proper way for the land of the free to frame his personhood, he won’t be free.

Even in a healthy society, there’s a degree to which each of us must play a public role to convince the rest that we’re good and reliable. But in the uniquely spectacle-poisoned US, the show must go on. People like Alexander (or like Samantha and Michelle, who also are nonwhite) aren’t allowed to truly experience their lives, only to perform them—look American, sound American, seem American. Because the test doesn’t end; because in a society built on suspicion, the tools of spycraft become necessities of survival; because if you can be certain of one thing in these uncertain times, it’s that there’s always someone watching.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Review: Stranger Things Season 5 Volume II & Finale

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

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

What works

Discovering what the Upside Down really is

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

Bringing Mr. Clarke into the crew

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

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

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

The epic Mindflayer kaiju battle

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

Being the first TV show to license Prince's music

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

Why I choose to believe El is alive

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

What didn't work for me

There are too many characters

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

The Marvelification of Stranger Things

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

Too much plot, too little room to breathe

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

Overall

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

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

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

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

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

There’s no “I” in Plur1bus

The nicest zombie horde you’ve ever met would do anything to make you happy—emphasis on anything

There’s a wealth of metaphors wrapped up at the heart of Plur1bus. One could summarize the show as: “What if the Borg succeeded at conquering Earth, but were really sweet and polite about it?” Or: “What if the world’s population became a single, massive Sense8 cluster except for you”? Or: “What if you were the last sensible person left in a world that has lost its mind?” I’ve encountered other descriptions that see connections between the story of Plur1bus and the fake version of human interaction that LLMs provide, or a not very disguised allegory of the culture war over coronavirus quarantine measures. Plur1bus can be about all that. It can be about everything. It contains multitudes.

But let’s try a less wide lens for a moment. Picture this: you’re Carol, a famous author of romantasy novels with a chronic inability to appreciate the blessings that life has given you. Your fantastic success with sales has allowed you to afford a beautiful house with an unbeatable view. You and the love of your life routinely go on exotic vacations. You readers can’t wait to give you more of their money for your next book. And yet, you hate all of that. You wish you were writing another genre. You wish you didn’t feel pressure to hide the person you love, because you fear that being openly queer will hurt your sales (which is a strike against the publishing business and how little it knows readers). In fact, you wish your readers would leave you alone. By any measure of our modern world, you’ve achieved the ideal life the rest of us can only dream of, but it doesn’t suffice to make you happy.

So one day the gods of fate decide to test you, and all of a sudden, your beloved dies. And the world immediately looks different to you. At first you run around, begging for someone to lend a hand, but no one is willing to listen. They seem absorbed inside their minds. You can’t make them understand. This pain is only yours. And it gets worse: when the rest of the world finally pays attention to your tragedy, their comforting words sound hollow, trite. They’re the same overused words everyone says at such times. They don’t sound sincere. So you lash out, and protest, and scream, but they waste no time in reminding you that you don’t have the right to get angry. All those negative feelings you’re carrying are an inconvenience to them. So better keep them to yourself, if you would be so kind. This pain is only yours. Can’t you see how they’re so generous and accommodating? They want nothing more than your happiness. Just remember not to let them hear how you truly feel. Don’t be ungrateful. Don’t ruin the mood.

Now you look around, and to you it appears like everyone has been possessed by a bug that dampens their humanity. It’s like nothing is real anymore. Without the love of your life, the world may as well have ended, and you’re the only one who’s noticed. Of course, people go on, doing their daily stuff, but for you it has lost its meaning. The world feels like an endless desert without her. How could anyone claim to empathize with you? They haven’t suffered through it the way you have. They haven’t watched their world crumble down around them. Their inner selves are fundamentally separate from yours. They can’t read your mind. They can’t pry into your head to know what it’s like. You’ve been left alone. This pain is only yours.

This is what grief feels like. The genius trick of Plur1bus is that it takes the “as if” feeling and makes it literal. When you lose the only source of joy in you life, it feels like the world has ended; it feels like everyone else’s happiness is feigned and pointless. So Plur1bus arranges a scenario where that’s precisely what happens: just as Carol’s wife dies, the world literally ends and humankind is literally transformed into an empty, perpetually cheerful husk of itself. Civilization has gone up in flames, and Carol is left to deal with her grief without any useful support. The people around her may as well have merged into an amorphous blob of a hive mind, for all the good their help does.

The richness of the gimmick in the plot of Plur1bus can be seen in how variously it’s been interpreted. I’ve seen online commenters describe it both as communist propaganda and as anti-communist propaganda, and it’s a credit to the show’s thematic complexity that both positions can be argued for. With humankind now connected in a single consciousness, except for a scattered dozen of the lucky immune, the social problems that have plagued centuries of our history have magically disappeared: no more crime, no more exclusion, no more discrimination, no more violence, no more hatred. But still, something feels off. Gone is the spark that makes life interesting. If Carol wasn’t previously willing to accept the normal joys of life, she’s absolutely livid at a world where everyone is satisfied all the time.

Now that we’ve explored the personal side of the story, we can go back to the larger picture. In the Foundation series of novels by Isaac Asimov, Gaia is a unified planetary consciousness designed by a robot who independently deduced the Zeroth Law of protecting humankind as a whole. The novels portray Gaia as a positive development for humans, because a mechanism for full mutual understanding and instant cooperation is preferable to the preceding centuries of violent clash. However, one also needs to consider the motivations behind Gaia: the robot who planned its formation followed the same principles underlying psychohistory, that is, ensuring that the mass behavior of humans would be uniform, predictable, and amenable to deliberate intervention. In other words, to make us easier to protect, it was necessary to make us easier to control.

That’s why Carol rebels against the collective mind. A world filled with good intentions is morally meaningless if no one has the option to do wrong. Heaven is torture if no one is free to sin. I’m not saying evil is necessary; I’m saying that the alternative of evil is necessary for virtuous choices to count. It’s a grim vote of no confidence in human potential to argue that the only way to solve evil is to amputate our ability to rule ourselves.

The type of mandatory bliss that Plur1bus presents is so self-evidently horrible that literature has warned against it for literal thousands of years. The Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey are so perpetually satisfied that they effectively stop having meaningful lives. We find the same stance expressed in The Futurological Congress, The Last Temptation of Christ, The Lion of Comarre, The Neverending Story, Vurt, and The Wheel of Time. Even if your political sympathies lean toward the collective sharing of aid, you have to beware any scenario where satisfaction is automatic and disagreement is unheard of.

Despite the thousands of plot ramifications that can be traced from such a fertile premise, Plur1bus keeps its attention close to its characters. Carol’s response to the collective mind goes through the standard stages of grief until she comes dangerously close to acceptance. Meanwhile, her fellow survivor Manousos is firmly stuck in anger. While Carol still hopes to reason with the hive, Manousos views them as the enemy, preferring to risk death by infection to accepting any form of help from them. They still don’t have the full picture of how the hive stays connected, but they agree that unmaking the hive equals saving humankind. If the hive persists, humans are as good as finished. That’s the size of the challenge, and the best moments in the series are those that follow our characters’ obsessive investigation and experimentation with how the collective mind works and how to navigate around its irritating pleasantness.

The complication comes when a still lonely and vulnerable Carol lets herself be seduced by a member of the hive, and for a while lives the fantasy of a normal relationship. She soon crashes against the painful truth that the gathered consciousnesses of humanity won’t love her more than they love an ant (and to be fair, they do love ants very much). In the same way that individuality is dissolved in the hive mind, they don’t love Carol for any attribute that is specific to her; they love her because she has a pulse and is breathing. And that breaks the spell for Carol: one can love humanity in a general sense, but what we usually mean when we allude to the importance of love has to do with what’s individual about it. Love is drawn toward the unique, the irreplaceable. That’s the way we need to be loved. That’s the form of happiness the collective mind can’t provide.

Plur1bus excels at every level of audiovisual storytelling: beautiful shot composition, compelling performances, sharp dialogues, careful pacing, deliberate editing. It’s a difficult trick to produce an existential dramedy where the only characters for most of the runtime are one random nobody and Everyone Else. And it’s even harder when the one individual we’re asked to follow is a grumpy misanthrope who, after losing everything, has no patience left for demands to make herself acceptable to society, much less when the society in question is as dishonest and manipulative as the one in this series has shown itself to be. The common rules of courtesy advise against acting like you’re the only one with the right opinion, but they don’t give guidelines for what to do when that exact scenario comes to pass, when the entire rest of the world is wrong.

I was briefly worried during the last episode of the season, when it looked like Carol was going to abandon the fight against the hive, so I was pleasantly surprised by the way the plot resolves her doubts. What it takes for her to finally renounce her fantasy is being bluntly faced with a question that is central to adulthood, a question that too many prefer to ignore: what matters to you more than other people’s respect?

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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