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.

Film Review: War of the Worlds (2025)

And the Oscar for Best Product Placement goes to...

In the original version of The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, published in serialized form in 1897, the first paragraph contains a disturbing prophecy:

… as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

In the new Amazon Video adaptation, released this week and narrated entirely via computer screens, as has become the signature look of movies made under producer Timur Bekmambetov, that scrutinizing gaze is removed from the alien invaders and put in our hands. In the era of the surveillance state, it's now humans who watch humans up to the tiniest detail. But instead of taking advantage of that clever reversal of the positions on the board to say something interesting, this War of the Worlds is unironically awed by the cool gadgets of mass surveillance. The script doesn't even reach the level of lip service to privacy rights: against this alien invasion, the thing that saves the world is the government's all-seeing, all-knowing machinery.

Sure, there's a silly twist where we learn that the hostile aliens "eat data" (whatever that means), and that what attracted them to Earth in the first place was precisely the government's compulsive accumulation of data about everyone. However, once the government's guilt is exposed to the public, the movie doesn't have enough self-awareness to have our heroes renounce their panopticon. No, their plan to defeat the aliens requires that they keep their toys and snatch every last byte that can be squeezed out of a street camera or a cell phone tower or a GPS satellite. Whatever point the movie was pretending to hope to make about the dangers of letting the state spy on its citizens is thrown out the window when the solution to having all the world's data stolen is to keep using the same tools of surveillance.

In a painfully obvious metaphor, the hypervigilant paternalist state is represented by our protagonist, a widowed father with a job in national security and zero awareness of boundaries when it comes to violating his children's digital privacy. From his secret bunker office, he not only monitors potential terrorists, but also every move his children make. They repeatedly call him out for it, and still he snoops, with a casual air of entitlement, on their personal chats, their credit card transactions, and their place of work. No telephone, no video game account, no smart refrigerator is safe from the watchful eye of this shockingly abusive style of parenting. And the plot rewards him for it: he saves the world from the aliens by wielding the myriad sources he has illegitimate access to. At the end he claims that he's done with all the electronic espionage, but that gesture comes after the aliens are gone, when it no longer matters to the resolution of the story.

Even more insultingly, the various tech companies blatantly showcased in the script are presented in an uncritically positive light. This is a movie where the nation's top security chiefs use Zoom on Windows to exchange the most delicate tactical information; where in the middle of a cyberattack on every major data center, WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams somehow still work; where letting a Tesla car's autopilot take an injured person to the hospital isn't a ridiculously irresponsible idea; where the most secure building in Washington lets its computers use Gmail; where the climax of the heroic plan is the successful trip of an Amazon delivery drone.

Let me repeat that. This is a movie where Amazon saves the world.

The same Amazon that grinds its workers to the limit of their bodily endurance and aggressively discourages them from unionizing, that fills the world with mountains of plastic packaging, that damages local economies by pricing small competitors out of existence, that charges sellers predatory fees while paying a pittance in taxes, that cozies up to the fascist regime currently occupying Washington, that put a smart speaker in every home to listen to your conversations 24/7, that enslaves children, that buys from suppliers that enslave victims of genocide, that enables its obscenely rich owner to demolish one of the most venerable guardians of democracy. That Amazon.

This movie, which of course is released on Amazon Video, isn't content with defiling one of the biggest classics of science fiction, but has the nerve to point the finger at the US government for its data collection practices while celebrating private corporations that are guilty of the same. At Nerds of a Feather, we reserve the 1/10 rating for works that are literally "crimes against humanity," and this shameless movie-length ad for Amazon (and Tesla, and Meta, and their ilk) definitely qualifies.

Nerd Coefficient: 1/10.

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

TV Review: Nautilus

You can humanize Nemo, but you can't Disneyfy colonialism

A character like Captain Nemo is challenging to write, all the more so in a prequel. Originally conceived by author Jules Verne as a Polish noble on a vendetta against the Russian Empire (which would have made the novel damaging to French foreign relations), upon publication he became an Indian noble on a vendetta against the British Empire. By the time we meet him in 20,000 Leagues Under the Seas, he's a jaded misanthrope, self-banished from civilization, who in his burning hatred for tyrants has ended up creating his own little tyranny. The wonderful ship he commands is not a symbol of human progress, but a weapon of mass destruction (and eventual self-destruction). How do you turn such a character into a hero, when many in the audience already know who he's going to become in the novel?

One thing you can do is break free from the novel. The new TV series Nautilus, produced by Disney and then absurdly abandoned by Disney before being rescued by Amazon, rewrites Nemo as a revolutionary fighter who leads a rebellion of slaves and steals the Nautilus just before the East India Company can use it to take over world trade. This version of Nemo keeps the rough outline of the backstory Verne gave him: the British killed his family and stole his lands, so now he's an enemy of the British. Some (not enough) layers of complexity are added to that characterization. Verne's Nemo was fueled by raw spite; this Nemo begins headed in that direction, but is steered toward a gentler, more honest reckoning with his grief through his interaction with his crew. He may have a yearning for the abyss, but he comes to realize that he must not drag others down with him. Still, the character isn't written with the depth a lead role needs. Even after doing the hard work of earning the goodwill of his Designated Love Interest, in the last episode he makes a crucial choice against her wishes that reveals he hasn't paid attention to what she's been going through. So the most charitable description of his arc is from "total jerk" to "not a total jerk, but still very close."

A slightly better treatment is given to Nemo's crewmates. They don't even get names in the novel. In an adaptation that focuses so much on the theme of toppling hierarchies, that needed to be fixed. Alas, the cast we get is a mixed bag. Their use as comic relief is excessive, although it gradually lessens toward the middle of the season. One character in particular spends several episodes being nothing but comic relief, and not in an endearing way but in an annoying way, which later in the series detracts from the expected impact when his fortunes change for the worse.

This mishandling of tone is a major flaw of the series. It wants to be a sincere narrative of rebellion against cruelty, but it also wants to sand away its rough edges with the trademark Disney aesthetic. The result is an incongruity: a cutesy romp through colonies ravaged by famine and massacre; a kid-friendly, bloodless adventure where our heroes routinely face and barely escape the world's most brutally rapacious institution and end each episode with a goodhearted laugh. Disney wants to have it both ways, and fails at both. The way our heroes finally prevail against the East India Company, cleverly beating capitalists at their own game, relies on so many artistic licenses about the workings of a stock market that the fact it succeeds feels almost cartoonish.

The bright spots must be celebrated, though. Thierry Frémont's character is a great addition to Vernean lore as the engineer who designed the Nautilus. He's the voice of reason that tempers Nemo's effervescent passion, and making this character French is a nice homage to Verne as the titular submarine's actual creator. Céline Menville, one of the precious few women in the show, shines as a multiclass fugitive/bodyguard/chaperone/assassin with a mysterious past. Cameron Cuffe expertly channels the perennial detestability of aristocracy. Damien Garvey eats up each of his scenes with a gloating smirk of pure evil. Richard E. Grant has a fun cameo as a puppet ruler with skeletons in the closet. And Luke Arnold carries half of the show's emotional load in an incredibly complex role as Nemo's childhood friend who grew up to repay betrayal with betrayal.

Did you notice the key problem with the preceding paragraph? Most of the show's best-written roles are given to the white actors. Although Nautilus (the ship), and therefore Nautilus (the show), has a laudably diverse cast, reflecting the extent of the British Empire's depredation of the whole world, the script wastes some very talented actors by not giving their characters enough material to work with. This is one of the recurring consequences of the impractically short seasons of today's TV. The most that the script does to distinguish the members of Nemo's crew is to give each of them a couple lines of sad backstory; beyond that, their personalities may as well be interchangeable (the only exceptions, proving the rule, are the aforementioned characters reserved for the position of comic relief). In one episode, Nemo is berated for not knowing his crew on a personal level, but neither does the audience.

Nautilus is a great concept stretched thin by the pull of incompatible demands. In trying to bundle the grim realities of anti-colonial struggle in the same package with the childlike awe of exploring wonderful landscapes, it ends up much like the Avatar movies, doing a disservice to its own intended message.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

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

Double Feature: Nevermind, Rewind

When death is cheap, lives become fungible

The 2023 films Restore Point (titled Bod Obnovy in the original Czech) and Aporia (a fancy word for "paradox") both tell the story of a widow grappling with the convoluted ethics of a form of technology that can reverse death. Interestingly, in Restore Point it is maternal feelings that set the whole plot in motion, while in Aporia maternal feelings provide the motivation for the ending. It seems one can't talk about cheating death without involving the creation of life.

In the future world of Restore Point, increased crime in Europe has prompted the mass adoption of periodic brain scanning as insurance against violent death. The service is provided by the government, although the institute that performs the resurrections has begun negotiations to be privatized. The murder of a high-ranked resurrection scientist who incongruously didn't have a brain copy stored in file triggers a protracted manhunt that ends in the not too surprising revelation that the institute itself has been igniting mass panic about crime in order to attract more subscribers and improve the chances of a juicy privatization deal. What's a few false flag terrorist attacks against millions of safely stored customers? Well, the detective whose husband was killed in one of those attacks may have something to say on the matter.

Aporia has a more modest reach, but a deeper emotional punch. Our protagonist has spent the last eight months trying and failing to adjust to widowhood, and she's reaching her wits' end, what with having to raise alone a kid who is crumbling under the weight of grief while the criminal trial against the drunk driver who killed her husband is getting nowhere. As it happens, her husband was a quantum physicist, and his former colleague has finished building their project: a machine that can shoot a particle into the past to create a mini-explosion. Yay, we can give the drunk driver a stroke before he kills anyone. Boo, the drunk driver had a wife and a kid of his own. Yay, we can continue violently altering the past to improve that family's life. Boo, the butterfly effect has decreed that our protagonist now has an entirely different child. Should she keep detonating the past to try and set things right this time?

In both movies, the lead casting is impeccable. As the detective in Restore Point, Andrea Mohylová walks the tightrope of a righteous champion working to protect a system that broke her life. Her performance conveys an unstable fragility built of learned toughness barely containing a deluge of unprocessed fury. (It doesn't hurt that the makeup department gave her a look uncannily reminiscent of Agathe Bonitzer, who did a phenomenal job in the French technothriller Osmosis.) Where Mohylová's acting style in Restore Point is controlled, understated and reliant on implied meanings, Judy Greer gives us in Aporia an unbridled ride through all the feelings. Her performance glides like a kite in the breeze, and generously invites us to glide with her, from brokenheartedness to despair to disappointment to shock to disbelief to ecstasy to bliss to remorse to compassion to hesitation to resolve to panic to horror to shame to scruples to resignation to bittersweetness. Her inner arc is an open book the spine of which holds the movie's entire edifice.

To the extent that a work of art expresses a stance about life, it's useful to ponder for a minute how we go about dealing with life. There's a theory in social psychology that proposes that the bulk of human culture revolves around trying to placate the fear of death. Our dreams, our traditions, our laws, our vocabulary, our desires, our civilizations—it's all an anxious effort to not have to think about death, to keep the inevitable out of sight. According to this theory, the always present, always ignored certainty of our coming death is why we make art and make love and make war. It's why we went to the moon and defeated smallpox. It's what makes the world go round.

And yet, over and over again, stories that imagine victory over death tend to add the complication where judgments begin to be made on the question of whose lives are disposable. Instead of turning you into the savior of the world, a technology capable of reversing death would force you to triage. Once you have control over death, every death you passively allow is one you're responsible for. You can either pretend to not see this power or embrace it with open eyes, and both alternatives are morally outrageous. In Restore Point, it's a utilitarian calculation on a mass scale: a few random victims for millions of terrified customers. In Aporia, the calculation is personal: this one guy's life is worth this other guy's. Traditionalists will protest that by claiming mastery over death we would lose our humanity, but more probably it's claiming mastery over the worth of life that does the deed. It's the dilemma faced by every self-proclaimed savior of the world: the unthinkable, unavoidable choice of whom not to save.

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Nerd Coefficient:

Restore Point: 7/10. There are some plot holes that hamper suspension of disbelief.

Aporia: 9/10. Keep your box of tissues at hand.

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

TV Review: Batman: Caped Crusader

A clever reinvention of the costumed crimefighter for the Defund the Police era

If you loved Bruce Timm's legendary Batman: The Animated Series (and since you're human and alive, you definitely did), his new show Batman: Caped Crusader scratches the persistent itch you've carried all these years. The series adopts a retro look similar to the earlier one, although sometimes it looks too clean in digital animation compared to the grainy, almost tactile surfaces that could be achieved by drawing by hand. What does remain unchanged from the original show is the grounded, human-sized evil that Batman fights every night (while occasionally venturing into the occult). Far from the intergalactic conquerors and alien/mutant/robot/demigods that are the staple of Justice League plots, Caped Crusader explores instead the thorny struggle to redeem the soul of Gotham City while the powers that rule it and are supposed to protect it become hard to distinguish from its colorful gallery of rogues.

The terms of Batman's relationship with the Gotham City Police Department are remarkably variable across incarnations. From a chummy partnership in the Adam West era to bloody hostility in the Ben Affleck one, this element of Batman's mythology has served, whether intentionally or not, as indirect commentary on the assumed effectiveness and desirability of a police force. In the 2016 animated film Return of the Caped Crusaders, the dynamic of the 1966 live action TV show is deconstructed to hilarious effect as it lampshades the fact that Adam West's Bruce Wayne exists in a Gotham City where the police is mind-bogglingly inept. At the other end of the scale of cynicism, Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne becomes a vigilante in part because the criminal justice system is no longer trustworthy. In this kind of story, e.g. the Nolanverse or the Gotham show, Jim Gordon is typically singled out as the only honorable cop in a corrupt institution. This "good apple in a spoiled barrel" approach has the advantage of being a tiny bit more believable than the standard bad apples in a good barrel. But sometimes the intended message gets muddled: Jim Gordon is fundamentally decent, but the police department is fundamentally rotten, but the people of Gotham City are fundamentally decent, but the streets of Gotham City tend to make you rotten. In a way, the Dark Knight trilogy is about whether Gothamites are even worthy of being saved. The question sounds scandalous, but the thing with the Batman franchise is that its moral stance hasn't been able to escape the shadow of The Killing Joke and its thesis that every decent person hides a barely contained sinister side.

Which leads us to the character of Harvey Dent and the interesting twist on his villain origin story in Batman: Caped Crusader. In several versions of Dent's arc, it's been a common trope that the trauma of his disfigurement was what gave rise to his split personality. Caped Crusader proposes something less sensationalist: he's always had a sinister side. His all too flexible morals have led him to become a two-faced hypocrite for whom disfigurement is merely incidental; it only makes evident a duplicity that was already there. To reinforce this point, Caped Crusader has him suffer his accident on the right side of his face, whereas the standard versions of Dent have traditionally been scarred on the left side. By subtle use of camera angles, the show implies that the left, intact side is the evil one, and the right, scarred one is his true self.

Cape Crusader's choice to make Dent's pretty face be the false one provides a useful mirror (heh) of Bruce Wayne's situation. A running subplot has him attending court-mandated therapy sessions with Dr. Harleen Quinzel, who is quick to notice the flimsy façade that hides Wayne's unprocessed pain. Their scenes together are fascinating to watch: two characters pretending to seek total openness while guarding the most important truth about themselves.

With so much focus on Batman's psyche and the moral stakes involved in saving Gotham, it's a welcome surprise that the show doesn't avoid the issue of how Bruce Wayne's immense economic privilege is a sign of what's wrong with the city. In one episode, the ritual that exorcizes an undead landlord requires performing a sacrifice of aristocratic blood and burning the original deed to his property; in another, corrupt policemen let a pyromaniac loose in a poor neighborhood as expendable bait to capture Batman. In a later episode, a planned snoburb being built by Wayne Enterprises becomes the literal battleground for control of the city.

You'd think it would be self-defeating for a Batman story to address the frequent criticism that Batman spends his time kicking working-class henchmen instead of challenging robber barons, but somehow Caped Crusader succeeds at it. Underneath that discussion is the unstated question: What would you have Batman do? Terrorize the rich into giving away their fortune? Because that's what this version of Dr. Quinzel does in her spare time, dressed up as the jester who mocks kings, and her brutal methods don't bring Gotham any closer to justice. Sorry, Joker movie, but breaking things is a terrible way of fixing things.

Still, Caped Crusader is honest about the complicity of law enforcement. The mayor of Gotham wants to Serve and Protect only himself, and even in this retro setting without online media, public perception overrules reality. On top of keeping tabs on mob bosses, child kidnappers and hired assassins, Batman also has to fight police brutality, extrajudicial punishment and institutional decay. But he especially has to fight the darkness within himself, the insatiable rage that keeps his inner child from maturing. It's the same darkness that he perceives in Harvey Dent after his accident, and his failure to save Dent from succumbing to his demons is the turning point in the show's emotional journey. There's no inherent heroic destiny in Bruce Wayne; with his horrific origin story, he could easily have become another one of Gotham City's murderous madmen. What makes him heroic is that he wakes up every morning night and chooses not to.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Review: Fallout

Quite the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. first attempt

The raging dichotomy on the Internet about video games and their film/television series adaptations can be a horrible place to find yourself at two a.m. on a Friday night, but someone’s gotta do it. The thing is, you won’t have too many dissenters when it comes to the recently released Fallout show on Amazon Prime. Sure, you have some folks grumpy about potential retconning to their favorite entry, Fallout: New Vegas (Obsidian), but overall, fans seem pleased. The first two titles in the game series were developed by Black Isle Studios and Interplay Entertainment, and Bethesda Studios continued with Fallout 3 and 4 (with Obsidian on New Vegas). I never played the first two Fallout games, but I can attest to the rest of them having hefty hundred-plus-hour runtimes (if you like to explore like me). This breadth of content left showmakers with tons of potential inspiration. And boy did they use it. For better or worse.

Let’s get it out of the way: Fallout is a great adaptation of the series. Fans should be excited and generally pleased by the attention to detail paid by Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, even if not every detail is precise to the world seen in the games. From the choice of soundtrack to costumes and dialogue, everything screams, “I’ve played these games and want to respect the source material.”

There were so many moments throughout the show that made me think, “This is Fallout.” One of my favorites sees a character decapitate another with a ripper (chainsaw sword) to the tune of the Ink Spot’s “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.” If that isn’t quintessential Fallout, I don't know what is. There were quite a few laugh-out-loud moments that took me by surprise, some at the moment, some after a reflection. Some moments in the show felt like they were left up to the RNG (random number generator) Gods, which was one of the truest reflections of the series. Let me explain. In the games, you’ll frequently come across obstacles in which you can choose an option. Sometimes it’s dialogue, sometimes an action. There’s a percentage of a chance that some of these things will work and quite a bit of a chance that they won’t. While I won’t spoil anything, there were a few moments where I thought something was going to backfire but worked, and something that I thought should work backfired. It pulled me further into the narrative and character predicaments.

The aesthetic of the show is true to its roots, especially the Vaults and its inhabitants. From the Vault-Tec bobbleheads to the political propaganda, from the Nuka-Cola to the Red Rocket gas station, and from the Pip-Boys to the power armor, everything looks fantastic and authentic. Seeing all these things made me want to boot one of the old games back up and return to the wasteland. This applies to the sound effects too. From Codsworth’s line delivery and voiceovers to the sound a stimpak makes, you won’t find yourself wanting for authenticity. Fallout looks and feels just like the games.

Lucy MacLeane, played by Ella Purnell, is your typical do-gooder vault dweller on a mission to save a loved one. She is thrust forth from the safety of Vault 33 and into the dangerous wasteland that was once California. She wears her blue jumper with pride and encounters many obstacles with the naiveté of an ignorant rich person stepping into a slum. The rules are different and she soon learns that, to survive and complete her mission, she has to adapt. Her path repeatedly crosses with two other protagonists throughout her journey, and this is where I had some issues. While the other characters make everything more fun and engaging, their meeting on happenstance is too convenient. One character is in trouble and the other just happens to show up and find them at this particular place in a massive wasteland with no communication beforehand. This happens quite a few times.

There were some slogs in the pacing for me as well. While it seemed true to the games to have nothing going on for a little while, it doesn’t work as well for the show. However, there was a hilarious moment where being bogged down by side quests was referenced. One entire episode (of eight) goes by without showing one of the four major protagonists, which I thought was a poor choice.

One of the four protagonists, Lucy’s brother Norm (Moises Arias), is inside a vault and is trying to discover its secrets. One of the best parts of any Fallout game was discovering what lay inside a vault and what experiment said vault was testing. Watching Norm access terminals and using his intermediate hacking skills was satisfying. It’s unfortunate then that this parallel narrative is left hanging in the balance, despite being one of the most authentic and enjoyable parts of the show. I wanted a more solid conclusion, but they seem to have left it for the next season.

I’ve used the words “authenticity” and “authentic” a few times because I want to reiterate the clear love for the game that I saw throughout much of the show. People in power armor yelling and running for their lives is what I spend half my time in Fallout doing, and they caught that. That armor doesn't make you invincible (but it does help). As a gamer, I loved it.

Then I considered it as a TV viewer. Still good, but there are some awkward dialogue choices that don’t feel natural. The romance doesn't feel great, and some of the things that the characters come across seem even more farfetched than the world would seemingly allow. But then someone gets impaled from a shot to the chest, and the camera pans down to see a baby doll’s leg sticking out. That’s what I’m talking about. That's Fallout.

The dirty word that was once “adaptation” seems to be slipping away into the darkness. With The Super Mario Bros. Movie, The Last of Us, and Castlevania among others, Fallout helps solidify the argument for using video games as a source material. While this initial season leaves a bit to be desired after the climax, it did have me yearning for more. I found that, despite some dragging segments, and that no one was called “smoothskin,” I was happy to watch multiple episodes in a row. When a derivative piece of work rekindles fond memories of your original experience with its source, you’ve done a good job. Now I just have to pretend that the Fallout games don’t exist so I can focus on my backlog.

The Math

Objective Assessment: 7.5/10

Bonus: +1 for authenticity, +1 for gruesome over-the-top violence that the series is known for; +0.5 for the soundtrack.

Penalties: −1 for some pacing issues, −1 for convenient hero happenstance.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

Welcome to the Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy

We really hope your insurance covers transdimensional discorporation

It's the far, far future, and doctors are still beset by the familiar woes: difficult patients, dangerous new diseases, petty status games, questionable sponsorship deals, inflexible protocols, atrocious work/life balance, oppressively demanding parents, legal gray areas, career uncertainty, iatrogenic infections, unexpected opportunities for turbulent self-discovery, the growing weight of responsibility to society, scary but admittedly hilarious side effects, workaholism weaponized against oneself, and way more bodily fluids than anyone needs to see or smell or touch. Space whale got your tongue? Doctors Klak and Sleech are at your service. Anesthesia is not guaranteed.

Workplace comedy is tricky to get right. Over-the-top exaggeration is one of the staples of humor, but there's a very precise mix of vibe, mood and flavor in communicating what it's like to do a certain job. The point of this type of comedy is not to achieve an accurate account of daily tasks (how many delivery companies get dragged into universe-breaking crises the way Planet Express does?) but rather to get at the core of people's relationship to their career. No doctor has ever had to cure accidental time travel or black-hole-inflicted injuries, but the animated series The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy manages to feel true to the pressures and anxieties that all doctors face.

Emotional honesty is the anchor that allows the rest of the story's elements to go wild in all directions. Behind the exploding fungi and extinct germs and exoskeletal injections and extrasensory drama lies a solid understanding of who these characters are and what they desire and fear.

Our protagonist duo is composed of doctors Klak and Sleech, famous for their unconventional, sometimes legally dubious approach to treatment. Klak grew up as the unwilling test subject for her mother's psychiatric research, which left her with serious confidence issues and an unhealthy perfectionism. Sleech has an aversion to intimate attachments, to the point that she never speaks of her family, can't relate to people who get along with theirs, refuses to trust anyone else's competence, and sabotages any personal connection that threatens to get too close. These are not science fiction scenarios. These are realistic characters who have to deal with relatable problems; they're just thrown into a setting that has aliens and spaceships. The zany antics of galactic medicine are just scaffolding around the emotional pillars that support each episode.

If you prefer to come for the zany antics, they're thrown at you aplenty. There are immortal brain parasites and mind-reading birds and teleporter fusion and face-swapping STDs and death-reversing implants and hairy heart disease and mutagenic candy bars and gastric detonation therapy. The writers aimed incredibly high with the creativity that a show like this requires. Every permutation of alien body types and body parts you can imagine is represented here.

Also, splatter. Lots and lots of slimy entrails hurled at every surface. Who knew aliens had so many squishy parts inside?

But again, the best moments are those that involve interpersonal dynamics. Our two protagonists have gone through so much together that their bond resonates as a solid, thriving one, even when their mismatched personalities cause inadvertent hurt and they need to have vulnerable conversations. In spite of all the times they drive each other up the wall, they still rely on each other for strength when dealing with a toxic ex, a stressful coworker, a personal insecurity, or a forbidden experiment that might endanger every brain in every known planet.

The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy is a great example of what you get with an all-female writing room. You get smart humor, you get psychological insight, you get a mature treatment of the tough experiences that happen at a hospital, and you get carefully constructed characters who feel like people you want to hug.

And you get splatter. I can't stress this enough. Brains and guts and feathers and who knows what else go flying all the time. And it never fails to be irresistibly funny.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

Microreview: Invincible: Atom Eve

How do you get enough of a show like Invincible? That’s the neat thing. You don’t.

I figure that Amazon Studios has realized that Invincible is good, given that it can get away with releasing but one single episode of the show to whet our appetites for the second season. Had that one hour-long special been forgettable, or worse, bad, we would have pilloried them. We never would have let the showrunners, the writers, Amazon Studios, and the actors ever forget it, and some of us would have been really obnoxious about it on Twitter (I will not call it X).

But, as fortune would have it, Invincible: Atom Eve is worth watching, and builds skillfully on the original show. It focuses, as you might expect, on Atom Eve, one of the major characters of the first season. The episode ends up feeling like a big-budget superhero movie condensed to half the time, which is actually to its benefit as it doesn’t feel the need to pad. It focuses razor-sharp on its own story, a deconstruction of one of superheroes’ greatest myths: What if the Kents were horribly dysfunctional when they found Clark in those Kansas fields (also, what if Clark were a girl)?

It can be a hard hour to watch, doubly so for those of us who have lived through the pain that these families cause. I have, and it was excruciating in the best way (unlike The Mitchells vs. the Machines, which was excruciating in the worst way). Eve, God bless her, has such incredible gifts, as superheroes do, but she is around nobody who can, or will, appreciate them. Her supernatural knowledge of chemistry is nurtured by her babysitter before her parents, who otherwise just find her strange and incomprehensible.

Her parents enraged me. To use the terminology I learned in /r/raisedbynarcissists to cope with my own trauma, her father is a narcissist extraordinaire, with hair-trigger temper and militant incuriosity. He is aggravatingly, obviously cruel. Her mother is what we survivors would call an enabler. Sure, she’s less obviously mean, but she never cares enough about her daughter to ever make her husband stop. She is the velvet glove that surrounds her husband’s iron fist, slightly softening a blow that is still incredibly painful. This is one of the most heart-rendingly accurate depictions of this sort of abuse I have seen in media, up there with Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, and I was stunned.

The violence here, like in the first season of Invincible, is bloody in a way that most superhero media is either prevented from showing, or shies away from; it’s like the Deadpool movies without the wry commentary. The blood, as disturbing as it is, takes aim at a key part of the superhero fantasy: that saving the world, or the city, or even yourself, would be clean, would be neat. There’s nothing clean about the violence here, and there’s nothing neat about Eve’s upbringing.

Beyond just her parents, Eve’s story is about breaking out of what others have dictated for you. Her origins are a tangled web of government deceit and dissent, each wanting something different from her, none recognizing her as a human being with agency. In that regard, the episode is a coming-of-age story, albeit with more graphic violence. The episode knows when to let the runtime breathe a bit, to let you feel Eve's pain, and when to overwhelm you with the power that she, and others, have. It is paced perfectly.

This episode floored me. I got both intense action and a very meaningful examination of trauma, parental and otherwise, one that was so painful in such a real way. If you have to have superheroes with tragic backstories, let them be truly tragic in a human way, like this. It is bloody, it is violent, it is heart-rending, and it is morally aware.

Highlights: sensitive look at abusive families, also graphic violence.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Maybe there's a parallel timeline where 'The Peripheral' hit the mark

It's a shame that a series with so many interesting ideas didn't try to go farther with them

Amazon Studios TV series The Peripheral, an adaptation of William Gibson's 2014 novel, has come up with an original angle on the overstretched "metaphor for class inequality" trope. In this story, scientists from the late 22nd century create alternate possible pasts where they can run unsanctioned experiments on live humans with cosmic impunity. Those other timelines are not seen as having real moral value, but in one of them lives our protagonist, Flynne, an experienced gamer who stumbles upon these secrets after beta-testing a new VR headset, and who is determined to defend her and her world's inherent right to exist.

This is an amplified echo of the cry of protest you can hear from exoticized peoples: Your Vacation Is My Home. Or, in The Peripheral, something more like Your Disposable Petri Dish Is My Spacetime Continuum. Such a concept sounds like it could spark lengthy discussions about the colonial practices still embedded in scientific research, the ethical loopholes of the gig economy, the rights of counterfactual agents, the mutual responsibilities between generations, and the still unsolved safety issues with brain-computer interfaces.

Unfortunately, the show doesn't meet the high expectations set by its premise. A research institute officially known as The Research Institute and a cleptocracy of mafia bosses collectively known as the Klept are the first signs that The Peripheral devoted only the barest of efforts to worldbuilding. Our near future, as shown in a small town in the southern US, looks almost like the present, with the changes established mostly in dialogue: stratospheric medicine prices, a vaguely mentioned Texan war, ubiquitous 3D printing, far superior video game graphics. With the supporting characters, the show follows the opposite approach: they are established implicitly, with minimal exposition, and the viewer doesn't connect who works for whom and who is whose childhood friend until well into the season. The mental bandwidth expended in keeping track of the scant clues about these characters detracts from the viewer's ability to follow the plot.

In the scenes set in the 22nd century, these deficiencies are multiplied: three separate factions are described but not properly introduced until the halfway point, and Flynne, who should serve as our eyes into that society, is persistently kept in the dark about how it works.

Worse problems afflict the visual style of the 22nd century. We only get to see future London as a vague skyline that blends impossibly cyclopean statues with incompletely rendered ruins, or as deliberately secluded side streets that look like the production team only had access to a small number of set designs. It's true that this society is recovering from multiple catastrophes that killed a huge portion of the world's population, but it's inevitable to get a sense of artifice from the continued recourse to the same few sets and the same few immensely powerful characters without ever learning how ordinary life proceeds for the average human.

The conflict between the near future and the not so near future is hindered by unnecessary mystery. Flynne only discovers what the villain wants from her in the last episode, and then almost by chance. Until then it's hard to get invested in the stakes of her fight, because the show insists on delaying as much as possible the moment of letting the viewer know what every faction wants. The lead characters of this future act as if they were facing an imminent crisis of utmost urgency, but then they spend interminable scenes sitting for tea to exchange barbs about their respective leverage and strategic weak points, and it's no longer believable that there's anything actually being fought over.

The Peripheral suffers gravely from this intentional slowness. Each episode spends too much time in revealing too little at a time, and the way the final two episodes resolve all the plotlines may as well have occurred just after the pilot, if only these characters stopped walking around, looking menacing and launching indirect taunts. This ungenerous pacing, combined with the barely-there London of the future, deals a near-fatal blow to the viewer's suspension of disbelief. It's no wonder that the villains managed to convince Flynne that she was playing a video game instead of visiting a physical place, because this supposedly broken and polluted London looks too small and too fake to take seriously.

There's no word yet on whether Amazon will produce a second season of The Peripheral, but if it comes to pass, the producers should ask for a higher VFX budget or larger outdoor sets, and stop being smugly mysterious just for the sake of being smugly mysterious. The viewer is supposed to be given a reason to care, and this first season relied too much on hidden agendas kept hidden too long for the resolution to have the impact it should.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10.

Bonuses: +1 for showing a realistic brother/sister relationship rich in complexity and disparate perspectives, +3 for T'Nia Miller's wonderful acting.

Penalties: −1 for the criminal underutilization of Alexandra Billings, −1 for having a tad too many extraneous subplots, −3 for the whiplash of following too slow a beginning and middle with too rushed an ending.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

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

'Paper Girls' is a more honest look at the 80s generation

If 80s kids must write stories that look back at their young selves, why not make it literal?

Yes, I know, it's yet another show about the 80s, but this one doesn't pretend it was a glorious time to live in. Each generation is handed their own rough deal, and the one that befell us 80s kids was to witness the beginning of the end of upward mobility, the rise of trickle-down Reaganomics, and the social damage caused by moral panic. We have, to put it mildly, a lot of baggage to process. To complicate matters further, we are now entering our middle-age crisis phase, which is why the world has been subjected to so many nostalgia stories this decade. We've seen the return of Ghostbusters, Full House, He-Man, Saved by the Bell, Top Gun, The Dark Crystal, DuckTales, and Baywatch, and we'll soon see the return of Willow, Quantum Leap, and Max Headroom. And of course, Stranger Things aspires to be the distillation of the entire vibe of the era.

So what does Paper Girls bring to the conversation about the 80s? For starters, it's not nostalgic. Its intention is not to make you feel warm and cozy about your childhood. It recognizes, and assumes that so do you, that the 80s were an awful decade. And so were the 90s. And so is the 21st century. There were never any "good old days." Whenever you are, that is your present, and in any present, life is hard. Having friends certainly helps, but the demons you carry are still yours.

Where Stranger Things tries to portray teen friendships as the foundation on which personal growth happens, Paper Girls demands that its characters first grow in order to learn to bond. Stranger Things takes kids who were already best friends and throws the end of the world at them. In Paper Girls, dealing with the end of the world is what turns the kids into friends. The interactions are more organic, the group dynamic is more realistic, the thought process behind hard choices is more compelling. Characters in Stranger Things are designed to allude to the archetypes of 80s movies. Characters in Paper Girls are designed to feel like people.

The other thing Paper Girls does with the 80s is turn the whole exercise of looking back into a two-way conversation. Our nostalgia binge is full of commentary on the 80s, but the use of time travel in this series allows the 80s to comment back. Generations are put face to face and given numerous chances to question each other, to try to figure out where things went wrong, and ultimately, to try to understand each other. Again, life is hard; it is in every decade. Much of the resentment and blame and scapegoating that one generation can hurl at the previous one or the next one can be explained by the failure to remember that life for them is hard too. We forget it so much that we often direct those hard feelings at ourselves.

Dialogue scenes between different versions of the same character are the best moments of the series. It's one thing to feel disappointed in yourself, and it's another to hear your past self or your future self say it to your face. It's a humbling experience to be shown a wider view of your life trajectory and discover that, every time you think you've got this life figured out, you're wrong. You may even convince yourself that the aspirations you ceased to have are no longer important, but the version of you that had those aspirations was no less real than you are now. Likewise, the person you will become may have valid complaints to make about the direction you went. You are your own harshest judge. If anyone has the right to be brutally honest about your mistakes, it's you.

This type of interaction intensifies the emotional stakes of Paper Girls to the limits of what the dramatic medium permits. In any narration it's normal for characters to challenge and call out each other, but it creates a very different dramatic situation to have a character argue with their own self. Science fiction uses this trick all the time, because it works really well, but very few stories have done it to the extent that Paper Girls does. To realize the fantasy of knowing your future opens the door to forms of vulnerability and introspection that would have been harder to achieve in more conventional coming-of-age stories. The focus of this series is not who will win the temporal war, but rather who these girls are capable of becoming.

Not that the temporal war plot is unimportant. It takes place in the background, as the excuse that allows for all the inner drama to happen, but it illustrates quite plainly the meaning of the story. It's a war between youngsters who want to improve the world and elders who want to keep it the way it's always been. In other words, the eternal struggle of every generation as it grows up and tries to reclaim its place. It's easy to imagine a window into the past and the future, but it takes a rare dedication to sincerity to let the past and the future judge us. And surely we'd have as many reasons to judge them in turn. But once you've had that conversation, once you've sat the child and the adult in the same room and given them time to scream their grievances and shoot their missiles, where do you go from there?

With the tease for a season 2, the plot of Paper Girls is not over yet, so it's premature to venture an all-encompassing interpretation. But isn't that the way life feels all the time? You don't have the full picture until it's over, and you never know when that is. You can only walk the road you see immediately ahead. When are you done growing up? You never know for sure. When are you complete? Maybe you already were and didn't know it. One reason why it's dangerous to view life as a story is that, for any present moment, the story is incomplete. And that's terrifying, because with enough time, you may become a completely different person. You may regret it. Or you may be glad it happened. Or you may not even have the chance to reflect on it.

Paper Girls takes the anxiety of our always incomplete story and makes it tangible in the conversations between child and adult. Now that we're inundated in reminders of the 80s, it's refreshing to have this series point out the folly of yearning for the past. You are the person you are. To truly return to the past, you'd have to forget everything you are now (a scenario that the series makes literal). That's what the obsession with 80s nostalgia has failed to understand: if time travel stories have taught us anything, it's that getting stuck reliving the same experiences is hell. We need to let the past be past. We need to live. That's the simplest message a story can carry, and perhaps the most essential. The road is not finished, and we can't see where it ends, but as long as we're on it, we need to live.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +1 for the refreshing emotional honesty that has been so lacking in the 80s nostalgia subgenre.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10.

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

Review [Television]: Undone

An underrated, insightful gem of a show that will undo your emotions in the best way.

The plot device that probably comes to many people's minds when thinking of ambiguity in fiction is whether fantastical happenings are truly fantasy or whether it's a figment in a mentally ill character's imagination. Almost always, it's a lazy plot device. It skirts answers, solidity, and finality in favor of cheap shock and a shallow veneer of intellectualism. Ambiguity works best if each interpretation elevates the story, not muddies it. Undone understands this more than almost anything I've seen. It’s a show that digs deep into the dilemmas of time travel and struggles of mental illness through character development and a clear emotional through line. 

Alma (Rosa Salazar) doesn’t have the perfect life. She’s struck by ennui, her father died under mysterious circumstances, and she doesn’t always have the greatest relationship with the rest of her family. Then, she almost dies in a car crash, and develops an ability to move through time. With her newfound power, she’s set on a mission to find out more about her father and his questionable demise. Mental illness, familial relationships, as well as romantic ones are explored in an ambitious tapestry.

Animation has so much potential to transcend the limitations of live action and go for broke through its imagery and creativity. Undone does such a thing, making the most of its medium, through creative transitions, like when a disparate setting collapses into another without being jarring, or an abundance of flashy visuals that could be overwhelming in another medium. The animation style is Rotoscope in which animators trace over live action visuals to deliver more "realistic" performances. That is never more clear than in the facial expressions. Lifelike looks of distress, joy, and anger are conveyed subtlety from a quirked mouth or a glint in an eye. And it never veered into uncanny valley territory for me.

One complaint I have for the show is that the midsection of Undone’s first season can be repetitive as Alma is learning her powers. While I don't think a training montage would be appropriate, I think a classier variant could be devised to speed things along a little more. However, the latter part of season 1 and the entirety of season 2 are a burst of momentum and creativity. Plot lines contort until they're as twisty as can be while still being comprehensible, while the social dynamics that were quietly built in the early stretch of the show pop off with satisfying explosiveness.

Undone isn't empty ambiguity. Its exploration of mental illness lays the foundation for its realistic story beats, while its time traveling exploits decorate it with vibrant imagination. While it offers two interpretations for what's going on, the ambiguity doesn't undercut one interpretation over another. Rather, the journey the show goes through uses its more imaginative sections to give more insight to its realistic interpretation and vice versa. Whichever interpretation you choose will be informed and enhanced by the entirety of what you watched, not just some of it. And what a rewarding experience it is.

The Math:

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Positives: +1 for a brilliantly executed animation style.

+1 for heart-wrenching explorations of intergenerational trauma and mental illness.

Negatives: -1 for a couple repetitive episodes

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10

POSTED BY: Sean Dowie - Screenwriter, editor, lover of all books that make him nod his head and say, "Neat!”

'The Wheel of Time' is an interesting exercise in adaptation

TV networks are searching for "the next Game of Thrones," but The Wheel of Time is playing a different game

After the colossally successful era of Game of Thrones (and its just as colosally divisive final season), it was to be expected that producers would scramble for something to keep feeding an audience still hungry for Medieval shenanigans. An earlier attempt by MTV to make The Shannara Chronicles the next hit resulted in failure (a big part of which can be blamed on the less than stellar source material), while Netflix seems to have struck gold with The Witcher, now on its eagerly awaited second season. In a strange turn inward, both Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings have spawned prequel shows, a sign of risk aversion that runs contrary to the adventuring spirit of high fantasy. We can wish them well, for the sake of all artists involved, but the risk of Westeros and Middle Earth burnout cannot be left unmentioned.

Robert Jordan wrote the series of books that comprise The Wheel of Time more or less at the same time as George R. R. Martin started writing A Song of Ice and Fire,  but they are radically different responses to Lord of the Rings. Tolkien's theme of power as a corrupting influence is taken by Martin to ghastly extremes, with hardly any character in Westeros being fully free of the poison of ambition, whereas Jordan did something arguably more interesting: in his world, it's not that power per se is bad; rather, power has been corrupted, and it needs to be saved.

Jordan worked with this metaphor by dividing magic into masculine and feminine halves, and adding a backstory that resulted in masculine magic being tainted and incontrollable. This runs into an essentialist can of worms, on which enough has been commented, but the TV adaptation by Amazon Studios is doing a laudable job of lifting the female characters out of their simplistic archetypes. On another day, we could have a longer discussion on what it means for power to be so rigidly aligned with gender, but since this is already the source material Amazon is working with, we need to ask a different type of questions: what insight on power does a high fantasy show have to convey to current audiences that hasn't been explored by Game of Thrones in gory detail, and what deep truth about humanity can be expressed in a fictional world where masculine power is inherently harmful and deserving of suspicion?

The status quo we find in The Wheel of Time is one where women have been at work trying to repair the world while keeping masculine power in check. This feels like an unstable state of affairs, one imposed temporarily to give the world a chance to heal while people figure out what to do about men. In-universe, this period has lasted for thousands of years, but people are not satisfied with the way things have turned out. It's as if we envisioned a hypothetical future where patriarchy has been dethroned, but things are very much in flux, because a new, lasting structure for social organization has not yet been reached. As much harm as patriarchy is capable of causing, a world where an entire half of the population are viewed as dangerous is not a viable model of society. The journey of restoration that takes place across The Wheel of Time is about finding a way to reintegrate masculine power without throwing the world into darkness. This is a break from recent treatments of related themes. Where Game of Thrones consistently punishes characters for not being cruel and manipulative enough, and The Witcher repeats all the time that humans are the real monsters, The Wheel of Time trusts humans. It's not certain that the world can be fixed, but if anyone's going to do it, it's us.

To properly explore this theme in the 2020s, the first season needed to shed many elements from the original novel The Eye of the World that are no longer as well received as they were in the 1990s. There is less emphasis on traditional gender roles, less hyperfocus on a single protagonist, and less dependence on fate to propel the narrative. In the TV version, the key choice by which our hero Rand saves the world hinges on respecting female autonomy. That is an apt test of character for a male hero in the world of The Wheel of Time, and a smart move by the screenwriters, because, according to the rules set in the novels, masculine magic requires asserting one's will to dominate the flow of power. A quiet family life may be what Rand wants the most, so his true moment of heroism, at the easily suggestible time when he's just learned to wield masculine magic, is the realization that he doesn't want that life if it means superimposing his will over his beloved Egwene's aspirations.

In other words, the story trusts a male character to be responsible and considerate in his use of power. That's a level of humanization that was too often missing in the exhaustingly bleak Game of Thrones. This is not the horrible Dung Ages of impassive tyrants and cutthroat cunning; this is a more enlightened world that is actively in search of healing. The Wheel of Time is gritty, but not grim; and even when it deals with darkness, it does not revel in it. This is a world that used to have advanced technology and peaceful governments, so it is known for a fact that a less cruel life is possible.

However, the path to restoration is anything but easy. The subsequent novels in the series deal with intense scheming and backstabbing within the Aes Sedai sisterhood of witches, as well as the standard amount of palace intrigue between ruling houses. In the first season we get but the briefest glimpse of the entanglements of power play in this world, but so far it doesn't have the normalized dog-eat-dog mentality that made life so dreadful in Westeros.

The Wheel of Time is consciously setting some distance from the show that defined fantasy TV for the last decade, and that's for the better. It is a more hopeful, more empathetic look at the weaknesses of humanity. It benefits from a beautiful choice of shooting locations and a believable cast of heroes whose struggles and frictions are handled with the due maturity. This season is a very good start, and a very good promise for future seasons.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10.

Bonuses: +2 for the brilliant casting of Rosamund Pike, who delivers a precious mix of compassion and toughness, of mystery and vulnerability; +1 for making a sincere effort to update 1990s gender politics to today's sensibilities; +1 for the ethereal feel of Lorne Balfe's soundtrack.

Penalties: −3 for building up to a huge final confrontation that turned out to be inexplicably anticlimactic.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

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

The new Cinderella has no use for princesshood, thank you very much

This entrepeneurial heroine is too busy pulling herself up by her own bootstraps to bother with glass slippers

These days it feels like we're up to the brim in fairy tale remakes. When Amazon Studios announced that it was preparing its own version of Cinderella, many obvious questions emerged: Who needs this? Who asked for this? And what new angle can you possibly add to the overcrowded menu of fairy tale musicals?

As it turns out, the new Cinderella knows fully well what media ecosystem it's entering, and it replies with a resounding justification for why this needs to exist.

You see, after the end credits, there is the obligatory disclaimer, "This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and locations portrayed and the names herein are fictitious, and any similarity to or identification with the location, name, character or history or any person, product or entity is entirely coincidental and unintentional."

Don't believe one word of that statement. This is a movie about Meghan Markle.

Principal photography for Cinderella started in early 2020, just as Megxit was blowing up, and the parallels are impossible to ignore. A brown-skinned commoner with her own fashion line who rescues a reluctant prince from the strict expectations of the royal family? A movie produced by James Corden, the same who welcomed the ex-prince and ex-princess to Los Angeles and has publicly come to their defense? A heavy-handed critique of the ways life in the palace turns women into props for the ego of kings? A romance fantasy where everyone speaks British except for the American-accented heroine?

Yeah, this is Megxit: The Movie. That's the unifying explanation for the massive revisions done to the source material.

Classic Cinderella isn't the most proactive of protagonists. Her happy ending is not caused by anything she does, but by who she is deep inside. This does not have to translate into an indictment of the tale's quality; she can be read as what writer and editor Vida Cruz recently called a mountain character, one who is besieged by every type of injustice and whose mere daily survival is already a victory. Thus, most adaptations of Cinderella used to focus on its moral side, as a tale of quiet kindness receiving its prize while active meanness was punished. Even Disney's 1950 version avoids asking anything of the heroine; the fairy godmother is summoned by her faith alone. In the sickeningly saccharine 2015 remake, at least this scene is more causally grounded: the fairy godmother first tests Cinderella's kindness by posing as a beggar in order to establish that she's worthy of a miracle.

In 2021, the rags-to-riches aspect of Cinderella is fully Americanized into a Horatio Alger tale of social mobility. This time, our heroine's ticket out of poverty is not via marriage with a noble; her sights are firmly set on the merchant class. If it weren't for the electric saws featured in the movie's first musical number, we might situate this story near the end of feudalism, when a rising wave of new money challenged the rigid layers of medieval society.

That she happens to seduce a prince is secondary to her aspirations.

As the fabulous godmother explains in a voiceover, "Here everyone had a part to play, and they played it without question. [...] This village of hardworking citizens moved to the same beat day after day, generation after generation." The choice to open the movie with Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" takes what was a straightforward moralizing tale of virtue rewarded and recontextualizes it into a parable about social exclusion. This theme is reinforced by the deliberate selection of songs by Black artists: the self-improvement anthem "You Gotta Be" by Des'ree, the aspirational yet poignant "Am I Wrong" by Nico & Vinz, the whimsical "Shining Star" by Earth, Wind & Fire. Through these musical numbers, Cinderella sustains a note of uniquely American timbre: the determination to keep believing in the American Dream in spite of all the structural injustices that create millions of unknown Cinderellas.

These issues are finally articulated in explicit form in the spectacular new song "Dream Girl." The quick shots of the palace women repeating the three lines of the chorus are the single most powerful moment in the entire movie. The problem facing Cinderella is not just classism; it's patriarchy intersecting with classism. (Because this is a kid-friendly fantasy, it doesn't go into the racism involved in the whole Megxit situation, but the pieces of Black music included elsewhere in the movie tell the rest of the story.)

Of course, bootstrapped success is also a fairy tale. No amount of singing "Million to One" is going to tip the scales of what passes for meritocracy, and Cinderella doesn't seem to acknowledge that her ascent to the bourgeoisie leaves her overworked neighbors exactly where they started. There's a brief suggestion that the new queen may have a serious plan for poverty reduction, but the movie can't have its anti-monarchy cake and let the people eat it too.

In its defense, Cinderella knows that the monarchy is absurd and ridiculous, and squeezes every possible laugh out of it. Pierce Brosnan invests full sincerity into the role of a pathetic excuse for a head of state, while his hypercompetent daughter doesn't miss a chance to put her elders to shame; and our designated Prince Charming, the blandest Central Casting face who ever central cast, can't wait to run away from the pomp of arranged marriage.

That the monarchy is a bad system is news to no one, least of all to Americans. But in our current era of soulless and toothless fairy tale remakes, the youngest viewers need a counterpoint to Disney's omnipresent and uncritical glorification of the royal lifestyle. This new Cinderella didn't even need to get married to land herself a guy. That's a lesson for the ages.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for a spot-on selection of songs, speaking of which, +3 for the new song "Dream Girl." This, and not "Million to One," is the true thematic core of the movie.

Penalties: −1 for a sometimes too simplistic picture of the patriarchy, −3 for ableist jokes about mental health, −1 because we really didn't need to know how James Corden feels about peeing.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

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

On the surreal horror of The Underground Railroad

How can evil be told so beautifully? How can depravity look so mesmerizing?

Viet Thanh Nguyen once said, "One of the unspoken silences of the Great American Novel is the assumption that it can only be written by white men." Maybe this is the reason why the literary scene still hasn't found this elusive Holy Grail; critics and academics keep waiting for it in the wrong places. Similarly, David Vann said the Great American Novel could only be anti-American, by which he meant it should focus on the country's greatest shames. Without a doubt, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead fits the description. As one character in the television adaptation just released by Amazon Studios declares toward the end, "America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. [...] This nation shouldn't exist if there's any justice in the world."

The book on which this production is based is not a historical novel; it is more, but the literary scene still seems not to understand how uchronia works. To summarize: in real life, the Underground Railroad is the metaphorical name for the secret network of allies who helped enslaved people escape into free soil. This was the rare kind of conspiracy formed for the cause of good, estimated to have saved one hundred thousand people before the Civil War. In fiction, The Underground Railroad takes place in an alternate world where the metaphor is reimagined as a literal railroad that goes literally underground. In the realm of the symbolic and the dreamlike, represented by the impossible feat of tunnels that go beneath and across the country, protagonist Cora Randall embarks on an allegorical journey through the history of American racial relations.

The first couple of episodes provide us with the key to interpret this story, which is Gulliver's Travels. Each location the protagonist visits is meant to stand in for a political reality. In the case of The Underground Railroad, the fact that one character speaks of vitamins, even though the word wasn't coined until 1912, gives the rest of the key: the tracks are a form of time travel. This can be read in two ways. One is as a collapsing of time: even if there had really been a magical fantasy train to take Black people out of the plantations, the states (and epochs) without slavery were not morally advanced enough to welcome them. The other way is as a more conventional time travel narrative. When Cora visits a fictional version of South Carolina where Black population is kept in check under the guise of benevolent uplift, we are visiting the era of eugenics, unethical medical research and forced sterilizations. When she stops by fictional North Carolina, where the mere presence of Black people is forbidden, we are in the era of segregation and of exclusion laws like the ones enshrined in the foundational documents of Oregon. When she marches through this story's version of Tennessee, it is a barren land consumed by unending fire, a reminder of the lingering pain that violence continues to inflict on the country. And when she reaches an agrarian utopia in Indiana, where Black people can live in freedom, we are given a skewed look at the purportedly equal 20th century and the ideological division between the strategy of respectability and the movement for Black separatism. All of these are revealed to be, as Cora declares, "no places to escape to, only places to run from." Episode 8 shows us a house located at the end of the railroad, and for a few seconds the camera lingers on the wooden lid of a tunnel. The beams of wood and the positions of the nails on it are arranged in a way that resembles the Confederate flag. This is stated to be a house that dates back to the Revolutionary War, which implies that America's rottenness has been hidden there all along.

Our villain is slave catcher Arnold Ridgeway, introduced with his own origin story that leaves us with no satisfying explanations, because evil is never so simple (take note, Disney). The son of a blacksmith with hippie leanings (Ridgeway Sr. both looks and speaks like a very high Walt Whitman), he is given an establishing moment of resounding significance when he is shown to be unskilled at forging chains. His lifelong insecurity belies the myth of Manifest Destiny, expounded only in later scenes when he's drunk and rambling incoherently, because such a perverse doctrine does not deserve a more dignified expression.

Ridgeway is an individual, because stories need characters in whom ideas can be embodied to put them in opposition, but defeating Ridgeway is not the point. The evil of racism goes beyond individual actions, and sometimes, when evil has developed an entire system, it has so much blame to spread around that it can fall on an innocent head. It's easy for viewers of The Underground Railroad to hate the character of Homer, to watch each of his choices and despise the little traitor. But such sentiment is misdirected. He's not morally responsible for having been turned into a tool by Ridgeway. One should instead hate Ridgeway, a hundred times more, for what he did to Homer. This kind of confusion in the task of assigning responsibility mirrors real-life situations where Black people are unfairly blamed for the few choices they have available. When the runaway Jasper chooses to die via hunger strike, Cora accuses him of giving up, but in his circumstances that's the only freedom he can still choose.

The Underground Railroad devotes much attention to the importance of leaving testimony at each stage of the journey. The railroad administration values those records highly, because the price of riding the train, which symbolically is the price of moving forward, is to share the truth. And that truth burns. I had to pause the episodes several times to take a breath, and at one point I had to ask myself why I was pausing, why I was letting my discomfort get in the way of the story. It is fictional, but it tells a truth that calls out for our attention, and on the face of which my and your discomfort matters not one bit. Just as Cora feels guilty for the slaves she couldn't bring with her, this story invites us to consider all the people who lived and died under injustice and who will now remain there forever. As much progress as we're making right now, we can do nothing for the millions who were enslaved. They are in the past, beyond our help, but this story makes the case that that doesn't absolve our generation.

Episode 9 features the traumatic sight of white men assaulting a Black church. As it was then, it is today, like the events of myth, which exist in eternity and are therefore always in the process of happening. The scars of this evil will never vanish, and that is the point. It would be unfair to expect them to vanish, or to actively make them vanish. It is a truth that demands to be told and retold. Like the stuff of myth, The Underground Railroad is told in symbols, with an impeccable use of sound and lighting and shot composition and atmospheric music that enthralls at the same time it horrifies. Director and showrunner Barry Jenkins has crafted a lasting testimony where the characters frequently stare at the viewer, saying nothing, because words are too small and cannot carry this message. Many of these shots have the sun directly behind the characters, obscuring their features to the point it's not clear whether we're seeing them from behind or face to face. We'd like to believe we're watching the show, but it points its gaze firmly at us.

The Underground Railroad is fully aware of the dual nature of this gaze. In episode 2, Black people are employed in a museum where they perform their exploitation for the entertainment of visitors, a metaphor for the show itself. The responsibility inherent to the telling of this type of story is best expressed in episode 8, when a character asks a poet, "If I gave you my sorrows, would you make them sound pretty?" The importance of dramatizations of American racism does not rest on its entertainment value. In fact, online discussion about this show cites its brutality as the main explanation for why Amazon subscribers are choosing to skip it. This is not a fun story. It contains no excitement, no catharsis, no moral validation of America. It will not amuse you. It will not make you feel better about yourself. But that does not diminish its narrative accomplishments. The Underground Railroad is a supremely beautiful piece of art, even while portraying supremely ugly truths, and you need to ask yourself what it says about you when the ugliness of truth is the reason you refuse to look.

Nerd Coefficient: 10/10.

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