Miscellaneous – James Gillen

REVIEW: Star Trek Discovery Season 5 (so far)

I had said that with the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, they didn’t fail so much in execution as in full-bore pursuing a direction that just happened to be the wrong one. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it’s the execution that’s off.

This was clear to me in the first episode of the current (and last) season of Discovery, which starts out in slamming Space Pulp fashion with Captain Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) in a space suit literally riding the outside of a starship while attempting to disable its engines to prevent criminals from getting away with a top-secret artifact. But then the scene cuts to flashback at a Starfleet celebration party and spends a bit too long on exposition before getting right back to where it was. Better direction – from say, Jonathan Frakes – or better scriptwriting could have created tension or irony by going back and forth between the two events, but this is an example of how Discovery kills momentum even when it is able to create it.

The incident stems from a double-secret “Red Directive” from the mysterious Dr. Kovich (David Cronenberg), which apparently justifies going against all Federation protocols. Burnham naturally doesn’t like this, and has her team investigate what little they’re allowed to know. In the meantime the pursuit is hampered because the criminals have endangered civilians while escaping, and Burnham directs Discovery to stop and clean up the mess because after all, the Federation are supposed to be the good guys. (As opposed to certain other ‘good guy’ nations of the real world that I will not name here.)

Eventually Burnham gets Kovich to reveal the purpose of their mission: The couriers Moll and L’ak (Eve Harlow and Elias Toufexis) had gotten their hands on the diary of a Romulan scientist who was a bit actor in none other than “The Chase” episode of the last season of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard picked up the lead of his late archaeology professor and, pursued by Klingon, Cardassian and Romulan teams, managed to find a hologram from the “Progenitors” who were the ultimate reason why humaniform life is so common in the Star Trek galaxy, and who left their last message in hopes that their descendants could live in peace. And while at the time nothing ever came of it (I liked the reaction where the Klingon captain said ‘That’s IT??’), apparently this Romulan scientist was taking notes and managed to trace the secret of the Progenitors’ universe-creating technology. And obviously the Feds don’t want these two criminals to exploit the secret for themselves, much less sell it to someone really nasty. Whatever that secret is.

And while the story manages to bring back Tilly (Meg Wiseman) and Book (David Ajala), who turns out to have a family connection to Moll, the main guest star of this season so far seems to be Captain Rayner (veteran Canadian character actor Callum Keith Rennie) whose ship interferes with Discovery’s mission about as much as it helps it. Rayner is a combative jerk, and in this respect greatly reminds me of Ruon Tarka from Season 4, except that Rennie has enough charisma to make it work. Not only that, Rayner seems to be more moral and self-aware than Tarka.

So at the same time that Rayner is pressured to give up his command because his rash actions led to the aforementioned endangering of civilians, Captain Saru (Doug Jones) decides to join the diplomatic core and marry T’rina of Ni’Var, so before leaving Discovery he tells Burnham to find a replacement Number One who is just as much of a “force” as she is. So she gets Admiral Vance to let her pick Rayner. Precisely because he’s not going to be a yes-man, and also to honor Saru, who took a chance on her as an officer after she’d been that much more insubordinate.

All well and good, but just as the issue with Season 4 was that they took the premise of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and stretched it over thirteen hours, the premise here seems to be revisiting “The Chase” and going from one episode to over 10. It’s not bad so far, but I’ve been seeing almost as many chances for this season to go wrong as it has to go right.

The Ukraine War and Hearts of Iron IV, Continued

Keep men, lose land: Land can be taken again. Keep land, lose men: Both men and land are lost.

–Mao Zedong

This was a lesson that Chinese Communist leader Mao had to learn the hard way. After the fall of the Chinese Empire, various (small-r) republican factions united against the warlords and petty nobles holding parts of the country; the Communists and the Nationalists (Kuomintang) were both inspired by Sun Yat-sen, but the Nationalists were opposed to the Communists and their Soviet influence. They joined forces but each faction tried to subvert the other until Chiang-kai-shek, leader of the Nationalists, turned on the Communists in 1927, destroying their strength in the urban centers. At this time Mao was only one of several revolutionary commanders, but he and others managed to escape Nationalist encirclement in a campaign that Chinese Communist mythology calls “the Long March”. Thus they developed a “space for time” strategy by necessity that ended up being mirrored by Chiang himself when the Japanese invaded and took over most of the coast and the Chinese capital of Nanjing.

Meanwhile in the present, the command of Ukraine’s defense went into transition. Until this year the Ukrainian Commander in Chief was the popular general Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, who was popular with his troops, especially after the 2022 campaign to clear the Kharkiv Oblast. But his position allowed him to say things that were unpopular with the government, like in 2023 when he famously did an interview with The Economist stating that the government’s counter-offensive had stalled, and why. In February, President Volodomyr Zelenskyy dismissed Zaluzhnyi while also appointing him Ambassador to the United Kingdom. Zaluzhnyi was replaced by General Oleksandr Syrskyi, who is thought to be more a follower of the old Soviet school of military thinking, and while given credit for the Kharkiv offensive was also blamed for continuing to lose troops at Bakhmut past the point that the city served any military purpose. According to one article, “So popular was Zaluzhnyi that Zelensky’s own approval rating dipped by five points to 60% after he fired the general. … The sense at the moment is of a political class that is factionalizing and selecting sub-optimal solutions to thorny problems. Syrskyi’s approach since his appointment has been to mimic Zaluzhnyi’s cautious, realist style—he has drawn up contingency plans in case American military aid never shows up, withdrawn from Avdiivka to avoid massive troop losses, and redoubled the army’s commitment to technological advancement and drone warfare. That close resemblance to Zaluzhnyi’s approach poses the question of why Zaluzhnyi was dismissed at all. And by all indications, the answer is that it had little to do with military strategy but was rather about personal friction between Zelensky and the former military leader.”

The popularity, or lack thereof, of each side’s government also relates to how many men each side can recruit, which is another point.

The Russian colossus has been underestimated by us. Whenever a dozen divisions are destroyed, the Russians replace them with another dozen.

–Wehrmacht Chief of Staff Franz Halder

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won by making the other dumb bastard die for his country.

–George S. Patton

As a lot of people have pointed out, Russia is always dangerous because they will literally waste their own troops and send untrained and even unarmed men into combat in order to make the enemy use up ammo and potentially erode their manpower, and then – eventually – gain ground after losing a lot more population than a more humane, or at least more intelligent and pragmatic, country would. In both World Wars Russia would actually send unarmed conscripts onto the field and order them to pick up any weapons they found on their comrades who’d already died. Basically, the Zapp Brannigan Killbot strategy decades before Futurama.

You might ask, how does one defeat such an enemy? Well, it happened at least once. Largely because the Russian homefront was so deprived in World War I, people revolted against the Czarist government in 1917. While this is not emphasized by popular history, The Bolshevik Revolution was not against the Czar but against the liberal “Provisional Government” that succeeded the Czar and remained unpopular because they wanted to keep fighting the Germans on behalf of the Allies. Also little known, the Soviets initially wanted to make peace with Germany – no surprise given that Germany had facilitated Lenin’s return to Russia from exile – but balked when the treaty included separating Poland and the Baltics from Russia “on the principle of self-determination that the Bolsheviks themselves espoused.” The only reason the Reds agreed to a peace treaty was because they had even less ability to resist German advances than the Czarist army did.

The other example of a military defeat in modern Russian history comes from the occupation of Afghanistan, originally to support a local Marxist party that had seized control from the former monarchy in 1978. And after about ten years, the Soviet Union realized that that conflict was their Vietnam, and was only bleeding their manpower and treasury to prop up a government nobody wanted, and so after about ten years, they left. It is telling that the figure for Soviet killed in that period is between 14,000 and 26,000, over ten years, while in less than three years of fighting in Ukraine, Putin’s Russian Federation has (according to US intelligence) lost 315,000 killed and wounded, while also losing two-thirds of its pre-war tank fleet.

In both cases, it didn’t matter so much that Russia had seemingly infinite numbers of men to throw away if the people at the home front didn’t see the conflict as futile.

In this war, both sides need to recruit as many men as possible, and both have problems. Russia in theory can recruit a lot more men than it has, and probably will now that Putin has won his election as easily as Trump wins at his own golf courses, and for basically the same reason. But one of the big reasons Putin hasn’t done so yet is that even he feels the need to worry about domestic dissent, and if the war gets closer to home because the draft affects the home front, that becomes more of a factor. The problem of course is that the war already has affected the home front, given that the country’s winter infrastructure collapsed in several places this year because the national budgets are entirely focused on the war and men who could have been servicing the heating systems are down at the front.

Meanwhile, despite its own critical need for personnel, Ukraine is that much less able to mobilize, given that as a democracy it is even less able to commandeer the population than Putin’s tyranny. In response to a Ukrainian request, the Estonian government is saying it is willing to repatriate Ukranian refugee men to serve in the war. The average age of a Ukrainian soldier is over 40. Even if Ukraine had enough materiel to support the war, it would be hard for them to take the offensive with manpower shortages, and it becomes that much more difficult to gain international support if it can be perceived that Ukraine’s own men aren’t going to fight. Probably the best solution at this point is where individual Ukrainian brigades are doing their own recruitment, “shunning an official mobilization system that they say is dysfunctional, often drafting people who are unfit and unwilling to fight.”

Neither one of these countries has a lot of logistical support right now, Ukraine because of Trumpnik interference and the EU mobilizing too late, and Russia because despite all of its built in advantages, it’s still Russia. You would think that this being the case Russia would realize it has time on its side, and all other things being equal it could just keep pushing with conventional attacks to undermine Ukraine in the long term. But if they thought that way they wouldn’t be throwing as many men into a meat grinder as possible for minimal amounts of land that they would probably get just as well with constant artillery bombardment.

It’s almost as if military conquest and the material benefits of taking Ukraine were secondary to Putin’s ultimate goal of killing as many people as possible, even if they’re on his own side.

As in a lot of wars, the Ukraine war basically amounts to who can kill the most people. And if Russia seems to have the advantage in that it has a lot more people to kill, it’s setting things up to where Ukraine can kill that many more of them.

It’s good to trust others. But, not to do so is so much better.

–Benito Mussolini

You will all wind up shining the shoes of the Germans!

–Italo Balbo

The first quote reflects the cynical, “Machiavellian” attitude of the fascist who thinks he knows better than the liberal just how the real world works. The second quote is from another veteran Italian Fascist, air ace Italo Balbo, who remembered that Italy preceded Germany in prestige and had a fascist government 11 years before Hitler. Much like Mussolini’s own son-in-law, Foreign Minister Galezzo Ciano, Balbo was very suspicious of the Nazi government and warned Mussolini and his fellow Fascists against increasing their ties to it. Balbo ended up assigned out of the way to govern Italian Libya. In 1940, Balbo died in Libya during the North Africa campaign when his scout plane was shot down by Italian anti-aircraft fire, further proving one of Murphy’s Rules of Combat: “Friendly fire – isn’t.”

And because Italy did not and probably could not become an industrial power on par with Germany or even France, it suffered more as it became more entwined with the Axis coalition, leading to the Allies taking their colonies and invading the homeland itself. By the time they reached the mainland, Mussolini was arrested by his own government, only to be “rescued” by Nazi commandos and installed as the head of a German puppet state running the remainder of Axis Italy. And when the war had brought both Italy and Germany to ruin, Mussolini tried to escape to Switzerland, only to get captured by partisans and executed in very sordid circumstances.

In his recent “interview” (rather, setup speech) to Tucker Carlson, Putin not only went on at tendentious length about why Ukraine isn’t a separate country from Russia, he attacked Russia’s old enemy Poland by saying Poland actually forced Nazi Germany to attack it by not agreeing with German negotiations. Blanking out the minor point that up until 1938, Hitler’s expansion was into his German-speaking “back yard” of Rhineland and the nation of Austria, while his takeover of the Sudetenland (in modern Czechia) was justified on similar grounds. That got some pushback from the West because that territory included mountains and fortifications that had been set up precisely to protect Czechoslovakia against German expansion, but Hitler promised everybody that that would be his “last territorial demand.” And then months after the Munich agreement Hitler walked into the defenseless remainder to invest Czechia and separate Slovakia from Czechoslovakia to become a separate puppet. So by summer 1939, Poland knew not to trust Hitler’s diplomacy, and so did everybody else.

Except Stalin.

On September 17, 1939, 16 days after Hitler attacked Poland, Stalin moved his troops in from the east to take ethnically Ukranian and Belorussian territory that Poland had won from Russia in a 1921 war (largely because of Stalin’s incompetence as a Red Army general, but I digress). This was the result of a Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, whose secret provisions allowed Stalin to not only take eastern Poland but pressure Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into joining the USSR, and also forcing Romania to cede Bessarabia (modern Moldova). Stalin also used the opportunity of the larger war to invade Finland, but had to settle for taking border territory rather than conquering the “historic Russian territory” outright.

And then after Hitler had conquered or subverted damn near every other country in Europe, on June 22, 1941, he invaded the Soviet Union in a move that surprised practically no one, except Stalin.

“Nine days before the invasion, the Kremlin ordered Moscow radio to assure listeners there was no prospect of a German invasion. An official TASS report dismissed “rumors” of a coming German attack as “clumsy propaganda” spread by countries hostile to Soviet Russia. Even as the offensive unfolded, Stalin still thought it was a provocation by German generals. “I’m sure Hitler isn’t aware of this,” Stalin told military aides.”

It’s like “I can’t believe the amoral bastard who I assisted in destroying another country was going to turn and try to destroy ME.”

And because of that, tens of millions of Soviets died who only died because Stalin had enabled Hitler in the first place.

But at least Uncle Joe died well.

And in our period, even as Donald Trump and his pet political party, along with Stalin’s former satellite Hungary, continue to do Putin’s bidding to help Russia kill Ukraine, promoting a country that defines itself as being at war with the West, Putin himself is increasingly obliged to orient his economy towards Red China because his war isolated him from Western economies – even as Chinese Premier Xi Jinping wants to maintain economic ties to the West and therefore refuses to give him more active support. China is at least as tyrannical, expansionist and racist as Russia, but just as Putin dreams of regaining all the Czar’s old territories like Finland, China dreams of retaking lands stolen from them by the Czar.

It’s almost a paradox that the most evil, untrustworthy and untrusting people are nevertheless practically gullible when dealing with people who are that much more treacherous than they are. But it makes sense if you consider that such people consider treacherousness to be an admirable trait.

As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable.

–Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was a socialist. The “good” kind. As a result he was in something of a moral conflict during the Nazi period. A Jewish German, he had to flee Germany during the Nazi period and he ended up violating his own pacifist principles to urge American President Franklin Roosevelt to speed up nuclear fission research in 1939 for fear that Nazi Germany could beat the West to an atomic bomb. (Never mind that the Nazis handicapped their own research by outlawing the work of Jewish scientists like Einstein.) When America did develop the bomb, we used it on Japan, and Einstein protested, with some accuracy, that the A-bomb attacks were partially motivated by “US-Soviet politicking” and the need to stop the Russians from dividing Japan the way they did Germany.

The book Out Of My Later Years (ISBN-13 978-1453204931) is a collection of Einstein’s various essays on a number of subjects, including but not related to physics. The section “Public Affairs” includes not only defenses of socialism but the 1947 “Open Letter to the General Assembly of the United Nations”. In this, he addressed the danger posed to the world by nuclear weapons and the inevitable arms race that was developing between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies. He said:

“The UN cannot be blamed for these failures. No international organization can be stronger than the constitutional powers given it, or than its component parts want it to be. As a matter of fact, the United Nations is an extremely important and useful institution provided the peoples and governments of the world realize it is only a transitional system towards the final goal, which is the establishment of a supranational authority vested with sufficient legislative and executive powers to keep the peace. The present impasse lies in the fact that there is no sufficient, reliable supranational authority. Thus the responsible leaders of all governments are obliged to act on the assumption of eventual war. … There can never be complete agreement on international control and the administration of atomic energy or on general disarmament until there is a modification of the traditional concept of national sovereignty. For as long as atomic energy and armaments are considered a vital part of national security no nation will give more than lip service to international treaties. Security is indivisible. It can be reached only when necessary guarantees of law and enforcement obtain everywhere, so that military security is no longer the problem of any single state. There is no compromise between preparation for war, on one hand, and preparation of a world society based on law and order of the other.”

The principal objection to this essay was placed by a group of four scientists from the Soviet Union.

A man has to be alert at all times if he expects to keep on breathing. If not, some German son-of-a-bitch is going to sneak up and beat him to death with a sock full of shit.

–George S. Patton

You would be amazed how relevant this still is.

REVIEW: Star Trek: Discovery (Season Four)

Well, Star Trek: Discovery is setting up its fifth (and last) season in April, so it occurs to me I should give my impressions on Season Four.

In comparison to the previous series Star Trek: Discovery, the main complaint Trek fans seem to have with the last season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is that it only went for ten episodes. Whereas most people think SNW didn’t go on long enough, you can’t say that about “DISCO” Season 4, which went on for 13 episodes. And to me, it seemed a lot longer.

This is the problem with being a Trek fan who is neither a “progressive” nor a knee-jerk anti-liberal: Discovery isn’t BAD, certainly not as bad as certain pundits would tell you, but it’s often hard to give a damn about it.

Season Four reminded me of nothing other than Star Trek: The Motion Picture (or as my friends and I called it, ‘Star Trek the Motionless Picture’). It centers on a strange space anomaly that has the power to destroy entire planets and cannot be stopped. The solution centers not on violent confrontation but on scientific inquiry, exploration and humanist values. But it takes A REAL LONG TIME to get there.

If fans of the time thought that Star Trek: The Motion Picture was too slow and ponderous, Discovery Season 4 is basically the same story done over about 13 hours. Though not entirely. There are some interludes where support characters like Owosekun get some spotlight. One of my favorite characters, Saru (Doug Jones) has a chaste affair with the Vulcan ambassador from Ni’Var. Tilly (Mary Wiseman) decides she’s not cut out for ship duty but still has a role in the main story. Adira’s Trill personality/lover Grey Tal (Ian Alexander) is given a synthetic body (much like Picard’s) so that he can interact with the physical world, and while this story doesn’t go anywhere cause Grey really doesn’t have a place in the crew, it’s nice to see that this plot element was addressed at all.

While the focus remains on Sonequa Martin-Green playing Michael Burnham as Captain, Season Four is largely the story of Cleveland Booker (David Ajala) whose homeworld was the first victim of the “Dark Matter Anomaly” and whose grief is the source of much of the show’s drama, even as the DMA proves to be a threat to the entire galaxy. Ajala is good enough in this story that it would have been that much more dramatically interesting if Book had initiated the conflict in trying to destroy the anomaly, but he doesn’t have the resources to do so, so the story introduces Ruon Tarka (Shawn Doyle) an arrogant scientist who offers his services, but is so high-handed in his approach that it’s pretty easy to see why Burnham goes against him, and thus it’s also predictable when his plan doesn’t work out. As such it’s a little difficult to care about Tarka even though the series does establish an effective back story explaining his motives.

Other than that, I thought the most interesting thing about Season Four long-term is how it continues to develop the independence and legal status of the Discovery’s now-sentient memory library and computer, Zora (Annabelle Wallis), assisted by the professional advice of Dr. Kovich (played by director David Cronenberg in what is probably the best stunt casting since David Bowie in The Last Temptation of Christ). I say long-term because just as characters like Kovich, Adira, Grey and Admiral Vance got introduced in the future timeline of Season Three and continued on, Zora is continuing to develop. In fact her continued existence is something of a loose end.

But it’s kind of telling that again, I found a “side trek” story of Season Four to be more fascinating than the actual plotline that was omnipresent from the end of Episode One onward. Season Three by contrast was genuinely dramatic even if I thought the reveal and the resolution were kind of anti-climax. Now supposedly the producers, taking the example of SNW Season Two, are making Season Five more episodic and action-packed, which would help. As I said about Discovery regarding Season Three, I like the characters and the actors but the writing falls down, and if you like the characters, that actually makes a bad story more disappointing. Let’s hope that they turn things around like SNW and Star Trek: Picard Season Three.

REVIEW: Dune Part Two

When last we left: In the space feudalism of the galactic Imperium, the reformist House Atreides has been in a cold war with the evil House Harkonnen for years. Harkonnen has power in the nobles’ council (Landsraad) largely because they control the planet Arrakis (commonly known as ‘Dune’) which is the only source of the drug “spice.” The spice is critical to galactic civilization because it is a psychoactive drug that allows navigators to make the calculations necessary to fold space-time and reach other planets. As the story starts, the Emperor has turned the Harkonnen fief in Dune over to the Atreides, a move that is so lacking in obvious motive that Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) rightly suspects a trap. As it turns out the Emperor has fully shifted support to Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgaard) and supplied him with some of his Sardukar commandos. The Atreides, no longer on their home turf, are dealing with an enemy that knows the territory, and Harkonnen troops with Sardukar support anhiliate most of the Atreides forces. Leto is betrayed by his household doctor, Wellington Yueh, paralyzed and brought to the Baron because the Baron is holding Yueh’s wife hostage. Either knowing or suspecting that the Baron will not let him and his wife out alive, Dr. Yueh implants a poison gas capsule in Leto’s jaw, so after the Baron predictably kills Yueh, he floats over to Leto to gloat, Leto bites down on the capsule and the poison gas kills everybody in the room – except the Baron, who barely managed to survive because of the anti-grav harness he needs to compensate for his abnormal obesity. (Or as Oscar Isaac might put it, ‘somehow, Baron Harkonnen returned.’)

What is not confirmed at the time is that Leto’s concubine, Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), and heir Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) managed to escape capture and were able to survive in the desert with help from some surviving retainers. They eventually made their way to the territory of Stilgar (Javier Bardem) a Fremen (native) leader who had been negotiating with Duke Leto.

Given that this intellectual property has been around for years longer than Star Wars, there are no real spoilers given how many fans there are of Frank Herbert’s original books, so there is not much point in going over the original narrative, which has already been brought to film at least twice. But filmmaker Denis Villeneuve has changed some things that may alarm Dune purists. Notably, the second half of the first book, which is the scope of this film, takes place over the course of years, whereas this movie takes place only over a few months, given that Jessica’s second child, Alia, is still in the womb, whereas in previous versions Alia ends up taking a major role in the final act.

At first, the external conflict that led to this movie is made secondary to Paul’s internal conflict. He, and his new girlfriend Chani (Zendaya) realize that the Fremen belief in a savior from beyond the planet isn’t a supernatural revelation but the result of centuries of manipulation from Jessica’s Bene Gesserit order. Chani and her best friend serve as examples of how Paul still manages to win over the Fremen as a whole, by his sincere desire to learn their ways and serve their people. But Jessica is quickly told to take on the role of the “Reverend Mother” for the community, which involves an alchemical ritual that warps her unborn child. This is all very involved, and I haven’t actually read the books myself, but with the Bene Gesserit, a Reverend Mother gains access to all her ancestral memories, but only from her female line. No male has ever gone through the process and lived, which is the main reason why there are no male Bene Gesserit. In fact, their multi-generational goal is to eventually produce a male child who will succeed at the ritual and become a “Kwisatz Haderach” who has total awareness of the past and future.

Jessica heads south to join a gathering of the tribes, and Paul’s budding psychic power lets him realize that the path she is leading him on will lead to war and the deaths of literally billions. He refuses to take on this destiny so he can stay with Chani, but when the Harkonnens trace and destroy Stilgar’s lair, he is left with no choice. Chani herself tells Paul, “Our choices are made for us.”

Dune: Part Two is very much about the idea that there is no free will, especially if one can see the future, and yet it trips up the destiny that everyone seems to have planned. The Emperor’s daughter, Irulan (Florence Pugh) confronts her Reverend Mother (Charlotte Rampling) who tells her flat-out that the Bene Gesserit manipulated the Emperor, and thus the Harkonnens, into destroying House Atreides because they had become too independent and too threatening to the status quo. Even the existence of Paul is a choice: Because Bene Gesserit can control their bodies, and arrange a timetable of marriages for the sake of the breeding program, Jessica could have had a daughter as her first child instead of a son, and was in fact told to by her superiors. Paul was born because Jessica had fallen in love with Leto and wanted to give him an heir, meaning the Kwisatz Haderach was born a generation early.

Compared to prior adaptations, Villeneuve’s Dune gives a realistic presentation of the Fremen as grubby desert survivors with their own language and culture, but that complexity goes out the window with House Harkonnen, gratuitously evil villains whose devotion to a bald monochrome aesthetic leads to a fight scene in their arena that is completely bleached of color, while House heir Feyd Rautha (Austin Butler) looks more like a buff Nosferatu than Sting.

But otherwise, the fight scenes are great, the acting is great, and while the direction is not quite so dependent on sensory overload as Part One, it gets the point across. I have a couple of friends who are fans of the book and saw the movie early, and they said that while it’s a great action movie, it isn’t really Dune. Certainly it changes things up with regard to the end-stage dynamic between Paul, Chani and Irulan, meaning that any presentation of Dune Messiah (which Villeneuve has not confirmed, but says would be his last production in the long and involved book series) would necessarily be different than the original material, which would be one reason to tell a story when all the fans know how the first one went.

REVIEW: The Flash

Having nothing else to do on Wednesday and not much capacity to do anything but watch TV, I went on “Max” to check out Ezra Miller in The Flash, just to see if it was AS bad as everybody said. And it’s not that bad… but it sure ain’t that good.

The movie starts with an amusing interlude with Batman (Ben Affleck) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) pursuing criminals while they set The Flash (Miller) to save civilians from the property disaster the crooks set off as a distraction. It’s good, but the part where The Flash has to save eight babies (and a nurse, and a therapy dog) from falling out a skyscraper looks less like an ingenious use of superspeed and more like Adam West running an obstacle course to get rid of a bomb.

But Barry Allen’s other motivation besides being a superhero is to try to get his Dad out of prison. As a boy, Barry’s Mom sent his Dad to the store to get a can of tomatoes for dinner, and when he came home, he was found with a knife in his wife’s chest. Working with the Central City Police and secretly supported by Batman through Wayne Enterprises, Barry gets footage from the grocery store but it fails to give his Dad an alibi. But, Barry has learned from his power stunt in the Justice League movie that he can break the lightspeed barrier and travel spacetime. And of course, he tells Bruce Wayne (Batman) his idea, of course Bruce warns him about “The Butterfly Effect” and of course Barry blows him off. He tries to change the past on only the smallest level: He goes to the grocery store when his Mom first visits and plants a can of tomatoes in the shopping cart so she won’t forget it, so that Dad won’t be gone when a stranger comes by the house. And it works: Barry sees his Mom and his Dad together again, safe and sound. But he doesn’t realize that he hasn’t changed the past, he’s created a parallel timeline where there’s another Barry who’s about to visit his parents too.

For the sake of distinction I will henceforth refer to him as “Stoner Barry.” Stoner Barry has all the goofiness of regular Barry but none of the intellectual depth. See, this version of Barry didn’t see his Dad go to prison for a crime he didn’t commit, so he wasn’t motivated to develop a career in police forensics. That’s another point Bruce made to Barry in their conversation: “Our scars make us who we are.” (Also, our scars remind us that the past is real.) As it turned out not only did Barry go back to the point at which he would have gotten his powers in a lab accident, this is about the same time that the Kryptonian force under General Zod (Michael ‘I’m Only In It For The Money’ Shannon) came to demand the appearance of the last Kryptonian on Earth. So apparently deciding he hasn’t done ENOUGH damage to the timeline, Barry takes Stoner Barry to the police lab to repeat the incident that gave him the Speed Force, except that when he does so, lightning strikes him and then Stoner Barry so that Barry loses his powers but Stoner Barry gets them. So now Barry has to be the rational adult trying to show this goofball how to use his powers and the speedsuit.

In his web searches, Barry realizes that Victor Stone is not a cyborg in this timeline and Aquaman and Wonder Woman don’t even exist. But Stoner Barry’s roommates tell him Batman is real, he’s just been in retirement for years. So the two Barrys take a taxi to the dilapidated Wayne Manor and get in a fight with an old martial-artist hermit who turns out to be – Michael Keaton.

In not too much time, the boys convince this Bruce Wayne to shave his hair and beard and put on the rubber Batsuit again. They trace the location of the Kryptonian refugee to a prison in deep Russia, break in and instead of Superman they see an apparently starving young girl. Barry insists on saving her. She is, of course, Kara Zor-El (Sasha Calle), kept for examination by the Russians under kryptonite lasers and deprived of sunlight. Of course, Batman gets the team to the surface, and she immediately begins to kick ass.

Batman, Supergirl and Stoner Barry all work together to (eventually) restore Barry’s Speed Force, and the four heroes fly out to where the Kryptonian forces are fighting the US Army in the desert. And this leads to much CGI ass-kicking and stuntwork, but with only one Kryptonian against dozens, the fight is against the heroes. Batman is killed and Zod stabs Supergirl, injecting her with a probe to harvest her DNA as the basis for a program to terraform Earth to Krypton standards, which will kill all existing life.

The two Barrys go back to the time nexus to rewind things to the middle of the fight and change events, but it doesn’t work: Batman is saved (temporarily) but they can’t stop the Kryptonians from taking Supergirl. Eventually Barry realizes this is the fixed event he can’t avoid, and he needs to give up. And Stoner Barry, who has been brought all this way for nothing, refuses to accept this, and won’t let him leave.

This conflict causes the various multiverses to begin crashing in on each other, and at this point the audience sees a whole bunch of crossovers, including George Reeves, Christopher Reeve AND Helen Slater, Adam West, and the Hair Club For Supermen Nicholas Cage, FIGHTING A GIANT SPIDER.

Strange, in the middle of all this fan service, given that DC obviously doesn’t care about paying actors for using their likenesses with cheap CGI, they didn’t bring in Grant Gussin from The Flash series on CW. (After all, Miller did appear there once.) But that probably would have been an unfavorable comparison. Gussin’s Barry may have been an overbearing do-gooder much of the time, but he was a real four-color hero and not a schlemiel.

In any event, Barry overcomes the internal conflict and manages to go back to the day of his mom’s murder, taking the can of tomatoes out of her cart, then going back “home.” At which point, he’s summoned to court in his Dad’s case, because the Wayne Enterprises tape has revealed new evidence. Apparently when Barry put the can of tomatoes back he put it on a different shelf, so when his Dad came to the store, he looked up to get it, so his face was on the security cam, and that proved his alibi. So Barry at least saved one of his parents. After Barry has a brief celebration with his girlfriend, Bruce Wayne comes to give congratulations. Except, now he’s George Clooney.

Oh, sorry. I guess there were spoilers.

I have to agree with some of the critics who point out that for all the comic-relief qualities that made Miller’s performance such a ray of sunshine in the Justice League movie(s), the same approach makes them seem like a nervous klutz when they have to carry their own movie.

The other issue is that just as Barry keeps trying to rewind the past, fans have already seen this before. It was called Flashpoint, a comic book crossover in which Barry’s attempts to save his family had disastrous effects. Flashpoint was one of the major story arcs in the later DC Universe, much as The Infinity Gauntlet is for Marvel, and like it has been re-used for various other media: graphic novels, TV cartoons, and the CW series. And in most of these cases the results were better stories.

The really odd thing is that as this script was hashed and re-hashed over years, in typical Hollywood fashion, two of the listed co-writers (who were previously on track to direct The Flash) were John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, who were also directors and co-writers of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. But the silliness worked in that movie, because it was more consistent with the tone, where the characters were basically gentleman rogues and no one really got hurt. It’s a little more jarring when you have the comedy team of Allen and Allen in scenarios where people are getting shot up with assault rifles or skewered with warblades. You would think that the Dungeons & Dragons movie would not have a code versus killing and the superhero movie would… but this IS the Snyderverse.

Or rather, it WAS the Snyderverse. The problem with building up such a massive movie is that if it doesn’t make an even more massive profit, it becomes one of the biggest bombs in Hollywood history. When you combine that with the even more disappointing Black Adam (‘Finally, The ROCK – HAS COME BACK! – to the video bin’), The Flash is clearly the nail in the coffin to the “DC Extended Universe” and makes it that much more easier for producer-director James Gunn to put his stamp on everything. It’s not impossible, but increasingly unlikely, that Ezra Miller and Gal Gadot will be brought back. They’ve already recast Superman and Lois. And the people who actually liked the Snyderverse (apparently, not enough of them) are all bitching about how James Gunn is going to fuck everything up. I say, if the results are like Peacemaker, then they’re going to be even more fucked up than The Flash but more dramatically coherent.

Call it Not News

Lie- lie to my face

Tell me it ain’t no thing, that’s what I wanna hear

Take your lie to the grave

That’s what an old friend told me, look what it did for him

The truth hurts so bad, wouldn’t you say?
So why tell it?
If ignorance is bliss, then I’m in

Heaven now

-Queens of the Stone Age, “3s and 7s”

I saw a post recently on Facebook saying that there was one consequence of the last Writer’s Guild strike that hasn’t been considered. NBC’s The Apprentice was losing ratings and they were going to drop Donald Trump’s contract, but the sudden need for “unscripted” TV meant they had to go back to him as the star of a new show, which was how we got Celebrity Apprentice, which was how Trump managed to get back into the public profile, also the same time he started pushing “birther” conspiracy theories about President Obama, which got a lot more credibility because TV producers who knew better pushed Donald Trump as though he were actually an expert source on finance, or on anything.

It is not newsworthy, or a surprise, that given a microphone and a stacked audience Trump will act like an orangoutan with Tourette’s Syndrome that fell fifty feet, landed on his head and is still able to talk, but what is surprising and newsworthy is that CNN, after everything we have learned about Trump in seven years, gave him a free platform AGAIN. Which raises the question of which entity is more stupid and desperate for attention.

Seriously: FUCK CNN. I blame these whores for the Trump presidency more than Russia, more than Hillary Clinton’s incompetence, more than James Comey and even more than Fox News. You would expect Russia and Fox to shill for a wannabe fascist. It took CNN to make him respectable. It took CNN to tell Middle America, “Hey, this is a REAL candidate. This is a centrist candidate. This is a serious alternative to Hillary Clinton, not like these minor party candidates that we’re NOT giving free air time.”

You could make the case that in 2015-2016, the people at CNN who knew Trump as a New York gadabout still liked him and didn’t know what he was really going to turn into, but they can’t say that now. Not after the Russky traitor bitch deliberately tried to destroy America’s (small r) republican system of government and showed he was willing to kill his own vice president to do it by crowdsurfing a mob of Confederate sympathizers. You can cover him, yes, because it’s the Republican Party that made the decision to keep him and that is a newsworthy (if repugnant) decision in itself, but that does not obligate you to enable him, as you (CNN and other media) did in the past. Keep in mind, this is a guy who used his presidential administration to help Saudi Arabia cover up and minimize the butcher death of Jamal Khashoggi (a Saudi-Turkish journalist working with the Washington Post) because he’d exposed critical truths about their government. This is a guy who routinely “jokes” about the violence he’d like to inflict on the press. And yet, CNN, like the Republican Party, comes crawling back to a man whom they know would have them killed just because it serves his purposes, or simply out of amusement.

What should we call them now?
Conservative News Network?
Call it Not News?
Cucking for Neo Nazis?

I mean really, it raises the question of why Trump needs to rape women when CNN will blow him and then bend over for free.

The thing is that whatever one might think of “conservatism”, it is clearly animating the Supreme Court, and several state governments, and requires some kind of philosophy. But that philosophy apparently doesn’t sell itself. You have Republicans in Congress like Nancy Mace and Dan Crenshaw who might be just as hardcore Christianist as the rest of them, but they still have enough brain cells to realize there’s a world outside their self-cultivated perceptions, and they need to negotiate with it, like everybody else does. But those aren’t the people running the Republican Party, let alone the Susan Collins-Mitt Romney types who clearly grew up in a different era. What’s running the Republican Party? The kind of goombas who wanted to watch what happened Wednesday on CNN, which is exactly why CNN presented it. You have an entire political party in this “two” party system that doesn’t believe in politics, it believes in “reality TV”, two words that do not belong in the same solar system, let alone the same phrase. They don’t want a government that works for anyone else, they don’t even want a government that works for them, they just want a circus. They just want Big Chief Ook-Ook Gorilla to dunk barrels on the mean old liberals and pound his chest and yell, so they can cheer along with all the other chimps in the audience. What they want, clearly what they’ve always wanted, is to turn the government of the most powerful country in the world into The Apprentice. And as long as they’re the ones who say how the Republican Party moves, anybody else who’s running for the Republican nomination is just another contestant on The Apprentice and Trump is still the host. And the grand prize for the winner is the chance to be Trump’s running mate in 2024, which as we know means being the designated patsy for Trump’s mob of mouth-breathers to kill when he needs someone to blame for his own incompetence.

But given the position that CNN has taken, it is clearly not trying to present “objective journalism” in giving Trumpism “equal time,” it’s deliberately appealing to that dysfunctional mindset, and that in itself is not an accident. Which raises the question as to what a concerned public is to do about all this.

Because clearly Chris Licht and the other suits at CNN think they can appeal to a Trump-friendly audience in the wake of Fox News settling its defamation lawsuit and then firing star anchor Tucker Carlson. But that debacle shows us how to combat this media misinformation campaign, given how the Fox case and the fall of Carlson was the main media story prior to CNN allowing Mr. Attention Hound to stink up the TV screen again.

The idea that one can shift the “Clinton News Network” rightward on the premise that that will make it more centrist is a bit disingenuous in this day and age. CNN was the only cable news network that still had pretenses to journalistic objectivity or objectivity on the part of its anchors. At both Fox and MSNBC hosts are expected to wear their politics on their sleeve. And that in itself has not killed journalism. Modern people find it more credible that a journalist would have an opinion than not. And one can have an opinion that Donald Trump did good things for this country, did good things for the economy, gave you the Supreme Court Justices you wanted, and all that. That’s no sin. Those are opinions. In some cases, they might even be backed up by fact. But you can’t say you’re violating journalism or committing fraud just for having an opinion. You ARE committing fraud if you present information that is opposite to what you know to be true, and you present that misinformation as real news.

CNN might not be deliberately presenting the opposite of truth as fact – yet – but it’s a small distinction when you allow Trump a whole hour to present his anti-truth with just Kaitlin Collins going “that’s not true” over and over again while she gets laughed down by his fan club of hooting redcaps. That was the technical concession that made the event “journalism” rather than a Trump campaign event. But as with the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit on Fox, there’s a pretty obvious effort to slant coverage, not on the basis of what is known to be fact, but to appeal to or retain a certain viewer demographic.

The difference with Fox is that we not only have a difference of opinion (as in, ‘should a man who plotted violent insurrection against an election certification even BE treated as a legitimate candidate, let alone given a friendly platform’) but direct evidence, obtained largely through the plaintiff’s discovery process, that Fox knew the votes weren’t there to save Trump’s re-election in 2020, but presented the false narrative that Dominion in particular had skewed their voting machines to take votes from him. In the process they also discovered certain embarrassing things about the company’s internal politics, such as, Tucker Carlson and other people at Fox actually hated and feared Trump but pushed the Dominion lie because they could see that telling the truth about Trump would alienate their “core audience“. Notably, as the Dominion case reached summary judgment, the presiding judge told Fox that if the case went to trial, Fox (the defendant) would not be allowed to make the argument that their coverage had news value, saying “I would have to tell the jury that newsworthiness is not a defense to defamation.”

Remember what Michelle Wolf said: “You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him. I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks, or vodka, or water, or college, or ties, or Eric… but he has helped YOU. He has helped you sell your papers, and your books, and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him. “

Fox News, in particular, was so obsessed with catering to the Trump fan club that they crossed the line from simply advocating for a controversial position to presenting the opposite of fact as news. And when you do that, and do so at the expense of a party that is in position to sue you, you can get taken to court and you CAN lose. As Trump has also learned. Just because you have a right to say something doesn’t mean other people don’t have the right to call you on falsehood, and you can’t call it “news” when it’s really defamation.

Because if there was a bright side to CNN’s desperate appeal to the Trump audience, it’s that the most newsworthy aspect of the Wednesday town hall was Trump continuing to dig holes for himself. He told Collins that he had a right to threaten Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger: “I said ‘you owe me votes’ because the election was rigged,” said Trump, speaking to moderator Kaitlan Collins. “That election was rigged, and if this call was bad, why didn’t [Raffensperger] and his lawyers hang up?” An Atlanta newspaper quoted: “My initial thoughts were, this isn’t going to help,” said Caren Myers Morrison, a law professor at Georgia State University and a former prosecutor. “I think it’s some good corroborating evidence.” When Collins asked him if he’d shown the documents he took to Mar-a-Lago to anyone else after leaving the White House, he said “Not really.” When she asked him to clarify, he just said “Not that I can think of.” And just the day after he got found guilty of sexual assault and defamation in the E. Jean Carroll case, Trump joshed about it to the CNN audience, using his go-to insult of “whack job” and insulting both her and her husband, to such an extent that Carroll’s lawyer told the New York Times they have cause to consider another lawsuit – one in which CNN might be held liable because they knew (or could easily guess) what Trump would say in advance.

See, this is why the Candyass Caligula spent most of that trial at his European golf properties even after the judge gave him the opportunity to testify in his own defense even after his defense rested. Because they couldn’t really offer a defense when Trump’s conduct is public record, and while he can tell any lie he wants outside a court, he knows he’s legally liable for what he says in deposition – and when he did make one it helped the case against him. If he lies in public OR tells the truth in court it makes things worse for him, because that’s what happens when you compulsively commit crimes. And it’s one thing to be liable in civil cases, but when your big mouth implicates you in plans to cancel an election that would remove you from power, that’s likely to lead to prison time.

Assuming, of course, that someone in Washington, New York or Atlanta cares to prosecute.

REVIEW: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

As I had said in my review of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, while this series of movies may be a lot of silly fun, that movie was also surprisingly deep in its reference to trauma. Director James Gunn’s ability to blend silliness, violence and dark character history became that much more clear in Peacemaker, the HBO series about a neo-fascist jerkwad that became more and more meaningful as the story went on.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 starts from another dark place with ominous musical cues. It seems as though it’s going to look at Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) drinking himself into depression over losing Gamora (Zoe Saldana) who is still alive, but as the alternate-history Gamora who was still loyal to Thanos and joined the Ravagers after he died. But the focus is really on the life and history of Rocket (Bradley Cooper) who gets hunted by Warlock (Will Poulter), a bioengineered superman in service to The High Evolutionary (Chukwudi Iwuji from Peacemaker). It turns out the Evolutionary is the one who “uplifted” Rocket from Earth raccoon stock, but did so with torture and implants, along with a bunch of other animals who were turned into misfit toys. Put in a coma by Warlock, Rocket remembers how he made deep friendships in the animal pens and also attracted the attention of his master when he figured out a genetic flaw in his newer creations. Once the Evolutionary integrates Rocket’s idea and improves his creations, he tells Rocket that he doesn’t need him and the other experiments on his new world, and plans to harvest his brain the next day. This of course, leads to tragedy, but Rocket escapes.

In the present, the Guardians realize there’s a code in Rocket’s cyberware that will kill him if they try using medical tech to heal his wounds, and so trace the code to the bio-fortress where the Evolutionary has his main genetic engineering business. This gets the Ravagers involved, which brings Gamora temporarily back into the team, even though she doesn’t care for Peter, and a certain amount of this movie is Peter coming to terms with that fact. In the process of saving Rocket, the Guardians find out just how ruthless and amoral The High Evolutionary is, and what the stakes for defeating him are.

Though there are quite a few scenes where it looks like someone is going to bite it, it is a spoiler to say that this movie is a happy ending for all of the main characters. But there is also a sad finality, as some of them decide to move on. Over the last couple of movies (including the hilarious Disney Plus ‘holiday special‘) the Guardians set up a real community in the “Knowhere” base, and the project has become a lot bigger than just five characters. It continues on. The characters continue on, but James Gunn has made it clear that this is his last Guardians movie and last project for Marvel Studios, after they jacked him around and fired him over politically incorrect social media posts he made back when social media was barely a thing. Now after Peacemaker, Gunn’s been given free rein to handle DC Comics’ movie line, and now social media is trying to cancel him because he decided to kill the Zack Snyder shared universe that wasn’t going anywhere to begin with and was probably going to be killed by DC anyway. While some of these fans don’t like Gunn’s quirks (like casting his wife and his brother a lot) he actually manages to combine the good humor and heart that are in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and were lacking in the DC Extended Universe with the violent action and dark themes that are lacking in the MCU and maybe a little too common in the DCEU.

So while some of the Snyder fans may bitch (and if there were that many of them, DC might not have done what it did), I’m looking forward to seeing what James Gunn will do with those comics characters, like maybe returning Michael Rosenbaum as Lex Luthor or casting Dave Bautista as Solomon Grundy.

REVIEW: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

The reason that so many role-playing game groups quote Monty Python and the Holy Grail – too much so, a couple of my friends say – is because Holy Grail is to fantasy role-playing what This Is Spinal Tap is to rock musicians: At some point, you will see a scene where you think: “My group has done this.”

The joke is the contrast between the medieval fantasy romance of The Lord of the Rings, Excalibur or even Camelot versus the reality of what modern people actually do when they’re roleplaying in such a world. Well, the great thing about the new Dungeons & Dragons movie is that it acknowledges this right off the bat.

Unlike the earlier atrocity released under the D&D name, this production (Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, henceforth to be called Honor Among Thieves, or D&D HAT) actually has some coordination with both game fans and the Wizards of the Coast company that has run D&D for years. For instance, the fictional world is the Forgotten Realms, the dimension that D&D has been using for its default setting since before Wizards took over. When Chris Pine’s character is described as an ex-Harper, Realms fans know that the Harpers are a group unique to that setting, basically an organization of do-gooders whose charter members actually were bards and other musicians.

Elgin (Pine) is a bard who left the Harpers after their enemies, the Red Wizards of Thay, tried to assassinate him and ended up killing his wife with a magical poison. So he gets his best buddy, the barbarian Holga (Michelle Rodriguez), elder thief Forge (Hugh Grant) and bumbling comic relief sorcerer ~~Snails~~ Simon (Justice Smith) to go on a quest for a magical plot device that will bring his wife back. This goes awry, Simon and Forge escape, Elgin and Holga are captured, and once they escape prison, they try to get back with Forge – now the regent lord of the city of Neverwinter – only to be double-crossed again by Forge, whose court wizard turns out to be another Red Wizard of Thay.

This leads to another quest to get the plot device, now combined with a need to get back at Forge, and of course this quest turns into a side quest to get another item they need to finish the first quest, and it becomes kind of a heist scenario, as most D&D games kind of are. The difference being that both the heroes and villain are less lethal and more altruistic than most D&D teams in my experience.

The acting is at least passable, the special effects are decent and there’s a lot of action and tricks. Again, the morality is more on the level of a Hollywood movie than true Swords & Sorcery, let alone High Fantasy, and the largely unserious tone might turn off more serious D&D players and wargamers. But it also is serious about the background material, with many monsters and spells that players will recognize. It might be a Hollywood action movie, but it’s a GOOD Hollywood action movie.

Indeed, my sister Natalie took me to this movie because she wanted to see it, and she really liked it despite not knowing anything about D&D besides what I’ve told her secondhand. Our other sister had told her she was interested in seeing it, and I would say that’s the best endorsement: If you can come into this movie not knowing anything about D&D or the Forgotten Realms, and it’s still an entertaining movie on its own terms, then that’s a success.

REVIEW: Strange New Worlds (Season One)

I took the plunge and got Paramount Plus (since I could just add it to my existing Amazon Prime account) and eventually binged Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season One to see if it held to the standard it had in the publicly released pilot.

Some impressions:

The girl playing Spock’s fiancee (Gia Sandhu) is better at doing Leonard Nimoy’s raised-eyebrow lift than Ethan Peck (the guy currently playing Spock).

If there’s anything I don’t like about SNW, it’s how they changed the Gorn into basically a race of space-faring Xenomorphs who cannot be reasoned with, which is especially odd because the one Original Series episode that used the Gorn (‘Arena’) started with the premise that they were a savage race but then Kirk found out they had their own reasons to feel threatened by the Federation, and the encounter managed to work out peacefully.
The security chief La’an (Christine Chong) is clearly the least sympathetic character, though I also think that’s on purpose. This is that much more obvious in the episodes where Chong is allowed to play against type.

Strange New Worlds was advertised as being more episodic (like the original Star Trek or TNG) in comparison to Discovery or Picard which have been focused on season-arcing plots. This is not exactly true. There’s no over-arcing “Big Bad/Bad Wolf” motif in Season 1, but there are several character arcs that recur over the course of the season, such as the courtship of Spock and T’Pring (which the audience knows will end badly), and the parallel flirtation between Spock and Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush), teasing what might be an interesting Season 2 with the villain played by Jesse James Keitel being married to Spock’s half-brother, the villain of Star Trek V. I mean, they could screw up that premise but I doubt they could screw it up as much as that movie did.

They finally gave a background to Number One (Rebecca Romijn), a character from the ’60s pilot who was so much of a cipher that the script didn’t give her a name other than “Number One.” Even in this production, her given name “Una” is just a synonym for “one.” Prior to SNW, fan fiction had assumed that Number One’s artificial identity meant she comes from some Human offshoot culture, and that turns out to be the case: Una is an Illyrian, from a Human nation that deals with the Federation but cannot join it because they use genetic engineering as applied technology when the Federation maintains a ban on it,due to the Eugenics Wars and the legacy of superman dictators like Khan Noonien Singh. What complicates things is that La’an considers Number One to be her role model as a Starfleet officer, but her surname is Noonien-Singh, which accounts for much of her character angst. (‘What’s your name, soldier?’ ‘Bill. Bill Hitler. No relation.’) La’an and Dr. M’Benga agree to keep Una’s secret but when it comes out, Una is arrested by Starfleet in a season-ending cliffhanger.

The engineer discovers that M’Benga (Babs Olusanmokun) has been using power from the transporter, and the doctor eventually tells Una that he has a young child with a fatal blood disease, and he smuggled her aboard in the transporter, keeping her in beam-lock as a makeshift suspended animation while he works on a cure. He takes her out periodically to share time and to read her favorite fairy tale book. This mini-arc gets resolved in the most deliberately silly episode of the season.

Pike (Anson Mount) remains haunted by his vision of the future, knowing that he saves young cadets from a radiation accident but is then condemned to live the rest of his life in a power chair that only allows him to click “YES” or “NO” (because in 1967, the effects department at NBC couldn’t imagine the interface system that Stephen Hawking had access to by the mid-1980s). However he is not aware of how he ends up after that (which was the story of original Trek’s ‘The Menagerie’) so he assumes that that vision is the end of his life. He also seems remarkably willing to discuss this issue with other people, given that the events surrounding Discovery Season 2 are supposed to be a Federation secret on par with the existence of Talos IV.

Pike’s latest attempt to thwart this fate leads to “A Quality of Mercy”, which is probably the best overall episode in terms of the level of its stakes and how it reinforces both Pike’s sacrifice and the bond he makes with Spock. Unfortunately, Paul Wesley (guest starring as Captain Kirk) through no fault of his own, less resembles William Shatner than Jim Carrey playing William Shatner on In Living Color.

That particular episode also implied that Kirk was ultimately the better captain where it counted and that it was better for the universe that Pike didn’t save himself from his future. In Strange New Worlds, they’ve made Pike a happy medium between the American military mindset of Captain Kirk and the compassionate humanism of Captain Picard, but in this alternate-timeline run of original Trek’s “Balance of Terror” episode, Pike ultimately decided to let the Romulans live, when the failure of their mission in the main timeline was what stopped a general war.

I really like the cast, especially Mount. If I squint hard enough, I can almost imagine him as Jeffrey Hunter. However, Ethan Peck just doesn’t come off as Spock to me. He doesn’t remind me of Leonard Nimoy or even Zachary Quinto. As I’ve said, it matters less when you have new actors for characters the audience has only seen once or twice (Pike, Number One, M’Benga) and more when you have characters who’ve been around most of the series (Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Chapel). Again, I LIKE these people, and I like what they’re doing with the characters, but they don’t really bring to mind the Original Series.

Strange New Worlds actually IS what Discovery was promoted as – an attempt to take pre-Kirk Star Trek in a new direction with modern sensibilities and production values – and while in the back of my mind it’s just not enough like original Trek to me, it’s good enough on its own terms to where it’s worth watching. Not just that, it’s better Trek in one season than half of Discovery and two-thirds of Star Trek: Picard. And now we’ve got the preview for Season 2, which looks to be much the same, only more so. Plus, the Klingons are back, and their makeup DOESN’T suck.

REVIEW: Star Trek: Picard (Season 3)

The main triumph of Star Trek: Picard‘s final season, after an “okay” first season and a completely unsatisfactory Season 2, is that it leaves fans wanting more.

All the more strange that it was largely the product of showrunner Terry Matalas, who was also strongly involved in Picard Season 2. But as Matalas put it in interviews, he thought that just as there was more that could be done showing Picard’s development in relative real time years after Star Trek: Nemesis, he also thought that that movie wasn’t a proper send-off to the Next Generation crew, and likened their reunion in this season to the final adventure of the original cast in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Which figures, because in comparison to the deliberately low-key Season 1 and the wandering Season 2, Season 3 Picard (like Star Trek VI) was a tightly focused narrative that retained action and suspense even as the threat in the story was only gradually revealed.

I have always considered Amanda Plummer to be awkward and irritating. In this case it actually worked. But she was good enough in portraying the pain and vengefulness of her character that Vadic’s death at that point in the storyline actually seemed anti-climax. That, and bringing back the fan favorite characters Ro Larren and Shelby just to kill them off as soon as they appeared were the only false notes of the season.

And then the whole thing turned out to be an intricate Borg plot, which explained a great deal about both Jack Crusher and Picard, but it also required a little bit more explanation that a casual viewer might have needed. First, the Borg villain was the original Borg Queen voiced by Alice Krige in the First Contact movie, as opposed to the Picard Season 2 Queen played by the late Annie Wersching, whom the crew picked up from a dystopian alternate history and who ended up merging with Agnes Jurati before the end of that story. Second, the reason the Borg Queen was so screwed up here is actually because of the series finale of Star Trek: Voyager, when Kathryn Janeway infected her with a terrible pathogen, which in the Picard finale is revealed to have killed most of the Collective as the Queen was forced to “cannibalize” them for her own survival. So really, this should have been a great tie-in to Voyager as well as The Next Generation, but according to fanzine articles, they couldn’t bring in Kate Mulgrew, or use Tim Russ for more than a couple of scenes, cause apparently Terry Matalas and the other producers just didn’t have the budget.

And then in only one year, Jack got through cadet training in time to join the USS Titan‘s crew, after they rechristened the ship the Enterprise (G). Which on one hand is cool, but on the other hand is the ultimate erasure of Captain Shaw (Todd Stashwick).

But in the wake of this optimistic finale, and the success of this season, there’s a lot of buzz (encouraged by Matalas) to continue using the younger characters (with Raffi and Captain Seven) in a continuation series, projected title Star Trek: Legacy. I’d even heard they were going to try some way to bring back the martyred Shaw, who started off as the season’s by-the-book Starfleet bad guy but became a fan favorite once people realized he was right much of the time.

The fact that they could present an unsympathetic character and then round him out (as they did with Vadic) is a good example of how this season used all of its elements correctly, as opposed to wasting people like Picard Season 2 did. Using Raffi (Michelle Hurd) and her story arc to bring in Worf (Michael Dorn) as opposed to bringing him straight into the main cast, worked really well and showed how both characters could work in the shadows, as well as displaying their sense of humor. The repeated return of Brent Spiner as Dr. Soong’s last “golem” actually had a clever resolution to the Data/Lore conflict. LeVar Burton as Geordi LaForge got to display more deep emotion in his scenes than he ever did in the whole Next Generation series. And this season, by extension the entire series, was a vindication for Jeri Ryan and Seven of Nine, who was clearly brought into Voyager for blatant sex appeal but (let’s face it) gave that show some much-needed edge.

The last couple episodes were a bit pat and “fan service” but they actually worked, and like The Next Generation’s series finale, created a satisfying ending for the main characters while still setting up possibilities for the future. And again, the producers really seems to be trying to make that happen, although the network budget constraints that killed some of their ideas might prevent “Legacy” from taking off. Still, it was announced earlier this year that Star Trek: Discovery is ending after next season, and the fact that Picard Season 3 was both popular with fans and a high-quality storyline should give more momentum to future Trek projects, as opposed to how the sails were deflated with the last appearance of the Next Generation cast in Star Trek: Nemesis. Not to mention, the other seasons of Star Trek: Picard.

REVIEW: Cocaine Bear

Cocaine Bear is a movie about a bear on cocaine. It is based on a true story. Sorta. In 1985 a botched cocaine run dropped a 75 pound load of cocaine in the Tennessee wilderness and later investigators in neighboring Georgia found a black bear that died after ripping through all the containers of coke. The medical examiner decided to have the animal preserved, and it still exists under the nickname “Pablo Eskobear.” Cocaine Bear takes an amusing but minor incident and turns it into a story that has about as much relationship with the facts as Bohemian Rhapsody has to the history of the band Queen, except that instead of Freddie Mercury running around on Quaaludes, you have a giant bear running berserk on cocaine. I mean, that’s almost as dangerous as a human on cocaine.

The bear in question never got the chance to attack any humans, and the film points out that normally black bears do not. However, in this story there is a combination of stray travelers doing the stupid thing and the contacts of the drug smuggler trying to recoup their loss, all going into the forest and becoming targets. Cocaine Bear is directed by Elizabeth Banks, the actor turned filmmaker who was also behind Pitch Perfect 2. It is also noteworthy as the last role of the late Ray Liotta, the star of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, which had maybe as much profanity as this movie. Well, the level of profanity is probably about right, given that the human characters are being chased by a giant bear on cocaine.

Some reviewers have presented this movie as a land version of Jaws, only played for laughs. Why is it somehow funny when the monster is a bear? Well, it’s a matter of human conditioning. We see animals like fish and insects as alien, and so they are disturbing as horror subjects. Whereas soft, fuzzy animals are cute. Cats, even great cats, are soft, fuzzy animals and therefore attractive. Bears are soft, fuzzy animals. Bears are cute. They are also giant omnivores. So a black bear is a land mammal that is simultaneously terrifying and adorable. Much like Aubrey Plaza.

It is probably a spoiler to say that the movie still has a happy ending for some of its characters. Including the bear. This is another change from the historical fact, because a black bear cannot eat 75 pounds of cocaine and survive, unlike Guns n’ Roses or Republican politicians.

So go see Cocaine Bear. It’s the story of a bear.

On cocaine.

REVIEW: Star Trek: Picard Season 3 (Episode 1)

I recently reviewed Star Trek: Picard Season 2 in preparation for seeing Season 3. Like a lot of people I was quite disappointed with the second arc’s arbitrary plotting and implausible writing and with this season, advertised as the last one, promising a reunion with the main cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation, it’s hoped that things will pick back up.

Shortly after the events of Season 2, Picard has finally developed a relationship with his aide, Laris (Orla Brady) and is planning to go on a trip with her to a Romulan aid colony. But the episode actually starts with Picard’s former love, Dr. Beverly Crusher (Gates McFadden) in deep space, manning a starship by herself with apparently one other person. She fends off an attack by mysterious aliens and is seriously wounded, and sends a coded message to Picard, through his old Enterprise-D comm badge, in order to avoid the notice of modern Starfleet. Picard recruits good old Will Riker (Jonathan Frakes), who confirms that none of the old crew have seen Beverly in about 20 years. Riker quickly decodes the message and finds Crusher’s coordinates, and decides to use his Starfleet connections to get them a ride out to the site at the edge of Federation space. This requires a bit of deception on more than one person’s part. At length Picard and Riker take a shuttle out to Beverly’s ship and are quickly ambushed but not before finding out that her passenger is her 20-year old son (Ed Speleers) – whom no one knew about. This raises the question of who this guy’s father is, although he has an English accent, which I think is a big clue.

This emphasis on The Next Generation is probably the direction the series should have taken all along (Episode 1 is actually called ‘The Next Generation’) but the series is still using Star Trek: Picard‘s main original character, Admiral Picard’s former Starfleet aide, Raffi Musiker (Michelle Hurd). She has become a street-level operative for Starfleet Intelligence and is shown trying (and failing) to stop a terrorist attack against a Starfleet facility. How this relates to the main plot has yet to be shown. It also has yet to be shown how the other principals of TNG are drawn into all this, although the navigator on Riker’s old ship happens to be Geordi LaForge’s daughter.

Terry Matalas was the main showrunner of Season 2, although on this story he seems to have done a complete re-boot, for instance putting the title sequence at the end (like on Marvel movies) and putting the secondary credits in the same font as the Next Generation credits. They’re clearly trying as much as possible to get back to the stuff fans liked about Picard and the Next Generation era, and so far it works, largely because of Jonathan Frakes’ swashbuckling spirit. It’s also got some of the more adult subject matter we’ve come to expect from this show and Star Trek’s other streaming media. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens next.