jducoeur

During my morning runs, I watch something on TV -- more often than not, that's when I binge something. For the past few months, that's been Discovery (on Paramount+), one of the latest generation of Star Trek shows. As of this week, I'm now caught up through Season 4. So let's do a review of the series so far.

tl;dr -- one of the better incarnations of the Star Trek mythos. Big, epic, and thoroughly modern in the best ways.

Important: I'm going to take the history of Star Trek for granted here, and I'm not going to go into any depth about it. The story has been running for 50 years, and there's just too much to try to get into. You do not need to know all of the (many) previous series in order to watch this one -- just be aware that there are a fair number of callbacks to it scattered throughout, since it is very much the same universe.

Descriptive stuff first -- I'm going to avoid major spoilers in this post (take note: spoilers are allowed in comments!), but here's the some of broad sweep of it.

Discovery is, first and foremost, the story of Michael Burnham. Like all Star Trek it's an ensemble show, but she's very much the central protagonist. It's not giving much away to say that, not long after the beginning of the story, she is basically public enemy number one, having screwed up big time and caused the Federation massive trouble. In no small part, this is the story of her gradual redemption and finding her place in the galaxy.

The series begins as a prequel to Original Series Star Trek, set around ten years before the first stories of James T. Kirk et al. There is one central connection: Michael is Spock's sister. Okay, adopted sister. Yes, she's entirely human, but was raised on Vulcan for half her life. Her self-identity is complicated and a little messed up -- a good deal of her arc is about her learning to become less Vulcan, and more comfortable in her own skin as a human.

(If you are now saying, "Wait -- what? It's impossible that we've never heard of her before", trust me: that's far from the only aspect of the first two seasons that will leave you saying that. Suffice it to say, they do provide an explanation, at the end of season two. I think the explanation is absolutely terrible, but they don't ignore the problem. Be prepared to just accept a monumental hand-wave, and move on.)

From the outset, the story postulates one new bit of Treknobabble that you need to accept: the Spore Drive. This is based on the great cosmic network of mushrooms that connect all of space, and lets the ship travel instantly around via that. Discovery is the only ship in existence with, essentially, galactic-scale teleportation.

Yes, yes, I know -- the science is deeply ridiculous in places. I'm telling you this now so that you're prepared to roll with it. Remember, Star Trek is rarely hard science fiction: as has always been true, it's space opera, and the pseudo-science is there to serve the story.

Like so much of Trek, the series starts kind of weak, and improves as it goes along. Season one is nowhere near as bad as the first season of Next Generation, but the characters are still finding their feet, the cast is still gelling, and the story features a coincidental plot twist that may be more ridiculous than the spore drive. It's a fun ride, but suspension of disbelief is critical for survival here.

Season two is a bit less ridiculous, and gets rather more fun with the introduction of Captain Christopher Pike (on loan from a dry-docked Enterprise) and a hunt for Spock, who also becomes a major character for the rest of the season. (After which they both head off to Strange New Worlds, which starts shortly after this.) But note that this season is timey-wimey to an extreme degree -- Star Trek loves time travel, and it is completely laced through this story.

At the end of season two, things change. A lot. Without going into the details, the Discovery winds up elsewhere, and at that point the story really begins to spread its wings -- no longer constrained by being a prequel, it starts to tell its own tale, and everything finally really clicks.

Season three's tone is very different, as our crew find themselves becoming a family of necessity and choice. The scenario is about as much Star Wars as Star Trek -- a little grittier and darker, more frontier-sy and a little more desperate. It's a very neat change of pace, and helps the series finally start to feel whole. Really, it feels like the series is finally getting to the point: in retrospect, I suspect the series bible always intended to wind up here, and the first two seasons are lining up all the pieces to make it happen.

(Many of my friends will appreciate that, while it's by no means central to season three's plot, the story leans into Star Trek's longstanding anti-capitalist vibe. It's overly reductive to say that the big bad of season three is capitalism, but that's certainly an element.)

Season three ends quite cleanly -- if they had decided to stop there, I would have said that it was a good resolution. But it did continue into season four: back to a more Star Trek flavor (albeit "elsewhere"), but again serves as a solid and complete story that ends well.

(I will note that season four involves probably the best first-contact story in the history of this mythos -- the first time we've ever dealt with a species that is truly alien. They spend multiple episodes trying to figure out how to even begin to communicate.)

Season five has been announced, and I'm looking forward to it. Discovery works in the modern style, with a granularity of "season" more than "episode", so the stories have a lot of room to breathe, and at this point each season is getting a proper beginning, middle, and end.

Discovery follows the common Star Trek assumption that nobody is simply a bad guy, moreso as it goes along. Things are a bit mixed on that front in the first two seasons (which do have a moderate number of aggressive assholes), but seasons three and four work hard to make clear that the tensions here (and those tensions are cataclysmic at times) are as much about circumstances and differences of worldview and needs as anything. There are a few people who are simply nasty, and some who are hard to agree with, but most are trying to do the right thing by their own lights.

While the science is laughable, and plots in the first two seasons severely far-fetched, the direction is mostly pretty decent, and the acting pretty good. It doesn't hurt that Michelle Yeoh is a major character for the first three seasons, being as deliciously complex as usual, but the show largely rests on Sonequa Martin-Green's Michael. She starts out pretty tightly reserved -- torn between her human and Vulcan heritages and conscious of how much she has to atone for -- but as she grows and figures herself out, she becomes increasingly glorious. Frankly, by the current point in the series she's every bit as much fun as Kirk at his best, and a significantly better person.

The show is notable both for its diversity, and for how lightly it wears that diversity. By the beginning of season three, not a single member of Discovery's command staff is a cishet white man. That's never called out: it's simply a fact you can notice if you're paying attention. The crew is thoroughly multi-racial; the one truly healthy and realistic permanent relationship is between the Chief Engineer and Doctor (both male); and season three adds an enby teen to the core cast. All of this is normal, unremarkable, just the people who inhabit this ship and make up its family. It's pretty wonderful.

Note that Paramount+ also has Short Treks -- a series of 20-minute short stories, which turn out to be closely linked to Discovery. I would recommend watching them in calendar order, interspersed with Discovery as they were originally aired. None of them are essential (I didn't even notice them until I was mostly done), but many of them provide backstory, fleshing out some details that get very briefly glossed over in the main episodes.

(One of these, Calypso, is utterly fascinating, in that it is wildly incompatible with where the series wound up going. It's pretty clearly foreshadowing of how the series bible originally intended the season two/three transition to work. My guess is that Aldis Hodge was supposed to become a central character in season three, and when he proved to be unavailable (due to getting increasingly in-demand), they rethought the story to go in a somewhat different direction. The producers still swear that Calypso will eventually be in-canon -- I'm skeptical, but curious to see if they eventually try to make it so.)

So overall -- it's fun. Even when the first two seasons are being kind of stupid, it's still a fun ride, and I absolutely adored the latter two seasons. Not quite an absolute must-see, but recommended to anyone who likes space opera, and highly recommended to anyone who likes the Star Trek universe.

Star Trek has, as a whole, gotten a bit stuck. Much though I'm enjoying Discovery (in the middle of the second season so far), it's conspicuous that since we got to the end of ST:TNG with the movie Nemesis, most of what has happened has been prequel. The next major thing to happen in that universe was the time-loop that led to the reboot movies. (Which, yes, are canonical with Next Generation: they just take place in an alternate timeline, looping back to an alternate Kirk et al.)

The series Picard, which has run two seasons on Paramount+, is the biggest exception to date. They start more or less in "real time", thirty-some years after the beginning of ST:TNG. I just finished the second series.

tl;dr -- a somewhat weak first season is made up for by an absolutely brilliant second. Worth watching; if you're a Star Trek fan, especially of Next Gen, it's a must-watch. Hang on, and let's get into the details...

The two seasons are distinct novels, and each can be watched on its own. I recommend watching season one, but largely because it establishes the characters, about 2/3 of whom are new. But I should be clear: season two is the main reason why it's worth watching.

Each season is, in its way, a sequel to Star Trek canon. Season one is a very direct sequel to Nemesis, which was probably a mistake: it was a fairly bad movie, and wasn't a great basis for a series.

Around 20 years after the events of Nemesis, things aren't entirely ideal in the Federation. The Romulans, left homeless refugees in the wake of that story, are largely distrusted and benighted outcasts. (Not entirely without reason: they're still Romulans, still prone to paranoia and intrigue. But they're by no means unthinking evil.) Picard is retired, and increasingly viewed by the establishment as a probably-well-meaning but naive old man. And after the events of that movie, true artificial intelligence has been firmly outlawed, for reasons that seem a bit strange and get explored over the course of the story. In general, the Federation has gotten a little inward-looking and paranoid.

Season one is, fundamentally, all about Commander Data. (Who is, yes, dead as of the movie.) He has left a legacy behind, and this is the story of it blossoming. The concept is lovely and inspiring.

Unfortunately, the writing is -- well, let's just say Not Good. The plot is ridiculously complex and a bit shaky, involving a couple of different women who are connected to Data, Romulan scheming, a left-behind Borg cube, and of course (this is Star Trek after all) a Vast Alien Intelligence. It's a fairly fun ride, and the acting and direction aren't bad, but the plot is a mess. I don't regret watching it, but if Season one was all there was, I wouldn't be recommending it.

Fortunately, then comes Season two. This starts a year or two later -- as I said, they are separate novels. All of our characters have had a lot of Life in the intervening time, including two failed romances among our six protagonists.

(Worth noting for some of my friends: one of those was between Seven of Nine and Raffi, one of our new characters: one of the rare lesbian romances in Star Trek canon, and it colors much of Season two. The chemistry between them is delightful.)

And then there is a sudden Borg incursion, and things get Very, Very Weird.

It's hard to say much without spoilers (and I don't want to spoil this), but Season two is classic Star Trek at its best, a story of alternate timelines, time-travel, and trying to preserve the future we know. If Season one was a sequel to Nemesis, Season two is a sequel to the much more fun First Contact. (As well as Assignment: Earth, for those who remember TOS.) Suffice it to say, much of the season takes place in the year 2024, as our heroes fight desperately to prevent the Darkest Timeline.

And it is a far more personal story than Season one. This is a tale of Jean-Luc Picard wrestling with his greatest demons: the Borg Queen, Q, his own fear of personal intimacy, and the family history that led to all of this.

Yes, I did casually toss out Q. This is the final Q story, the one that was alluded to in the final episode of Next Generation. I won't claim that it entirely makes sense, but it wouldn't be a Q story if it did, and emotionally it works quite nicely. Broadly speaking, the plot mostly makes sense, which is about the most one can usually ask of a time-travel story. (There's a pretty clear paradox involved, but handwave-handwave-Q.)

Fundamentally, Season two is the story of three old men -- all facing their mortality, trying to come to grips with their past sins, and figuring out their legacy. Each handles it differently, and the contrast is subtle and well-handled.

Both seasons are chock-a-block with cameos by familiar faces. Many of them are pretty gratuitous (eg, Riker and Troy in Season one), but suffice it to say that, Data's death aside, Brent Spiner is a constant presence in both seasons. And Seven is a core character -- frankly, she's more interesting and important here than she ever has been before, and most seriously kicks butt. But S2 uses its guests more wisely, with Guinan as a significant character, and Alexander Siddig in a magnificently bait-and-switch appearance. (Plus a glorious walk-on in the final episode that explains so much, in a deeply Wrong way.)

I'll be honest: I hope there isn't another season of Picard. There could be (there is room for more stories about him)(edited: and I learned today that yes -- there is definitely one more season coming), but this one is all closure, all the time, and it's a fine way to finish his story. IMO it's one of the best overall seasons of Star Trek to date, and more than makes up for the weak first season. If you care about the universe as a whole, and especially if you enjoyed Next Gen, it's a worthwhile finale.

(Edited to fix my goof from last night, mixing up Nemesis with Insurrection.)

As of this morning, before watching the last episode of Season 3, I was hoping to be able to do an end-of-series full review of Umbrella Academy. I can't really do so. Seasons 1 and 2 end with truly catastrophic WTF cliffhangers that leave no doubt that there has to be another season. That's not quite true here: they could end the series with Season 3, but I really hope Netflix is smart enough to give it one more.

So I'll keep this review brief. The tl;dr is that it's a strong series, that I like more with each passing season. I recommend watching it, with the understanding that it really needs one more time to finish the story.

Summarizing where we are:

The Umbrella Academy is the story of seven "siblings", born of different mothers spontaneously and suddenly in 1989 and raised by the harsh genius billionaire Reginald Hargreeves. Each has a distinct superpower, ranging from Diego's impossible knife-throwing to Allison's ability to control people to Number Five's teleportation.

I'm not even going to bother summarizing the plots of the first three seasons. Suffice it to say, this story is consistently timey-wimey (there is So Much Time Travel), and each season has an overall arc of "We know that the end of the world is coming, we know when it is coming, we know it's kind of our own fault, but we don't know exactly what's going on or how to prevent it." This doesn't get as reductive or repetitive as that sounds, though, because really, this isn't primarily about the plot -- it's about the dynamics of this extremely strange and broken family, and each of them slowly growing up.

The tone is that of a family dramedy with occasional superheroish fights and special effects. It rarely goes into Deep Dark Pathos, but each of our protagonists is fairly messed up in their own way.

Season 1 (which was several years ago) has a moderate case of Netflix Disease -- its ten-episode run sagged in the middle, and felt about three episodes too long. The pacing improved markedly with Season 2 (which takes place in 1963, and has a lot more social consciousness), and Season 3 is really quite tight and bingeable IMO.

The series is based on a comic book; suffice it to say, the show is much better than the source material, both in terms of interesting characters and coherence of story. While the show is extremely weird, and nobody should go in expecting hard science fiction, it has its own internal logic, and works if you just roll with it.

Diversity note: the first-billed actor is Elliot Page, and while it's very much an ensemble show he is always a little bit first among equals. He transitioned in mid-series, and his character follows that arc: the character who begins as Vanya comes out as gay in Season 2, and transitions to Victor in Season 3. This is handled reasonably respectfully: it's not brushed off, but it isn't handled as some sort of woo-woo super-nonsense, nor does it turn into big melodrama. Victor just finally figures out who he is, comes out to the family, there's a mild amount of confusion for a little while, but broadly speaking everybody accepts that, as their lives go, this barely even begins to count as unusual, so they get past it.

Overall, it's a solidly good story so far, and one that has been improving season by season -- I started out mostly liking it, but by now I'm deeply invested and really care about these characters, fucked up though they are, which is always a sign of a good show. The only reason I have to hold back from a whole-hearted recommendation is that the tale isn't quite done yet: the end of Season 3 isn't a cliffhanger per se, but it's not a satisfying resolution either. With that caveat, I recommend checking it out, and joining me in hoping they finish it properly.

Kate is out of town visiting her family and I had an evening to kill, so I decided what the heck: time to mask up and go to an actual cinema. I took the opportunity to catch Doctor Strange before it leaves the big screen.

Summary: not bad, but not one of Marvel's standouts.

As so often with Marvel, the movie suffers from being a little over-stuffed. Most of these movies are adapting something that was a significant epic in the comics, often multiple -- for example, the upcoming Thor movie is clearly smooshing basically the entire Jason Aaron run into a single movie. But this one is built from something like five separate runs of various comics, ranging from relatively recent back to the mid-80s. Madness indeed.

It's not much of a spoiler to say that the movie has three main characters (all of whom show up in the first ten minutes or so): Stephen Strange, America Chavez, and Wanda Maximoff.

Each gets a character arc, of which Strange's is the least interesting -- basically, he learns to be slightly less of a self-absorbed asshole. (Which is a recurring theme with him.)

I'm delighted to see America show up on screen, but annoyed that this movie puts her into the "girl who must be protected" role. By the end we're starting to see the America we know and love, but it's disappointing that it takes the whole movie to get there. (In the comics, she is a badass pretty much from the outset.)

Really, though, Wanda is the most interesting character here. I can't get into details without major spoilers, but suffice it to say, this movie is a direct sequel to the Wandavision TV series, and IMO it's not worth watching this without seeing that first -- this is telling the rest of that story.

(ETA: it's probably also worth watching the What If animated series on Disney+ before this -- it's not essential the way that Wandavision is, but this movie ties into it in multiple ways.)

There is lots of sound and fury here, across multiple worlds, and all the fan service one could wish for, but some of it just annoyed me -- for example, they take one major multi-year Marvel crossover arc and use it almost as a throwaway, with none of the depth that made the corresponding comic interesting. (The same problem as with Civil War -- it isn't quite so much that it is awful in the movie, as that it could have been so much more interesting if they had taken the story more seriously and given it room to breathe. Here, it is downright gratuitous, pulling this story in solely because it is another "multiverse" epic.)

It's notable that the two Scarlet Witch storylines that are loosely adapted here are two of her most important stories, and they are woven together in a way that makes sense; that plays into why I found her story most interesting. (If not happy.)

Overall -- it's fine. It's not one of the actively bad Marvel movies: the story is decently coherent, it has some fine actors (including appearances by a couple of favorites), and it's an interesting yarn chock-full of special effects. If you like typical Marvel movies, you will probably enjoy it. But it's not going to be one of the cultural-landmark movies: it's neither that good, nor that important.

I just finished Season 2 of Russian Doll, on Netflix; it's worth talking about a bit.

Our protagonist is Nadia; Season 1 starts in the bathroom at her 36th birthday party. All her friends are there, as well as other folks -- it's a big uncontrolled party in a decidedly artsy bohemian part of NYC, so not a small close-knit group. She wanders out -- and gets killed.

She finds herself back in the bathroom, a bit freaked out. She leaves the party -- and gets killed.

Yes, it's a dark Groundhog Day scenario, but it leans weird and darkly funny, rather than horrific. It takes her a few tries to even get out of the building alive, but that's just the beginning of the loop, and the struggle to get to tomorrow.

Along the way, she meets Alan, who is almost her complete opposite. She is free-wheeling to an almost pathological degree -- she says what she thinks, and doesn't much care what people think of her -- whereas he is careful and controlled to the point of rather prissy. He is suffering from the same time loop, so the two of them bond over trying to get out of it.

(I should note: this story is not a romance. Nadia and Alan largely wind up friends supporting each other in a crisis, but are, to say the least, really not each others' type.)

The story does come to a resolution, and they do eventually see tomorrow. You can stop there -- Season one is a complete novel unto itself. But it's worth continuing on to Season two, which is when things get weird.

We pick up four years later -- Nadia's 40th birthday is coming up, and she has been visiting with her friend and quasi-aunt Ruthie, who is getting on in years and not entirely healthy. Nadia wanders down to the subway at Astor Place and steps onto subway car 6622, but instead of winding up crosstown, she finds herself in 1982, in the body of her mentally ill and extremely pregnant mother.

Season 2 is all trains and all time travel, all the time. It is not a story of being trapped in the past -- after all, Nadia can just find car 6622 again in order to return to 2022. But she decides that this is her opportunity to learn more about her family history -- mother Nora, grandmother Vera, and of course Ruthie -- and maybe figure out where the lost family fortune went, and how to get it back.

(Along the way, she tells Alan about it, leading to him being in East Berlin in 1968 in the body of his grandmother. There's an interesting story there as well, and the plots do meld by the end of the season, but this is mainly Nadia's story.)

Suffice it to say, the season looks like a treasure hunt, but is really a meditation on family, history, and mortality. It gets steadily stranger, until, towards the end, Nadia has kind of broken space-time, which is a bit of a problem and needs to be fixed.

This is about as far from hard science fiction as you can get -- do not go into this series expecting explanations. The story is moderately consistent, and follows some internal logic of its own, but the tone is more mystical than scientific, especially towards the end of Season 2, which gets downright 2001-esque. (But ends better than that did, IMO.)

It's solidly good stuff, and Nadia is a marvelous character: self-absorbed to a sometimes distressing degree, but generally good and sympathetic. She is neither the "must be careful to be inconspicuous" time-traveler trope, nor the "naif who doesn't understand what's happening" one -- she's smart and well-read, but generally doesn't give a fuck and isn't interested in conforming to 1982 expectations (or history in general).

So: recommended if and only if you can go with the flow and accept the story on its own strange terms. It's wryly funny, thought-provoking, and raises a lot of feels by the end, but far closer to mystical fantasy than any sort of science fiction.

Movie Night was last night (Kate and I have decided that, with Saturdays mostly at-home for now, that's a good use of them), so we decided to watch tick... tick... BOOM on Netflix.

tl;dr -- beautiful, fun, slightly melancholy musical about artistry vs. capitalism, and striving to make your mark while you still can. Well worth watching.

tick... tick... BOOM was written by Jonathan Larson, better known as the author of Rent, who died many years ago. This production comes via Lin-Manuel Miranda -- I gather that Rent was one of his inspirations to get into musical-writing, so this is sort of his tribute to Larson. The story is very explicitly autobiographical -- as it says at the beginning, it is all true, except for the parts that Jonathan made up.

The story is set the week before Jonathan's 30th birthday -- the first song (and the original title of the show) is "30/90", and his age is looming large. He has a bad case of, "I'm about to turn 30, and I haven't accomplished anything yet".

He's an aspiring musical writer, who has devoted essentially his entire adult life so far to writing Superbia, a science-fiction musical about a dystopian future in which people spend all their time glued to their screens watching shows about celebrities. He finally has a commitment to workshopping the show, and is scrambling to line up all of the moving parts involved in that. He's committing to this completely, quitting his job in order to pursue his dreams -- whether that is a really dumb thing to do is laced through the story.

At the same time, there is a major stumbling block: there is a missing song. He's known this for years, he knows where it belongs in the story, but he has the world's worst case of writer's block around it. As the workshop draws closer, day by day, the stress of that block isn't making his life any easier. And none of this is helped by the fact that his girlfriend is thinking of moving away from NYC, and would like him to come with her.

tick... tick... BOOM is the story of that frustrating week and how it played out. It was originally performed (a couple of years after the events depicted) as almost a one-man show, just Jonathan on a piano plus a band. Lin-Manuel turns it into a full-scale production, with that original stage show as a framing sequence set around the main story fully filmed. As such, it winds up as a show that could never be performed on stage, cutting from the stage to the biography and back again sometimes second-by-second, but it works wonderfully to show Jonathan telling his own story.

The story itself shares a lot of DNA with Rent, and many of the same themes. It is all about the tension of trying to succeed as an artist in a capitalist reality that isn't especially interested in helping you with that. (Indeed, it presents a more balanced view than Rent does, with a more sympathetic "sellout" character, making the tension much, much sharper.) It is set in the stage community in 1990, which means that AIDS is almost as central to the story as it is in Rent. (So there is a content warning for illness, and mortality in general, as topics.) You can feel the musical similarities -- Kate observed that in some places they were clearly adapting the orchestrations of Rent to play that up.

Lin-Manuel's Rolodex really deserves its own Producer credit: this production is astonishingly star-studded. Stephen Sondheim is a significant character (played by Bradley Whitford, except for one line recorded by Sondheim himself), and the show-stopper number is an homage to "Sunday", with walk-ons by a cast of Broadway legends that a Lincoln Center tribute could only dream of.

It's a great story, moreso for being more-or-less true. The music is delicious: nothing likely to become an anthem like La Vie Boheme, but you can see where that came from -- this was written between Superbia and Rent, and the evolution of his talent shows. That's where the melancholy comes from: it is very clear that he was hitting his stride, and one can only imagine what he might have accomplished if he hadn't died so young.

It's not quite Rent, but not many things are. Strongly recommended if you have Netflix.

This one's been waiting for a long time. I tend to post reviews when a series gets to a stopping point. And while Lucifer has been one of our very favorite series for a long time, seasons have tended to end at least somewhat on a cliffhanger, so it's apparently never felt right to post even an interim review.

We just watched the last episode.

tl;dr: still one of my very favorite shows, and yes, they stick the landing.

For those who are unfamiliar with it: Lucifer is an extremely loose adaptation of the comic book of the same name, published by Vertigo many years ago. It was a spinoff from Sandman -- specifically, the Season of Mists storyline, in which Lucifer decides that he is tired of ruling Hell, so he quits. The comic (which ran 70-something issues) told the story of Lucifer figuring out what he wants, eventually creating his own universe where free will is the greatest virtue. The television series of Lucifer (very much like the similar adaptation of I, Zombie) starts from more or less exactly the same place the comic book did. Lucifer has quit Hell, and is now running a bar named Lux in downtown LA, with his faithful demon companion Mazikeen.

After that, though, it's an almost completely different story, and that starts with Lucifer himself. Where the Lucifer of the comic is distinctly celestial, the cool, blond, white-suited avatar of icy resentment against God, the Lucifer of the TV series is black of hair and suit, and exemplifies the Crowleyan principle of "An it harm none, do what ye will". He is up on Earth being a happy hedonist when he crosses the path of Detective Chloe Decker, and our story begins.

(Notably, where the Lucifer of the comic has a cruel edge, the one in the show is almost unambiguously good, if a bit hot-tempered and self-centered. As the story puts it, he has spent eternity punishing evil-doers -- what part of that would make you think he likes evil?)

Yes, it's a police procedural. Yes, the elevator pitch can be summed up as, "She's a cop. He's the Devil. Together, they fight crime!" Yes, the two of them are fated to be together. Somehow, it works wonderfully anyway.

Like all good modern procedurals, there is a lot of arc laced around the crime-of-the-week. While Lucifer and Chloe are our clear leads, the show has a rich cast, ranging from Lucifer's stuck up brother, the angel Amenadiel, to Lucifer's therapist Linda (yes, much of the story happens on her couch), to Chloe's daughter Trixie (the most refreshingly non-annoying child I can remember on network television) and her asshole ex-husband Dan. And of course, the delightful Mazikeen, who is having a lot of trouble dealing with a world where torture is not always the correct answer. By the time the story is through, every character grows up quite a lot, sometimes in ways that aren't initially obvious, while still being very true to themselves.

Of course, at the beginning of the story you have the celestials like Lucifer and Amenadiel on the one hand, and the mortals who have no idea what is going on on the other. Suffice it to say, it doesn't stay that way forever: this is not the "Lucifer hides his identity from Chloe, ha ha" show, and the story gets better as this varied cast grows into a family and more of them get clued into what is going on. (Lucifer is incapable of lying. But when you walk into the room and casually announce that you are the devil, folks do not tend to immediately believe you.)

Of course, this is a procedural, so there is a murder nearly every episode, occasionally murders in grisly ways -- there are content warnings here for fairly typical television violence, not to mention cosmic-level family drama. (And oh yes, non-trivial blasphemy: this is much closer in spirit to the Gaimanverse that spawned it than the Bible.) That said, while there are moments of darkness, the tone is generally light, and often laugh out loud funny.

The series originally aired on Fox, ran for several seasons, and got cancelled mid-story. Fortunately, it got picked up by Netflix and given a couple more years -- including an extra season over the original plans. And I will say that that kind of worried me: extra seasons often go badly, and season 6 is, shall we say, a little timey-wimey.

But like I said -- they stick the landing, with an ending that fits the story perfectly both in terms of plot and theme, and they took the time to tie up pretty much all of the plots. I didn't see where it was going, but the ending is nicely teed up by the final season, and by the series as a whole. In the end, the story takes a couple of pretty well-worn tropes, and explores them more deeply than I've seen done before: it winds up a bit inspiring.

So -- recommended. It's not quite on my "best of all time" list -- it's not aiming to be as artistic as The Good Place or Watchmen -- but it's one of the most fun shows that Kate and I have watched together, one of our mutually-agreed favorite bits of comfort watching. Check it out: it's good from early on, and gets better from there...

Okay, riddle me this. What sort of world are we in, that "Horror-comedy series about the British Civil Service agency that secretly deals with Things Man Must Not Know About" is a genre?

Yes, I'm a huge fan of autopope's series The Laundry Files, a glorious series of novels about the slowly-approaching apocalypse. (Each book is kinda-sorta in a different genre, and each is glorious in its own way -- highly recommended.) From the elevator pitch, Oddjobs (by Heide Goody and Iain Grant) sounds very similar, but in practice they are very different stories.

First and most importantly: while Oddjobs runs five books, it is really a single novel. That's not obvious at the beginning -- the first book stands adequately on its own -- but time telescopes in this story. Book one takes place over a week or so, IIRC. The second takes a couple of days. Book three is Wednesday; four is Thursday; and five is Friday morning, with the chapter headings telling you down to the minute what time it is. The story gets steadily tighter, as apparent side-details from the first couple of books assume greater and greater importance.

As for the plot, let's summarize. The Venislarn -- Lovecraftian alien horrors from beyond space and time -- are here on Earth, and secretly have been for a long time. Probably. They are going to conquer the world in their own good time: the Soul Gate will close, death itself will be no release, and Hell will be forever released on Earth. This is well-known among the right circles, and unstoppable.

Our heroes are the Birmingham (England) Consular Mission to the Venislarn. Their job is to smooth the process, and make the eventual hellish demise of humanity go as well as possible. Tasks range from buttering up Yo'Morgantus (spellings likely inaccurate -- I did these books on audio), the giant flesh-blob secret ruler of Birmingham, dealing with rogue Venislarn that are causing havoc without the public finding out about it, and planning PR campaigns so that, when humanity's horrible rulers are revealed, they are welcomed in a friendly and constructive way.

The members of the mission include Morag Murray (lately come to Birmingham from Scotland, where she just killed a minor deity whose sisters are out for revenge); Rod Campbell (the big clever former-military guy whose greatest weakness is his extreme awkwardness with women); Nina Seth (convinced that anyone over 25 is ancient, and clearly pulling her leg about 20th-century life, which can't have been that strange); and Mrs Vivian Grey (brilliant, focused, utterly terrifying in her resolute lack of patience with everyone else's nonsense).

And oh, yes, Steve -- a giant horrible monster with dozens of limbs and a hundred penises, who is now trapped in the body of a small patchwork doll. One of the best reasons to do this story on audiobook is the frequent moments where a squeaky voice will cry out something like, "Beware, gobbet, for you have incurred the wrath of STEEEEEVE THE DESTROYER!", and immediately divebomb something using a paper clip. (I kind of want a Steve doll for my shelves.)

The first book was merely fun, but by the time I got into the third it was downright gripping: as the plot kicks into high gear, things seem to be flying in a hundred directions at once, but it all gradually finds its way back to center, getting more and more focused. Book 5, The Long Bad Friday takes longer to tell on audio than the actual story time, as almost every minute counts.

Note that "horror-comedy" is very strictly accurate. This is very much a horror story, full of creatures that will drive you insane if you look too closely at them, and there is a lot of just-plain-gross in the imagery. (Part of me thinks it would make a great TV series; part of me is sure it would be too visually unpleasant if they did it right, though.) But it is also relentlessly funny, in a classically British sort of way, and the humor is more front-and-center than it is in The Laundry Files. Even the alien gods suffer from office politics, infighting and intrigues, and the most ghastly moments tend to have a wry Douglas-Adams-esque lens applied, so it never gets depressing or even all that dark, even when The End Is Very, Very Nigh.

And there is more depth here than initially meets the eye. I can't say much without spoilers, but there is a unifying conceptual theme -- a distinct philosophical idea that comes up repeatedly (in at least three separate ways, offhand), and turns out to be dead-central to the story. That isn't obvious until you get well into Book 5, at which point it becomes clear that the groundwork has been laid from the very beginning. So the structuralists should find material to enjoy there.

ETA: I should also note that there is a good deal of timey-wimey in the story. This isn't primarily a time-travel story, but both that and "time doesn't pass the same way in different universes" are significant elements here. Precisely how long Book 4 takes depends on which character and location you focus on. As always for such things, whether that's a plus or minus is going to be a matter of your own taste.

But mostly, it's a fine yarn: surprisingly fun for material that is, really, pretty damned dark, well-written with interesting and varied characters. Excellent on audiobook (I feel sorry for the poor reader, who must have half-destroyed his voice on all the gutteral Venislarn names and phrases), but I suspect also a great read in paper. Recommended, especially if you like British bureaucracy humor, provided you don't have problems over-visualizing graphically-described horrors.

During my morning run on the elliptical each morning, I watch TV. A full-length episode is about the right length for a decent workout, and it helps distract me from work and stuff.

I watch a lot of different shows; it's common to have several alternating at once. But there tends to be one main "spine" to my viewing -- something long that I keep coming back to for a fair while. For several years, that was Stargate; a while before that was Star Trek. (Yes, it's always genre.)

For the past couple of years it's been Supernatural, and I just finished it. So it's time for a review.

tl;dr -- generally good show, albeit with a lot of ups and downs, and some major caveats. I'm glad to have watched it through, and recommend it with some specific reservations.

For those who don't know the story: Supernatural is the story of Sam and Dean Winchester. They are "hunters" -- in the sense that they hunt things that go bump in the night. Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, that sort of thing. At least, that's where the story starts.

Story aside, from a theme point of view this is a story about Fathers, Sons and Brothers, and that is both its strength and its weakness.

On the strong side -- family matters, and this is all about family. Not only blood family, either: over the course of things, the "family" is at least as much chosen as born. The importance of sticking by your people runs throughout.

That said, you will note the lack of women in that description. Supernatural has a pretty serious gender problem, and that's the biggest caveat. It's not overtly misogynistic or anything: it is just absolutely consistent that the main characters are all male -- Sam and Dean, and eventually Bobby, Castiel and Jack. Even the main bad guys are all, well, guys -- not least, Lucifer and Michael with their cosmic-level Daddy issues with God. (Who, yes, does eventually wind up being a recurring character.)

There are some great, strong female characters, but they tend to be conspicuously secondary: only a few appear in more than half the episodes while they are active. And the ones who do become key regulars, quite frankly, eventually wind up fridged. (Not quite as badly as in the original Green Lantern story that gave rise to that term, but the basic principle holds true -- they eventually die, to provide the boys with lots of fodder for mourning them for a good while after.)

And the series has at least some problem with toxic masculinity. It's not awful, in that it is rarely celebrated -- indeed, it's usually presented as near-terminally stupid -- but many of the characters (especially Dean) are prone to some annoyingly Manly Habits.

All that said: it's a hell of a good yarn.

You have to divide it into phases. I honestly don't love the first couple of seasons: they're important for understanding what the heck is going on, providing all the backstory and the early stages of the boys' evolution, but they're heavy on Bug Hunt and Monster of the Week, which isn't what I look for in a series. I found the first season, especially, to be a slog.

In season three, the story really hits its stride, as we begin to level up. We begin to move from merely routine monsters to the divine, with angels and demons becoming regular characters -- in particular Castiel, the trench-coated angel who eventually winds up part of the family, and everyone's best of enemies: the demon Crowley. Seasons 3-5 are a fairly cohesive arc, as Lucifer comes on stage to bring out the first (of several) attempted Armageddons. Those are probably the most consistently good section of the story.

After that -- well, my understanding is that it was originally plotted for five seasons, so they have a big "what next?" problem, and the next couple of seasons flail around. (I pretty much hate season 6.) But they eventually find their footing again, and things gradually level up yet further, right into the cosmic -- by around season 8 it's solidly fun again, and by 10 I was really drawn back into the tale. There is a bad case of Baddie Inflation, but it's a fun ride.

A particular strength of the series is that it is Meta as all get out. A few seasons in, we introduce Chuck -- a Prophet of the Lord who has been seeing visions of Sam and Dean's adventures, and writing them up as a series of pulpy novels called, of course, Supernatural. The result is that the boys have an in-continuity fan base, complete with SupernaturalCon (which is a delightful episode), the occasional psycho fan who figures out what's going on and likes it way too much, and even a homebrew high school musical based on their lives.

At its best, the series sometimes gets very funny, even amongst the darkness. There's the episode where the boys get trapped on a series of TV shows; the one where they are stripped of all of their Hero Points and get to learn what life is like for normal people; riffs on The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Wizard of Oz (both featuring Felicia Day's Charlie, who is perhaps my favorite character on the show); even one where they wind up trapped inside, no shit, a Scooby-Doo episode. In general, while the story is never happiness and light, it doesn't wind up weighed down in grimdark terribly often, and stays watchable.

Not to get spoilery, but suffice it to say the story leans into all that Meta in the last several seasons, getting very seriously into issues of omniscience vs free will at the cosmic level. It makes a warped kind of sense, but if you are offended by blasphemy I specifically do not recommend this story, because oh boy does it wind up blasphemous before the end. God is not the hero here -- indeed, it gradually becomes clear that a more-or-less omnipotent God is a very mixed blessing. (The term "theodicy problem" never appears in as many words, but it becomes a very real issue towards the end.)

The story does end, and does so decently well. They knew that Season 15 was going to be the last, and it's pretty tight. (They had to shut down production for the pandemic two episodes before the end, and it's a damned good thing they got back to it, because the antepenultimate episode is remarkably bleak.) As it is, they tie off most of the major threads, and while there is plenty of room for fanfic during the timeline, it is very much Done.

So: overall, not the best show ever, but generally a good ride. If you are good with a very long story, and if you can deal with the fact that the female characters never get their fair share, it's a good watch.

Kate and I have gotten into the habit that Saturday is Movie Night. Now that we have subscriptions to half a dozen streaming services, we figure there always has to be something worth watching. In the run up to Oscar season, we watched a pile of Worthy Dramas (IMO, One Night in Miami was the best, and Trial of the Chicago 7 was the most fun), but pickings have gotten a bit slimmer lately so we've been trying stuff out.

(Tangential micro-review: last week's movie was Mitchells vs the Machines on Netflix, which was much better than I was expecting. A massively dysfunctional family on a terrible road trip winds up having to save the world from a Terminator-style Rise of the Machines scenario. The film is nearly Lego Movie-level funny, walks the line between sincere and sappy well, has a zillion blink-and-you'll-miss-it jokes, and even has some well-handled, if unsubtle, social commentary. The viewpoint character is the teenage daughter, heading off to film school, with the result that the film has a unique and delightful Pixar-meets-TikTok vibe to it. That movie is well worthwhile, and highly recommended as a fun time. But I digress...)

Tonight's movie was I Care a Lot, which annoyed me enough to post a quick review.

Our protagonist is Marla, who has a truly sweet scam going. She finds elderly people who have a decent amount of money and no terribly close family. She gets friendly doctors to claim that they are incompetent, gets herself appointed their legal guardian, takes control of their assets, and "cares" for them, draining their assets as she goes.

This is the story what happens when Marla pulls her scam on the wrong person, and winds up deeply in over her head. (Suffice it to say, Peter Dinklage appears as a mobster, and is as delightful as always.)

There are so many ways in which this could have been a good movie. It isn't. Marla is such an awful person that, when she gets to the point where people are trying to kill her, I couldn't bring myself to care in the slightest. The mobsters are terrifyingly dangerous, except for the multiple times in which they are accidentally incompetent for no reason except that the plot demands it. Marla is a legal shark, whose domain is the courtroom -- who mysteriously turns out to be really good at espionage for no apparent reason except that the plot demands it.

I think this story is trying to be some sort of parable about awful capitalists, but ultimately they are all so awful that I find myself unable to care. If it wasn't for the judge in charge of the family court (who appears to be completely sincere, but entirely hoodwinked by her), I don't believe I could name a single non-awful person in the entire film.

Huge swing and a miss. If Marla had been a halfway decent person (heck, if even her girlfriend had been a decent person), the suspense might have been real. If she had gotten the right comeuppance at the end, it might have at least felt like it had a moral. There are lots of good movies that could have been spun out of this concept and these talented actors. This isn't one of them -- don't bother.