Here We Come to Save the…
Thanks to Captain Nath for providing aid this week. Send articles to be featured to ploughmanplods [at] gmail, post article from the past week below for discussion and Have a Happy Friday!
At Episodes, Emily St. James talks the hit The Pitt and the resulting armchair analysis that TV shows need longer seasons again:
My larger point remains: The people who say they want more episodes of TV shows are rarely, if ever, watching the shows that have continued to provide just that. And if you ever press this point, you’ll often discover a kind of easy reductivism about, like, not wanting to watch procedurals or something like that. Which is fine! Not every show is for everyone! I just think “make more episodes” is a trendy answer to a much trickier question: How do we bring back the TV-making culture that existed from roughly 1990 to 2015? And that’s much harder to figure out because the answer involves undoing a decade of the entire industry chasing after the streaming genie it let out of the bottle. There’s no easy fix here.
Vanity Fair‘s Anthony Breznican tells of Tony Gilroy’s journey to this week’s finale of Andor (spoilers ahoy!):
Creator Tony Gilroy delved into the shadows that lurk within the most noble of do-gooders, as well as the buried humanity straining to escape those who have served a brutal autocracy. The Oscar-nominated writer-director of Michael Clayton and frequent screenwriter of the Bourne movies was first brought into the Star Wars universe to help shape Rogue One alongside director Gareth Edwards. At the time, he did not know that he would end up with a decade-long assignment. In our conversation about the Andor finale, he says he once regretted getting entangled in the galaxy far, far away. But now that Andor is complete, it’s clear the sacrifice was worthwhile.
For the Letterboxd Journal, Brandon Struessing emphasizes the enormous and continuing impact of Rififi on the heist genre and cinema at large:
Rife with peril and intrigue, it would only make sense that the genre’s defining feature was borne out of refuge. In the 1940s, Jules Dassin was one of Hollywood’s finest purveyors of noir. From The Naked City to Brute Force, Dassin wasn’t strictly making great crime capers: he was making statements. Brute Force, in particular, an oil-black prison picture, is as vicious a condemnation of the prison industrial complex as you’ll ever see. Forget the 1940s; its venom directed at the United States’ lack of care towards restorative justice and rehabilitation would feel vital now. It’s unsurprising, then, that Dassin would be one of the earliest names to appear in House Un-American Activities Committee hearings. Accused of being a Communist during one of the darkest moments in American history, by a fellow director no less, Dassin was blacklisted from Hollywood. His final film before his cruel expulsion, Night and the City, is widely seen as one of the finest noirs ever made. A body of work boasting any of those titles, let alone three, would see Dassin as one of the great filmmakers of his era. If it ended there, we’d still be talking about him today in mournful, reverent tones. Thank God, the French had no such qualms around the idea of Dassin leaning a little Red.
NPR reports on the publication of two newly found short stories, one by Ian Fleming and the other by Graham Greene, in the same issue:
Pairing Greene with Fleming says something new about both authors, and why their writing endured, Gulli added. “What I found fascinating about pairing these two together was that these are two writers [who] are icons of mid-century writing. But these are works that are not within their comfort zone,” Gulli said.
And Matt Mitchell returns to Pink Floyd’s The Wall and ranks every song on the album for Paste:
There came a point where I didn’t like The Wall—not in a “this is bad music” way, but in a “I need something that challenges me better” way. You can say that about most rock bands, that parts of their catalogue will call out to you at different chapters of your life. By now, it’s been at least nine or 10 years since I’ve listened to The Dark Side of the Moon in full outside of work. It’s been even longer since I’ve listened to Piper at the Gates of Dawn. My taste has not fallen back into Pink Floyd’s orbit very much, aside from my yearly returns to Animals, but recently, I spent time with The Wall as a listener, not a writer. And it seems that the pendulum of my interests is swinging back to my genesis as a Pink Floyd fan. Listening to all 81 minutes of Roger Waters’ operatic magnum opus was, to my surprise, just as pleasurable now as it was two decades ago.
About the writer
C. D. Ploughman
The weary Ploughman is a writer and filmmaker, focusing these days on documentary and educational projects. He obsesses over movies with his very patient wife and children.
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State of the art special effects, little attention paid to plot - what's changed over the past 120 years?
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Conversation
What did we watch?
Babylon 5, Season Two, Episode Ten, “Gropos”
Kind of a dull one, slowing down the plot to explore Franklin’s relationship with his father and humanise a bunch of troops so we can see them get killed at the end and be sad about that. I enjoy the way Franklin and his father interact; you can immediately see where he got his fiery principles when they first talk, and it leads to a cool scene between him and Ivonova as she gives him advice based on her own experiences. Otherwise, it all pretty much goes down as you’d expect. The subplots are downright risible.
I know the show was innovative when it came out, but in 2025, it sits in this really uncomfortable middle ground between the procedurals of its day and the serialised storytelling that followed it; even Stargate, which began airing in this show’s final seasons, incorporated serialised storytelling in a much more effective way right from the jump. Deep Space Nine was and sometimes is argued to be an imitator as well, but I also think it built off the ideas of serialised storytelling more effectively, mainly because it was planted itself so heavily in episodic stories and used serialisation as a kind of spice.
Babylon 5 is frustrating because the serialised aspect is so good but the standalone episodes come off as pointless wheel-spinning; it’s like putting a pill into peanut butter to give to a dog, except the pill is what I actually want and the peanut butter is all disgusting and in the way. It worked in the first season as a way of introducing me to this world, but now I’m invested and I just want things to get moving. It’s possible to do this kind of “planting the seeds” storytelling – which is less rare than it used to be, but still rare – but I feel like the seeds need to work not to resemble the plant. Contrast with The Shield, which distracted you from the small seeds planted with large explosions.
This is a good way to put it — Babylon 5 is a trailblazer in serialization (not the only one), but it did get quickly to the point where the episodes that aren’t about the main plot feel like marking time, which didn’t really happen with DS9 or Buffy until their final seasons.
Vampire Hunter D (1985)
File under “bad movies to see with a modern audience.” The film is straightforward and earnest in its presentation of tropes, showing both an acknowledgement of the past (I am choosing to believe they used the last name Lee because of Christopher who played Dracula in Hammer films) and a reference point for the future (this makes me want to watch John Learned’s Annotated Symphony of the Night to see how many times this is named). But the straightforward nature of the film and its clear aim at teenage boys elicited a lot of laughs at the film in the theater. From a 2025 perspective, this is a film begging for Rifftrax. So many characters get fake out deaths that I stopped caring about who died because I assumed they’d come back three scenes later. Which raises the important question: this film is unquestionably important, but is it any good? I’m not sure it actually holds up in quality from a modern perspective. Which is too bad.
I remember watching this around 2000 or so in pure laughing jackass mode, the whole “talking hand” business came in for particular mockery. I should’ve been more open but I vaguely remember structural stuff like those fake-out deaths that I assumed was a crappy edit, I guess it’s the real movie?
The version I watched was a 40th anniversary celebration with an intro from someone at HIDIVE so it’s about as official as you’re going to see through legal means in the west. The talking hand is completely out of nowhere, but that didn’t even get as much laughter as the line that the succubus mermaid things would have sucked the life out of a normal man in 5 seconds but D is just that strong. There are a lot of moments that are made to look cool to teenage boys that just read as silly from a 30-something’s perspective.
I watched Ninja Scroll around the same time and my recollection of that as also being quite silly is tempered by its silliness fitting comfortably around acceptable action nonsense (people screaming and punching viscera out of each other), so it was a lot more enjoyable.
Sounds like the audience brought it down to a Vampire Hunter D-minus (I’ll be submitting this as a writing sample to Rifftrax).
There’s no winking in Vampire Hunter D, and everything it is is right on the screen in its id-tastic glory, and I think there’s something to be said for that, even as silly as the movie looks in the cold light of 2025. This was maybe the third or fourth anime I ever watched in my life, so it’s hard to be objective about it, but I think the look of it (while not nearly as striking at the manga) is worth appreciating if nothing else. I remember it as mostly vibes, tbh. We liked Ninja Scroll better (and I’m aware that also hasn’t aged well, though I’ll note that it still handled the sexual assault/poison situation better than Whedon and Minear wanted to on fucking Firefly).
The Righteous Gemstones, “And Infants Shall Rule Over Them”
A+ ownage at the end of this episode, from BJ’s clever repurposing of the table pager conceit to alert Jesse and the others that the cycle ninjas had arrived to Gideon’s terrific takedown (even sticking the cattle prod between the spokes, per Jesse’s ridiculed suggestion). Incredibly fun.
I’m now wondering if it’ll turn out that Junior wasn’t behind the cycle ninjas at all, and the characters have been focusing on him the way they focused on Johnny Seasons back in S1. Junior is obviously trouble, but there could easily be someone else in the mix, too.
Love Jesse getting what he thought he wanted–control of the church, with a major bump up in power and leadership–in the worst way possible and realizing that if he even wants it and is fitted for it at all (which he may not be: his total ignorance of Martin’s life is, as he himself admits, a bad sign), he certainly doesn’t want it like this. Love the Eli-Kelvin reconciliation too.
Perfect detail: Eli’s room number at the hospital flashing on the screen like a “call now!” advertisement.
Ninja III: The Domination
There’s no way I’m not reviewing this, so I’ll say nothing here except that while this isn’t as good as Pray for Death, it’s somehow even wilder. I don’t know if the world as a whole needed a ninja movie that’s also mixed with Maniac Cop and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, but I sure did. Watched this over a phone call with a friend, and we kept losing our fucking minds about it.
Kelvin’s prayer brought me to tears last time – DeVine has a rep as the annoying guy from Workaholics but the show let him bring some real dramatic weight. Also Jessie actually kicking (some) ass as “GOD LOVES A GEMSTONE” booms is rousing as hell. Great music cue.
Whoops, let’s try this again.
Babylon 5 — women, amirite! One alien has multiple wives, another alien is becoming more human and that leads to … bad hair days! I think Peter David is maybe not the guy to be writing this stuff, the ending joke about “what is this … pms” is a real stinker. But at least the aliens are back, I’m wondering if there were some production decisions around who is in which story when — the past few episodes were all humans and this one brings in almost every single alien, maybe they only wanted to pay the makeup artists on certain days.
Live book reading — Niko Stratis promoting her new book “The Dad Rock That Made Me A Woman,” a memoir/collection of essays about the titular music and growing up trans and closeted in the Yukon. Stratis was quite funny and while I know there is pushback against the terminology she had a lot of insight into a vibe more than a sound, failure expressed as wisdom. The book is great so far and gets right into Wilco and 9/11, so Captain Nath is on notice.
Live music — well, I sort of had to afterwards. Stopped in at the local dive/free show spot that shut down a few years ago but has since re-opened and god damn was it good to be back. The Baker Thomas Band, longtime residents, was there with the typical guitar/bass/drum/other guitar/keys/trombone/baritone sax/tenor sax/accordion sound, lots of fun with originals and covers — there were numerous calls for songs to stump the piano player, I suggested “Toxic” and he nailed it, then the full band pulled out Eddie Rabbit’s “Driving My Life Away.” That kind of show, I paid the price the next day but totally worth it.
I am at once a big fan of Peter David (his Hulk run and his second run on X-Factor are big favorites) and wary of his tics. He goes for the easy gag, and sometimes goes for it over and over.
I have never read more than the occasional issue of his run on Hulk, but everything else I’ve read by him is characterized by jokes that aren’t funny and misunderstandings of every character he didn’t create. (He gets Peter so wrong in the Death of Jean DeWolff I wonder how he ever got another gig). Plus he was snarky to me on the DC Message Boards 20 years ago when I had the temerity to correct a factual error he’d written into an issue of Young Justice.
Woooo! Live music! Booooook! Live reading!
Once again, further evidence that “dad rock” is just tautologically defined as “Wilco.”
It isn’t, not here! The first essay revolves around the Waterboys, and Stratis talked at the reading about how different people have their own dad rock. I really think you would like this.
Wooooooo live books!! And music!!
Kill Me Again – John Dahl, working as a storyboard artist on such movies as Robocop, and his writing partner wondered under what circumstance someone would ask someone else to “kill me again.” The result is a neo-noir where Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, on the run with a suitcase of Benjamins from her insane boyfriend and the Mob, asks sad sack PI Val Kilmer to help her fake her death. And when that only makes things bad for Val and worse for Joanne, she asks him again. This low budget first feature is reasonably entertaining and makes good use of Nevada and Arizona scenery, but for the most part Dahl is learning to walk before he runs in Red Rock West. Val is solid as the PI, who copes with the disasters in his life by trying to not let his emotions out. The camera loves Joanne, with those big eyes and long neck, but she’s not really up to playing a believable femme fatale. The recently married couple has decent if not stellar on screen chemistry. Michael Madsen plays the violent boyfriend and does exactly enough.
Kojak, “Monkey on a String” – A cop hard up for cash since he thinks that is the only way to keep his wife happy takes a bribe to let a low level mobster go. Only for the boss to not let the cop out of his clutches. We all know the cop isn’t getting out of this alive, but how it gets there is pretty well done. The final scene is filmed in a snowy field somewhere in the Riverdale section of the Bronx and looks great.
Frasier, “To Kill a Talking Bird” – Niles moves into the luxury apartment he’d stay in till the end of series, and is desperate to impress the neighbors. If only that new bird Niles just bought hadn’t first attached itself to Niles’s scalp and then repeated some choice things the neighbors were not supposed to hear. Some funny bits, but the “what were you laughing so loud about” moment came at the start, when Niles is forced to see that his dog is a canine version of Maris. A dog wearing a “pillbox hat” – an ashtray briefly held to the dog’s head – is priceless, as is Niles’s reaction to the truth.,
“This low budget first feature is reasonably entertaining and makes good use of Nevada and Arizona scenery, but for the most part Dahl is learning to walk before he runs in Red Rock West. Val is solid as the PI, who copes with the disasters in his life by trying to not let his emotions out. The camera loves Joanne, with those big eyes and long neck, but she’s not really up to playing a believable femme fatale” — this was my reaction a while back, it’s a fun watch but definitely not Dahl’s best.
I think I might embark on a project to watch all his movies. I’ve already seen five, so just four to go. He’s on my list of people who I wonder why they stopped directing features, though he’s done quite well as a TV director.
It looks like he had a few duds or at least disliked features after his good ones (Unforgettable and The Great Raid are both movies I forgot/had no idea existed) and his general mode of character-based neo-noir was not just out of sync with 90s blockbusters but with post-Tarantino 90s crime, so I think he was doubly screwed.
He turns up on episodes of Justified about once a season and they do generally seem to be particularly good episodes.
Final Destination Bloodlines – good fun, I’m not really sure why they decided to revive this franchise after a substantial break but this felt like a solid revival that includes some enjoyable nods to the earlier films without getting into Alien: Romulus “fan service at any cost” territory. I was a little wary of this being 20 minutes longer than most of the previous films but it uses that time well, having fun with an extended opening sequence and keeping things interesting between the big set-pieces. Getting one final Tony Todd appearance was a treat, if they make more of these then he’ll be much missed.
I saw this at the small-town cinema near me where basically every other time I’ve been, I’ve been the only person at the screening. This time it was busier and the couple sat on my row were the worst kind of “we will cheerfully talk through the whole movie as if we’re at home” viewers… slightly infuriating although at least it was a big loud movie that often drowned them out. Crazy stuff though… really don’t understand that need to say everything that you think out loud.
“71-year-old stuntwoman Yvette Ferguson came out of retirement for a fire stunt in the premonition scene, which director Lipovsky believes to be a world record for the oldest person set on fire on camera.”
Excellent.
Yeah, well, Lipovsky hasn’t seen my home movies.
I’ve had to learn how to just tell people to shut up, and this includes friends of mine!
Look Who’s Talking Too – More talking babies, more dancing Travolta, more unmotivated Gilbert Gottfried ADR, better movie. Didn’t realize this is where my wife’s chant to our toddlers about “Pee-pee in the pot-tay!” came from. As the motion picture Look Who’s Talking Too suggests, you’re always discovering something about yourselves as a couple.
I also watched this yesterday and I’m sorry but I can’t agree it’s better than the first. I will agree, though, that it’s a lot more fun to watch. It’s so plotless. At least the first had a nicely rejigged romcom structure.
I seem to recall that Greta/The Narrator wrote a “Bad Films Shot by Great Cinematographers” article about this back on the Solute (I can’t find it there at the moment). But she’s totally right about that aspect. Cinematographer Thomas Del Ruth seems to have been given the instruction, “fuckin’ go nuts. Whatever you want.” The lighting in their apartment (so like 70% of the film) is wild and garish – Del Ruth went bugnuts on this movie.
I also liked Kirsty Alley’s nogoodnik brother who comes in spouting anti-immigration and other right wing stuff and Travolta immediately calls him a fascist who shouldn’t be around his kids. Good stuff.
But the ADR voice-over lines from the kids in this are atrocious. Not a sensible chuckle to be had. And the plot, such as it is, is just Alley and Travolta yelling at each other in front of the kids until they remember they love each other. There’s just not much there.
I’m pretty sure that there was a whole plot excised from the film where it turns out the private pilot job that Alley’s dad gets for Travolta turns out to be some sort of corrupt smuggling situation. Remember on his first flight the client makes a big deal about not forgetting his suitcase? And it’s one of those metal suitcases that only ever signify drugs or money in movies? But then that pilot plotline just disappears for the rest of the movie. That’s some cutting room floor stuff that would certainly explain why this movie has no plot and is ony 80 minutes.
I’m with you that this is greatly inferior to the first one.
This is not a hill I will defend to the last, it may also be my expectations for a comedy classic vs a months-in-the-making sequel. Both feel like they’re looking for something to do in between kids say the darndest. The excised plot theory is interesting.
Star Wars – well, I guess the Mrs. really got her appetite for the story a long time ago in a galaxy far away whetted by Andor. And it makes sense to continue with this, since Rogue One* leads directly into it. Plus, you know, it being a good enough movie to kick-start a global phenomenon.
I hadn’t seen it in probably 20 years, and I think that was the only time. There are all kinds of things that are easy to forget about it, especially in the structure. I forgot that the first 15 minutes of the movie is basically fucking around with R2D2 and C-3PO. And the extent to which the rescue of Leia is far more a centerpiece and extended sequence than the actual assault on the Death Star.
I’ve long said that one reason I think this became a phenomenon is that there are enough extraneous details to suggest a much bigger world than what we see and to really stoke the imagination as to what the galaxy is like. Han’s subplot with Greedo and Jabba is totally unnecessary, but it adds to that sense of a wider world and to what Solo’s life is like when he’s not being hired for a rebellion. (By the way, I can’t believe “No, Greedo shot first” – which I don’t buy – is or was any kind of controversy. Who gives a shit if Han shot first? Greedo has a weapon drawn on him at point-blank range! Do people get mad with Raylan Givens because he gets a shot off before the criminals drawing down on him do?)
And the impression I’ve gotten from a lot of Star Wars media since the original trilogy is that it’s more concerned with filling in those explanations and lore, making connections, providing “hey it’s the thing from the other thing” moments, etc. Things that kill the imagination rather than stoke it.**
Anyway, the movie is still a lot of fun, even with its charmingly cheesy special effects, and with at least one shootout that made me think of Police Squad!, but it still creates the sense of stakes and long odds that makes the finale feel genuinely exciting and triumphant.
* – I can’t know the alternative viewing order, but I’m even more convinced that Rogue One works best as a capstone to Andor.
** – This is part of what made Andor so good. It works as a standalone story, rather than just something that fills in the blanks. But it also enhances Rogue One and it gives the events of Star Wars a real sense of the cost along the way, how many heroes had to die or sacrifice themselves to even get the Rebel Alliance in a position to have a shot at the Death Star, heroes who don’t get medals and will be all but forgotten in the history books.
I once saw this–“enough extraneous details to suggest a much bigger world than what we see and to really stoke the imagination as to what the galaxy is like”–described as a kind of oxygen-to-fuel ratio that, at its best and most precise, is the key to all really lasting SFF universes that keep fans’ attention year after year, which I think is accurate.
Star Wars spent years burning up some of that oxygen in its expanded universe, but to be fair, I think that worked much better than doing it in the canonical movies. The tie-in novels were interesting possibilities for those who wanted to delve into those hints more (same with fic, though much more sanitized, obviously); Han Solo’s name getting an origin story in Solo is much more annoying by virtue of it supposedly being a) canon and b) for mainstream consumption. And I say that as somebody who mostly enjoyed Solo.
I didn’t see Solo but I heard about that and it annoyed me. Why does his name even need an explanation? Who gives a shit? Imagining a Breaking Bad flashback to eight hundred years ago or whatever when middle English was adopted into modern English and some ancestor of Walter’s was given the name “White.”
Something that bugs me in action movies, to greater and lesser degrees, is the convention that the good guy has to wait to kill the bad guy until the bad guy draws down on him/shoots at him. A certain recently-released movie ignores this (or at least ignores it after an initial conflict) and it absolutely owns, fuck that guy! Waste his ass! And like you say here, Greedo has his gun out, even if he’s not about to shoot he is making a fatal threat. I feel like the “wait to fatally respond” trope really took off with 80s action movies, maybe that informed the Greedo edit (which sucks ass)? But in any case the change is dumb as rocks.
A lot of people ding the Vader ending of Rogue One, which was added to the film very late in the game to boost the guy’s screen time, as fan service, but to me it is the brutally distilled aspect of “how many heroes had to die or sacrifice themselves to even get the Rebel Alliance in a position to have a shot at the Death Star, heroes who don’t get medals and will be all but forgotten in the history books.” At least we, the audience, got the names of the heroes of the previous two hours and change, but we don’t know any of these grunts who buy crucial seconds with their deaths, it’s very grim and it’s the point.
Fully agreed on the Rogue One ending; as you said, those lives buy crucial seconds. That is the cost, and at that point in time, it’s the correct choice. But it also really underlines how much sacrifice has to be made just for a shot at taking down the Empire.
(I will reiterate that if you like Star Wars at all and haven’t seen Andor, you really should. Great portrayal of fascism; works in a few genres, but “spy thriller” is probably the most prominent. If you can get through the lack of fireworks factory in the first two three-episode arcs until their concluding episodes, then you’re in for a fun ride.)
I’ll see Andor at some point — we don’t have Disney plus and I’m too lazy to pirate it. If these guys were really rebellious they’d bring it right to my door! That’d stick it to the man.
you can;’t succeed at being a pirate if are lazy. The pirates who don’t do anything really got it wrong.
There’s a pretty decently priced bundle of Disney+ / Hulu / (HBO once again) Max available, which is what we signed up for a little while back.
Oh, and I, uh, also have a fondness for fucking that guy and wasting his ass.
“A certain recently-released movie ignores this (or at least ignores it after an initial conflict) and it absolutely owns, fuck that guy!”
Damn right! I was laughing out loud in the theater when it went down. I noted it earlier, but this seems very much inspired by The Train.
Can testify in regards to that movie that the audience basically cheered when he got wasted, FUCK that guy.
I think the Vader sequence also does some of what Star Wars does so well: that harrowing race to try to get the files to Leia before Vader stops the chain of transmission shows us other people on their own missions, leading different lives. Maybe they were just on a supply run before they found out they were carrying the most important information of their lives, information that will almost certainly get them killed. It builds richness.
The cheesy effects age better than most digital FX. OK, light sabers look better now. Weightless CGI ships do not.
“I forgot that the first 15 minutes of the movie is basically fucking around with R2D2 and C-3PO. And the extent to which the rescue of Leia is far more a centerpiece and extended sequence than the actual assault on the Death Star.”
You won’t if you’ve watched The Hidden Fortress!
Mad Men
Season 6, Episode 5. “The Flood”. Rewatch.
PIcking up my watchthrough after a couple of years off, but it’s been long enough that I decided to rewatch this episode (which is where I’d left my watchthrough) first to refresh my memory. It seems my memory was pretty good, the only bit I didn’t remember was Roger being sympathetic to MLK Jr. after he’s killed, and how swiftly the episode moves from the impact of the assassination to Don’s issues with his kids. On to “For Immediate Release” next.
Andor
Season 2, Episode 10. “Make It Stop”. First time.
Fast forward another year, and the moment of truth comes hard for Luthen, Kleya and their informant. Start off strong with two incredible dialogue scenes, as the Death Star plot comes to the surface thanks to the informant, forcing Luthen into a corner and a decision, followed by another confrontation that’s been a long time coming. Both conversations are loaded with verbal fireworks and end with swift, irreversible decisions, leaving Kleya to deal with the aftermath and do what needs to be done. Her hospital infiltration is great, and it’s filled with the kind of details this show excels at, while we also see through flashbacks how Luthen and her got to know and work with each other. It’s a great window into their personalities, and into how much they’ve sacrified to get where they are. Also, this is the first of three episodes directed by Alonso Ruizpalacios, one of the great current Mexican directors (Güeros, Museo) and this episode is filled with terrific direction from the start, with one blinking light in an empty room signaling doom, all the way through the end, with another set of blinking lights in a near-empty room.
Season 2, Episode 11. “Who Else Knows?”. First time.
Once again, another incredible dialogue scene as a prelude to action, as Ben Mendelsohn returns to take Dedra Meero to task for the fuckup in the previous episode, while Kleya desperately tries to contact to Rebellion for help. Back in Yavin, Andor gets the call and comes to the rescue, without authorization from the increasingly-bureaucratic rebel command. The episode carries great tension from Andor and Kleya clashing while outside Imperial troops are coming, leading to one last cliffhanger.
Season 2, Episode 12. “Jedha, Kyber, Erso”. First time.
Won’t go into detail, just to say that this is a highly satisfactory ending, finding a neat resolution to the show’s many arcs and handling the transition to Rogue One very well. Appreciate the way an elegiac tone sweeps in even while in the middle of propulsive action and the ramp up for the movie’s events.
Pete both being correct about Harry’s insensitivity (“Don’t you scream at me” lives immortal in my head) while also projecting about his own family stuff is great. “Only because it’s costing you, you PIG!” A good continual beat is that Pete really is offended by racist behavior, like his disgust in the S5 opening at the joke ad whereas Roger and Don just laugh.
Meant to say “it sets up further tragedy” in that last, spoilered paragraph.
What did we read?
”The Call Of Cthulhu”, HP Lovecraft
Yep, here it is. My first Lovecraft, and my first because it’s his most famous work of all. This is where a lot of his instincts and older works come together in one package; the investigations, the trips underground, even his various travel writings. But for once, I think the iconic power of this work comes less from a solid construction and more from the vivid originality on display; from the design of Cthulhu to the fictional language to mighty city of R’lyeh, this is Lovecraft’s imagination acting on overdrive, and I think that and the ambition is what has attracted audiences for over a century.
Also for once, much of power here comes from ambiguity of action. The precise nature of Cthulhu and R’yleh is a matter of debate; one take (which the text explicitly refers to) is that Cthulhu is a god who is literally sleeping, but I’m increasingly convinced by arguments that Cthulhu is actually a powerful alien and R’lyeh is his space station, with cultists misinterpreting his signals and dreams as magic. On top of this, Cthulhu’s exact motivations are uncertain; is he maliciously infecting the dreams of humans to create a cult, or, as I prefer, are they an unintended byproduct of his existence that happens to drive humans insane?
What’s inarguable is the emotion: humans are powerless in a larger cosmic system of which we are at best dimly aware. The idea of a creature psychically invading human dreams is a powerful one. “The Call of Cthulhu” is an extremely rare racist work in that the racism is both built in and necessary to the power of the work; the presentation of different cultures is undeniably racist, but the overall point becomes that all cultures fall before the might of Cthulhu. The story is a racist one of cultural degeneration, but it pushes into that so hard that it becomes about degeneration as a universal concept, in which all of us are going to eventually crumble under the weight of time.
However you read this story, it’s hard to come away thinking humanity is anything but withering away. This mixture of philosophical certainty, commitment to an emotion, vivid visual imagination, and ambitious structure all coming together is probably why this, of all Lovecraft’s stories, is the one that made his name and is why the tabletop RPG isn’t called “Yog-Sothothery”.
The Unworthy, Augustina Bazterrica
This will have spoilers, because much of the value of this book came from knowing nothing about it before I read it. It’s a post-apocalyptic science fiction book pretending to be a magic realist fantasy; the conceit is that the narrator is an amnesiac living in a cult and writing notes to herself in secret, and she slowly reveals details about her world as well as remembering her own past. Technically, everything that happens has a logical explanation, and even the characters often present that as a theory; they quickly realise that the visions some people are suffering could just be something in the water.
Mostly this is straightforward “wow, it’s shit being a woman” storytelling with gorgeous prose; that sounds more insulting than I mean it, especially given some of the awful things that happen. The value of this is largely in the empathy it creates and emotional reaction; I found myself thinking of different women I’d known who have gone through shitty things. Like, this is what they see, this is what they feel.
Started two interesting works of history:
I took Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944 by Robert Paxton just wanting to follow up other readings about WWII France. I only learned since that it’s considered THE singular work on the subject, one that forced France to stare into the mirror of the past a lot than it wanted to. Haven’t gotten far yet, but it’s well written and does not pull punches. (The copy is an original printing, stamped as purchased in 1972. I like seeing books that hold up physically as well as historically.)
Einstein’s War: How Relativity Triumphed Amid the Vicious Nationalism of World War I by Matthew Stanley could use a better title – it might be better to call it “Einstein Despite the War” – but the story is fascinating. The great thinker was a pacifist in the crucible of insane German nationalism, and during a war that made scientists into weaponsmakers like never before, and that was so fanatical that German and British scientists started to reject each other’s discoveries. But Einstein did science nonetheless and never wavered in his opposition of the war. I don’t entirely understand the science – relativity is hard! – but the rest is a fairly easy read.
As noted above, The Dad Rock That Made Me A Woman is very good so far! The mix of musical and personal history is well-balanced.
Dragon’s Fin Soup, by S.P. Somtow
Somtow (a.k.a. Somtow Sucharitkul) is a strong candidate for “most interesting person alive,” what with being a prolific and award-winning science fiction/fantasy/horror author, a noted conductor and omposer (operas, symphonies, a ballet), a minor film director, and the artistic director of Opera Siam. He even worked as musical consultant on Tar. I first came across his short stories in Gardner Dozois’s Year’s Best anthologies, and I was delighted to see this collection available on Kindle. It has occasional weird digital formatting errors–I’m pretty sure some of Microsoft Word’s track changes edits were left in, for example–but it’s still totally worth it. The best of these are incredible–colorful, lively, inventive, sharply detailed, and alternately generous and ruthless–and even the weaker ones are pretty good.
My favorites were “Dragon’s Fin Soup” (a young Chinese woman living in Thailand deals with the possibility of an unwanted arranged marriage by consulting with her American food critic friend and the dragon that her family repeatedly mines for its restaurant special, with vividly gross details on that front; this is weird and exuberant and delightful); “Lottery Night” (a Thai boy is recruited to spend the night in a graveyard to try to get his dead relative to convey winning lottery numbers to him in a dream, and he drags his American friend along with him; again, funny and exuberant and bursting at the seams with great details. This also introduced me to the Thai folkloric ghost the krasue, a severed head dragging its own entrails behind it, moving around using its tongue as a pseudopod, and living off shit); and “Fiddling for Waterbuffaloes” (two brothers in a small village who make a living dubbing American movies–mostly turning them into improvised comedies–become the focal point of a kind of alien invasion-by-possession, and it all gets tied up in questions of authenticity and opportunity; fantastic ending).
Get Real, by Donald E. Westlake
The final Dortmunder. (Alas!) This is a ton of fun. Dortmunder and Co. being recruited into starring in a reality show about them pulling off a heist, and using the show as the opportunity to pull off a second heist (one a little more real than “reality” TV will allow) is a superb premise, and the reality TV backdrop gives Westlake plenty of opportunities to flex his comedic (and specifically satiric) muscles. Dortmunder smiles twice in one day, and I do a lot of smiling too.
Since Westlake’s unfortunate lack of immortality means this all did have to come to an end at some point, this turns out to be an excellent stopping point: funny, clever, and with great character touches. Love Dortmunder’s passionate defense of the purity of money from theft.
“Money from wages is not the same as the same money from theft. Money from theft is purer. There’s no indentured servitude on it, no knuckling under to whatever anybody else wants, no obedience. It isn’t yours because you swapped it for your own time and work, it’s yours because you took it.”
Parker would never say this because he wouldn’t have to, and I don’t know if he would even think to put it into these words, but this is how he lives. Dortmunder grew out of Parker and it’s so fucking boss to see that essential link in his final adventure. I looked at this in relation to a certain cop show (and a certain cop fantasy) back at the old place, despite getting a fairly crucial line wrong: https://www.the-solute.com/know-your-evil-the-vimes-dortmunder-mackey-axis/
And Get Real is a high note in general for the series — like you say, the satirical stuff is very strong and I think Westlake obviously is not a fan of reality TV and the larger media world but is not going to let well-meaning people off the hook for their involvement either (and this has one of his few capable if not sympathetic rich people, I think their existence in a younger world may have let Westlake draw them with more shades than other characters). The ending is great — Dortmunder is off in his world but you’re on your own (and this too echoes the final page of the last Parker book). Next step is up to you.
That’s a truly sublime article. (And, as a minor point, I also lean more towards liking “Admit your evil” over “Admit you’re evil,” I think, although I also like that having it as a spoken line leaves it interestingly ambiguous.) Dortmunder knows who he is and what he’s doing (and who he’s not, and what he’s not, even when he’s tempted by it, like when he thinks about giving away some of the cash at the end before recognizing Kelp’s implicit point that they’re not those guys).
Thanks! And yeah, that tag of Kelp talking Dortmunder back from charity is excellent, Kelp can be very capable when he wants to be (the novella “Walking Around Money”) and it keeps Dortmunder from being a dispenser of wisdom — he needs a kick in the rear too sometimes.
Finished The Power Broker, and not exaggerating when I say this is the best non-fiction book I’ve ever read. (To be fair, many of those are crappy music biographies.) A knockout ending line and it actually brings some poignancy to Moses’ exile – as Caro says in interviews, he’d seen so much of the damage the old man had inflicted, and still couldn’t help but pity his tragedy.
Incidents of a Slave Girl – the third slave memoir I’ve read and the one that feels the least meant to appeal to a white audience in it’s stinging rebuke of “the religion of the South” (though Harriet Jacobs is very Christian) and exact, angry recording of the slaveowners’ hypocrisies. There’s nuance here, of course, like the owner who hides Jacobs at a crucial time, but goddamn is chattel slavery evil. This also dovetails with my current observation that a lot of doomscrollers and posters tend to be white and very whiny about what’s currently happening.* Oh, oh, “we’re cooked,” things are bad? This woman had to hide in a room for seven years to escape slavery, maybe you’ve just had a nice life and have to take action now in order to keep it that way.
*And probably deeply depressed, to be fair, but life is fucking pain. Sorry you were told otherwise.
Did start Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, this is HEAVY. I may have to read it in pieces.
Damn, you are in a certain harsh groove here. Sower is excellent, but be warned that sequel Parable of the Talents is even heavier (and also excellent).
I know I have probably said this every time, but you’ll love Caro’s multivolume LBJ series. Incredible stuff, and I think even better: LBJ strikes me as much more morally complex than Moses while still having the same kind of determination that makes him into a force of nature. Fantastic supporting characters in those books, too. Caro is also just so, so good at the practical reality of how anything political gets done, which I feel like makes all his work feel very Shieldian. (Moses’s end certainly compares very naturally to Vic’s in a lot of ways.)
Anyway, phenomenal book, and I loved having our readings of it overlap. Always good to get to share a sense of fury about the blight this guy was on various New York neighborhoods! Everything with his brother is so devastating, too.
I love the Caro LBJ series though I know history buffs who have issues with them. I really hope he can finish the last book.
Absolutely going on the list, and agreed that the book’s pragmatism/emotion is very Shieldian. Both Moses and Vic have greatness to them, but that greatness doesn’t mean they aren’t cancerous.
I do wish Caro could’ve gone into more detail about Moses’ family, he said in an interview his daughters were disappointments to him, but…how so?!
As a fan of TV from the 24 episode past, and even the 39 episode past, I can say that quality will find a way. It’s bizarre that Dick Van Dyke did 39 episodes a year for five years and managed to be in at least 30 good episodes a season. The first year of Star Trek was 29 episodes and also universally regarded as its best. And dear lord, a typical 60s season of Doctor Who was endless, and yet also usually really good. I don’t have a clue what causes the alchemy that allowed TV shows to make long seasons good sometimes, any more than I can tell you why TV shows with eight and ten episodes seasons can be so terrible. But I really think that if the talent comes together just right, it works.
I do think the lack of strict serialization is an advantage there. Another long-seasoned show I was thinking of that, at least early on, had a ridiculously good ratio of hits-to-misses is The Twilight Zone. (It couldn’t keep that up the whole time, of course.) You’d think it would be more exhausting trying to constantly come up with something new, but I think a lot of TV writers find that invigorating, whereas trying to maintain a single story at that length is tricky and wearying–it’s a lot more to keep track of, it’s harder to abandon directions that aren’t working, you have to think about structuring and pacing the whole season as well as the individual episodes, etc.
Another factor beyond seasonal structure is episode structure — three-act sitcoms, four/five-act dramas, in either case a rigid adherence to time. This of course has altered over the years, in particular the time whittled down significantly, but in any case the structure stays the same over the course of a season, as opposed to being able to pull out an extra ten minutes here or there. And the acts create structure that is often lacking in streamers. I think those restrictions add a lot; and changing them is noticeable — The Simpsons has moved to a four-act structure and even beyond the rest of the show’s decline you can see how ill-suited that is for the show.
There is an art to constrained writing. Both on TV and in comics. The “done in one” comic, or even an eight page story, can sometimes be more brilliant than the best 18 issue epic.
Comics are an interesting counterpoint — I think they’ve wound up with the opposite problem, where the form of a 24-page comic and more importantly a six-issue TPB is the standard and lots of stories/storylines that do not fit that are stretched into it anyway.
There are two modes now, five and six issue stories come hell or high water, and endlessly serialized stories that will be collected in six issue lumps that are no more complete than the single issues. Once in a while, some writers will do one issue stories – Mark Waid does them in his Batman/Superman series once or twice a year, and sometimes annuals are standalones – but I think you need to be a Mark Waid to be allowed to do that without the editors crying foul.
And this is just insane recency bias, right? How many comics of the 50s and 60s and 70s stretched past at most three-issue storylines? EDIT: I remember some years ago coming across a compilation of comics about the Skrulls, this was probably in advance of their appearance in a Marvel movie, and their introduction is fucking hilarious — here are these shape-shifting aliens, OK they’re dealt with, we still have half a fucking comic book to write. Now there’d be an entire year of buildup.
Marvel was definitely doing more and more two and three part stories, though the innovation was the soap opera stuff. Spidey’s battles never took long, but Peter’s travails with MJ and Gwen lasted (and are one thing I love about that era.) DC, OTOH, not only stayed away from multipart stories but even from single issue stories. I am making my way through the entirely of the Silver Age Flash, and it’s not till the late 60s that full issue stories become the norm, and even into the 70s it’s common for one story to leave room for a second short story with Kid Flash or Elongated Man. And the closest we get to soap is Barry not tell his wife he’s the Flash till a year into the marriage, only to learn he talks in his sleep and told her!
See, soap opera relationship stuff is fine to drag out — it’s the plot that often becomes dopey at length. It means finding downtime to extend between action sequences, instead of spending that time with the extensions of the Elongated Man.
Typo alert: “Endor” instead of “Andor.” I only note this because up until maybe a week ago I, despite having seen Rogue One multiple times, thought “Andor” was the name of a planet and not a guy, and I think the existence of Endor led to that confusion.
Bewitched fans from southern Europe must do that all the time with Endora and Andorra.
(Jedi mind trick gesture) You didn’t see any typos.
Hey Friends, What’s Up?
It’s official, I’m going to be a full-time eighth grade English teacher starting next fall. I’ve been given the textbook (teacher’s edition is on the way) and my copy of Fahrenheit 451 to read over the summer alongside the weekend classes I’ll be taking on my way to a Master’s in education. Been a long while since I’ve had a full-time job and it’s going to be an adjustment. I like the school a lot (it’s a strange, small district on the border of the city, basically covers rural and urban areas but no suburb), I met my fellow teachers and they all seem very nice and supportive. I go back and forth between excitement and head-slapping “what-are-you-doing”-ment, but sitting around the house waiting for something new to happen wasn’t sustainable (much as it had its perks).
Congratulations! And “Been a long while since I’ve had a full-time job and it’s going to be an adjustment” — been/still there. But bringing home some bacon is good. And you can introduce students to preachy Bradbury!
He also has a short story in the textbook! A certain Soluter would not be happy about the direction of public education.
Which short story? I am going to guess “The Sound Of Summer Running,” which was in an old textbook when I was in school.
I’m throwing in a guess for “There Will Come Soft Rains.”
I taught “Soft Rains” in an Intro to SF college course. I paired it with Judith Merril, “That Only a Mother.”
The answer is: “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh,” which I don’t actually remember reading, so should be interesting. There’s also a lesson on the Hero’s Journey Archetype using *Big Hero 6* (meh) and an essay on heroism by Oliver Stone (that I can get behind).
Congrats! Remember that any kid who quotes “me fail English? That’s unpossible!” in response to a bad grade immediately gets upgraded to best in class.
Thanks! And that student ought to, they’re probably at least 35 years old.
Good luck! Those minds at once beg to be taken to the next level and resist all efforts. Those bodies of course have other ideas entirely.
Congratulations! Obviously you should assign some thoughtful, erudite Magpie essays as extra credit reading.
What’s up is me on Tuesday attending a meeting at One World Trade Center. For business reasons, as well as just to have a more interesting venue than our rather bland board room, we held the so-called annual meeting in function space on the 64th floor. As you would expect, the view was amazing, if a little overwhelming being higher up than passing helicopters. It’s also just a bit bittersweet being there for the first time, having not just memories of what was just next door but also memories of having worked in the previous WTC one summer in college. There are ghosts there, clearly. (Unsurprisingly, there is also huge security. I had to gather the names of every guest as they appear on people’s state issued IDs. Exactly. Middle names, suffixes, everything.)
The meeting itself went as smoothly as it could for a public media company in 2025. Lots of anxious questions from anxious Trustees, and lots of frustrations, many of which have nothing to do with Orange Julius Caesar. The tech aspect of the meeting, the part I needed to oversee on-site, had a hiccup but my colleague at One World Trade really knew her stuff and we fixed all the bugs in about two minutes. Always a pleasure to work with pros.
And I accidentally found a way to get from there to home in an hour. Just needed to stumble onto the right subway in the Oculus (the shopping mall and poorly designed transit hub next to One World Trade), and to get to Penn Station one minute before a train that stops in Forest Hills. (A subway from WTC to Queens would have taken closer to ninety minutes.)
BTW, if you were wondering, no one calls it Freedom Tower. That hideous name fell by the wayside years ago.
Meanwhile, we went searching for a new microwave cart only to find that as large as Home Depot and Bob’s Furniture are, they don’t actually have showroom models. So we are taking a chance and buying online. I am sure it will be fine, but it’s a risk. At least the trip wasn’t a waste since we were able to hit Trader Joe’s and the closest comic book shop, where I got a couple of things I missed through my online shop.
Work has been very stressful so I keep making impulse purchases to cheer myself up. This is completely sustainable and will not backfire in any way.
Getting ready to spend a week in Uruguay! My wife was extremely (and justifiably) excited to find that there are parks where you can see capybaras. So I probably won’t be here much next week, but I’m looking forward to reporting back two HFWU threads from now with trip details.
The national sandwich of Uruguay, just as a sample of the delights the trip could offer:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chivito_(sandwich)
*reads sandwich link* I want to go to there
My daughter would insist on a visit to capybara park.
I did pick up a bunch of two-peso capybara coins as souvenirs, if your daughter would like one!
She would love that!
Year of the Month update!
This June, we’ll be moving on to 1983, including all these movies, albums, books, et al!
Jun. 23rd: Sam Scott: El Sur
Jun. 24th: John Bruni: Legendary Hearts
Jun. 30th: Tristan Nankervis: The Big Chill
And there’s still time to sign up towrite about any of these movies, albums, books, et al!
May 16th: Gillian Rose Nelson: Big Red
May 19th: Bridgett Taylor: D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths
May 23rd: Gillian Rose Nelson: Almost Angels
May 30th: Gillian Rose Nelson: In Search of the Castaways
“Listening to all 81 minutes of Roger Waters’ operatic magnum opus” — Uh, I’m gonna have to stop you right there, and switch out “whiney” for “operatic” and “pretentious display of misogyny” for “magnum opus.” Now, what were you saying about returning to The Wall?
I meant, change “operatic” to “whiney” and “magnum opus” to “pretentious display of misogyny”