Final Grade

This weekend, the purportedly final movie in the Mission: Impossible franchise (and direct sequel to Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One) arrived in theaters. I sat through all nearly-three-hours of it, and it left me feeling decidedly mixed. If this is the best Mission: Impossible can muster these days, then it probably is best if this is the last one.

Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is about the efforts of Ethan Hunt and his team to stop a powerful AI from taking control of the world's nuclear arsenal and bringing about the end of the world. It's also made as a deliberate, knowing swan song to the film franchise, full of callbacks to earlier films. (But don't worry if your memory of those is shaky; footage from the other films is awkwardly cut into this one to tell you anything you need to know.)

Memorial Day weekend traditionally marks the beginning of summer blockbuster season... and some would say that plot doesn't really matter that much in a summer blockbuster. It's just "grout" between the "tiles" of the big action sequences. If you (like me) don't subscribe to that way of thinking, there's definitely going to be a low ceiling on how much you can like The Final Reckoning. The plot of this film is pretty bad on more than one level.

First is how shockingly complex it is for how minimal a role it's supposed to play in the movie. Although the movie is nearly three hours long, there are essentially only two major, elaborate action sequences in it (and depending on how you'd count it -- that is, whether a simple shoot-out or fist fight pegs the needle for you -- one to four minor ones). That leaves a lot of time for talk, which is crammed-to-bursting with exposition about "the Entity," its plan to take over the world, and the way it can be stopped. For as much time as they spend talking about all this, you'd expect the Evil Plan to make more sense. Instead, a lot of that time goes to having characters awkwardly explain why the Entity isn't doing the more obvious thing that would be a whole lot simpler (and probably reduce the overall movie runtime to two hours).

More unforgivable is the way this part two completely abandons the thing that was most compelling about part one. The Mission: Impossible films have always had an undercurrent of distrust: never believe what you see, because at any moment, someone could tear off a realistic head mask and reveal themselves to be someone completely different. Dead Reckoning Part One upped the ante on that idea by presenting an enemy that could masquerade anywhere in cyberspace. Against the Entity, you could trust nothing connected to a digital source. The Final Reckoning makes passing mention of this threat on a couple of occasions, but never actually uses it in any meaningful way. Here, the most distinct "villain" in the history of the franchise abandons all subterfuge for a boring, brute force scheme.

But say you are one of the "who cares about the plot?" crowd. Are the action sequences you're really here for worthwhile? Sort of. There's no denying that the final, climactic stunt -- an extended aerial chase between biplanes -- is thrilling. If this is truly the last big stunt in the last Mission: Impossible movie franchise, then it's everything you want. And it effectively one-ups the last time Tom Cruise hung off an airplane for these movies. (The movie knows this, which is why it isn't afraid to show you an early flashback clip reminding you of that stunt.)

The big stunt in the middle of the movie is an extended underwater sequence inside a downed submarine. And unfortunately, it's far less satisfying in a number of ways. This seems more a triumph of clever set design and camera work -- important components of a good action sequence, to be sure, but not the "watch Tom Cruise do insane things" promise at the heart of this franchise's best stunts. Although the scope is massive, the impact is less impressive than the previous underwater stunt in the franchise -- also in Rogue Nation. (And again, the movie seems to know this; unless I missed it, it doesn't show you a clip from that sequence in this movie.) Most disappointing is the way Ethan Hunt escapes his situation at the end of the sequence, by doing something we're expressly told can't be done when the whole premise is set up. Despite "impossible" being in the name of these things, it feels like the missions are usually merely "implausible."

The resolution of a cliffhanger is rarely better than the cliffhanger itself. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning is not an exception to that rule. And since I gave Part One a B-, it feels about right to me to give this movie a C+.

Enterprise Flashback: The Breach

On paper, Phlox was one of Enterprise's goofier characters. Yet the series often found a way to put him at the heart of a real moral dilemma. It did so again with "The Breach."

When the new government of the planet Xantoras orders all off-worlders expelled, the Enterprise has a limited time to locate three Denobulan scientists and evacuate them. But they're deep inside an underground cave system, so Mayweather, Reed, and Trip must go caving themselves to locate them. Meanwhile, Enterprise comes to the aid of a transport ship, bringing an Antaran to Phlox's Sickbay. The Antarans have a dark history with Denobulans, and so this one refuses life-saving treatment from a sworn enemy.

Star Trek has been shooting scenes in fake caves since the very beginning -- and usually, not very convincingly. Here, the show takes on a task of next-level difficulty to present extended climbing sequences complete with rock slides and other dangers. And it's asking too much, really. CG of the time isn't up to what it's being asked to show here: the shots of a giant rock fall, and of a Denobulan "Spider-manning" up a cliff wall, look super goofy. The props and costumes are ridiculous; there's no reason you'd go caving not with a headlamp, but rather a lamp on a big stick above your shoulder. (And the "sample containers" are clearly just Tupperware from the local store.)

However, under the direction of Robert Duncan McNeill, the cave sequences actually come off far more credibly than you'd expect. He's smart enough to get lots of footage -- and the right kind of footage -- to be able to do a lot in the editing suite. Particularly effective is the moment where Travis breaks his leg; the right editing (and a horrible sound effect) really sell the moment.

But the real meat of the episode is the parable on racism, using the Denobulans and Antarans. The Next Generation did a memorable version of this type of story, in which Worf refuses to donate blood to help a Romulan. Still, this episode stands well apart from that one, thanks to the intriguing way it uses Phlox.

Things are interesting early on, when we learn that the Denobulan version of the Hippocratic oath is to foremost respect the will of the patient. But then we go deeper when we learn that among Phlox's many children, one has embraced all the racist propaganda about Antarans -- despite Phlox's own efforts to model better behavior. The two haven't even spoken in a decade. So this situation has very personal stakes for Phlox, who essentially needs to save this patient because he cannot save his own son. And the writing is smart enough not to articulate this so directly.

The writing is even smarter to not tie everything up in an easy bow by the end of the episode. The Antaran allows himself to be treated, and has evolved by the end of the episode. But it's not by leaps and bounds. He's willing to be on the same ship as Denobulans... and that's a realistic win, a gradual relaxing of generational racist dogma. The final letter we hear Phlox record for his son is the perfect way to end the story, reaching out to try again to get through to his wayward son.

And as a bonus... this entire episode is facilitated by events that feel very topical watching the episode today: it's all because a new, virulently xenophobic government has decided to expel foreigners from its borders. Sit with that a minute.

Other observations:

• The teaser for this episode is pretty bad, a real slide whistle of a scene about Phlox feeding his tribble, so he can in turn feed it to some other critter. Not only does it condition the audience to expect a lighter, comedic episode rather than the one we get, it depicts Phlox as being quite cavalier about life and death, in a way that actively undermines the story to come.

• We've established before that Mayweather has rock climbing experience, and it's nice to see the show remember that and make use of it here. And yet... how the hell did he gain rock climbing experience growing up on a cargo freighter making delivery runs between distant stars?

• Even I know rappelling down a cliff is a lot faster and easier than climbing up. So the idea that they're going to split their three-day time limit exactly in half before turning around to come back? It seems completely bonkers. (No wonder they return late.)

The Phlox story here is really quite good. And Robert Duncan McNeill clearly demonstrates that he knew how to go about directing this episode's demanding caving sequences. But with the extremely limited time and budget he was working with, there's only so much he could accomplish -- and those limitations did take me out of the episode at times. Overall, I give "The Breach" a B+.

A Familiar Ring

Over the years, I've blogged about the film concert series at the Colorado Symphony Orchestra -- performances where a movie plays as the orchestra performs its score in live synchronization. (If you live in a city with its own symphony orchestra, they surely do this too.) I haven't attended as many of these recently, as the last few seasons have featured mainly movies they've done before. But a few months back, when a special show was added to the current season, I knew I had to go -- they were playing Howard Shore's score for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

Every time I go to one of these concerts, the initial impact is always admiration for the musical talent on display. The orchestra generally rehearses for just a few days before these concerts, but that's all they need to all be playing not only in perfect coordination with each other, but in perfect sync with the film. Being a movie score fan, I know all the technical tools that exist to achieve this -- but it doesn't diminish the accomplishment to me in any way.

That initial response always gives way to admiration for the music on a new level, and this occasion was no exception. I would say The Fellowship of the Ring was a score I knew fairly well -- I could have hummed a few bars of each of the major themes that Howard Shore developed for the story. But I certainly didn't remember all the details. Watching the players take the stage one by one before the concert began was a fun build-up of anticipation. There's a dulcimer in this score? Yeah, I guess that makes sense. An accordion? Hmm... when was that? I guess we'll find out. The french horn players are sitting pretty far back this time -- what's that about? Oh, it's to accommodate the "twice as many as usual" number of oboe, bassoon, and clarinet players. (And those bassoon players in particular wound up working harder than I think I've ever seen at one of these film concerts.)

Another huge feature of this score, of course, is the 100-person chorus. Generally, when a score requires human voices in only a few moments, they'll make some substitution. (In fact, they did here for two moments -- about 10 collective seconds of music -- calling for a boys choir.) But for this film, we got the full chorus, which covered moments throughout the film from the ethereal warmth of the Elves to the terrifying threat of the Nazgûl. And two soloists were employed sparingly, but potently -- a woman and a young boy -- for specific moments that fans of the movie will likely remember well. Impressively, they just each had to sit quietly on stage for over an hour, and then -- without warmup -- just stand up and nail their moment in one shot. They deserved the enthusiastic applause they received from the audience when they did so.

Throughout the 3-hour concert, different moments gave me chills, or nearly moved me to tears -- even though I barely ever had my eyes on the screen or my mind on the story. (There were perhaps a collective 6 minutes of the entire film where the orchestra wasn't playing... and even those moments felt almost "musical" in the powerful choice for rare silence.) It all left me with a much greater appreciation for this score than I'd had before. It made me feel that as much credit as John Williams rightly gets for making the original Star Wars trilogy what it was, Howard Shore should be equally celebrated for contributing to the success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Hobbiton wouldn't seem half as idyllic without the moving melody on the recorder that accompanies it. The One Ring would not be the powerful presence it is without the mournful strings signifying its influence. The wraiths would not be half as terrifying without the galloping runs of the woodwinds beneath the wailing choir. The Uruk-hai would not seem as disruptive to the natural order without the clever 5/4 melody of their theme. The deeds of the fellowship would not seem nearly as heroic without the powerful horn anthem. Whatever your favorite moment of the movie is, odds are it has a distinct musical accompaniment elevating the emotions you felt about it.

Maybe The Fellowship of the Ring in particular might not be the movie you'd choose for a concert experience like this. But I'd encourage you to look for whatever movie would be ideal for you, and seek out a performance like this. For music or movie lovers, it's an experience that can't be beat.

Cinematic Sins

For weeks now, I'd been hearing people sing the praises of the new movie Sinners. Director Ryan Coogler left the MCU behind (but brought his longtime collaborator Michael B. Jordan with him) to deliver a horror movie that wowed the critics and beat box office expectations.

Set in 1932, Sinners is the story of twin brothers Smoke and Stack, who return to Mississippi from mob work in Chicago. There they hope to set up a successful juke joint of their own. They reunite with the locals and recruit people to help, including their young cousin -- an unnaturally gifted guitarist they want to play at their club. But the brothers also have to contend with local racists looking to shut them down. And vampires.

I debated just putting that last part out there like that, because when you watch the movie, it's a slow reveal. The total run time is nearly two hours and 20 minutes, and fully an hour has elapsed before there's even a whiff of anything supernatural at play. Yet the "twist" has been widely circulated, that this is really a From Dusk Till Dawn style bait-and-switch movie where an entire story is set up only to be annihilated by the arrival of vampires.

It's too much of a slow burn, if you ask me. The movie, of course, knows where it's going. And so it never completely engages with the ideas raised in that opening hour. When a landowner (who might be a Klansman) figures prominently in the opening minutes, you assume he's going to be an antagonist throughout the story. And while the story does eventually circle back, Sinners doesn't seem to want to engage with racism as directly as, say, Get Out or Blink Twice.

But the movie does have a more interesting take on its vampires. That's where the metaphor resides in Sinners, contrasting the community of the segregated South with an unexpected version of a vampire community. (I think I'll skip any more detail and leave that twist unspoiled.) And once Sinners really becomes the horror movie it was meant to be all along, it's an over-the-top, violent bloodbath -- a slasher that hides no grisly details from its audience. It's perhaps one of the reasons that horror fans have embraced it. Another might be the unique (so far as I know) take on how you get vampires in the first place.

Still another is probably the cast, which is uniformly strong. Michael B. Jordan gets the spotlight, of course, in his twin roles -- in which he gives two very different performances. But there's also great work here from Miles Caton, Jack O'Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, and more. The characters are more interesting than just their utility as meat for a slaughter.

Once you get to the heart of the movie (because it's almost literally been ripped out to display beating in front of you), Sinners is a well-made slasher. But there's a reason slasher movies don't usually run longer than two hours. I was short on the patience this one demanded. I give Sinners a B-. If you're a horror fan wondering if this movie is worth the hype, you might want to check it out. If you're not a horror fan, wondering if the hype is worth you stepping out of your comfort zone? I'd skip it.

Enterprise Flashback: Horizon

On multiple occasions over the course of nearly two seasons of Enterprise reviews, I've complained about the series' disinterest in its half of its main characters. Usually, the problem is that storylines which could have been given to Mayweather, Reed, Sato, or Phlox are instead given to Archer, Trip, or T'Pol. With "Horizon," the problem is that they actually do devote an episode to one of the "lesser" characters -- and it's terrible.

When word arrives that Travis Mayweather's father has died, he takes leave to go visit his mother and brother on their cargo freighter Horizon. There he engages in sibling rivalry as his brother struggles in his new role as captain, and generally begins to question if you truly "can't go home again." But soon, all differences must be set aside as Horizon comes up against a group of pirates. Meanwhile, aboard Enterprise, T'Pol is encouraged to take part in movie night and fraternize with the crew.

Another complaint I've registered about Enterprise is that it can be too plot oriented, failing to develop its characters by tailoring aspects of its stories to them. "Horizon" is a wild swing of the pendulum, a story that's almost all character, where nothing happens that feels like a Star Trek plot until near the very end of the episode. (And even the confrontation with the pirates feels stiff.) Because the show just doesn't have many reps in for this sort of exercise, it staggers through with no idea how to tell this slice of life story well.

A whole lot of time is spend "telling, not showing." Travis reminisces with people all over the cargo freighter, each one telling us a story that hints at some adventure that would have made for a more compelling episode. We do get more "show" than "tell" in the B plot centered on T'Pol -- yet even this feels dull and inert. It's a long, slow burn about Trip trying to convince T'Pol in the value of horror movies.

Of course, his argument is limited by movies that can be taken from the old Paramount film archives. Ask a hundred horror movie aficionados to each name three great horror movies, and I'll wager not one is going to say the 1931 version of Frankenstein. It's always been humorous that in the Star Trek future, all music after classical composers, all literature after Arthur Conan Doyle -- all entertainment not in the public domain -- has seemingly ceased to exist. But there's something next level about visualizing that in the form of a movie that Enterprise can steal without paying a huge licensing fee.

The writing is even bad in the details, full of small imperfections that should have been smoothed out in a rewrite. The teaser gives nothing to actually "tease" you into watching the episode; you simply see Travis in his favorite upside-down spot when he's asked to report to the bridge. That's it. No hint of what's to come, just the nebulous idea that this will be a "Travis episode." After the credits, he learns that his father is sick, and makes plans to see him. But just a scene or two later, Dad has died off-screen -- with nothing gained narratively by the odd little fake-out. And later, even though it's really, really important for you to understand that the captain of the Horizon in Travis' brother, that fact is barely mentioned in one early scene, making the whole relationship feel strange until you realize later that you've probably missed something key.

Weirdly, Enterprise isn't even doing a good job here at the things it normally does well. I assume because they blew out the budget making "Judgment," there's no money left to spend here -- so the inside of the supposedly old cargo freighter Horizon is literally just the Enterprise with a few different decorations on the wall.

If you really try, you can find a couple of good moments in the episode. Travis learning that his father complimented him -- not to his face, but to Archer -- feels like a too-familiar restraint from tenderness between too many fathers and sons. The lesson Travis ultimately teaches his old shipmates, about not rolling over to a bully, is kind of basic -- though it feels apropos today. Phlox's take on the scientific plausibility of Frankenstein is fun. So is the Vulcan-like way T'Pol ultimately gets into watching it (including the way she "shushes" Phlox for talking during the movie).

Other observations:

• Archer has a weird moment of "making it all about him" when he tells Travis he almost served on a cargo ship. He at least has the good sense to realize now is not the time for that story.

• Travis and Malcolm have a laugh about an element of Star Trek: The Next Generation, that space travel would be better with families aboard the ship... but that this would require having a psychologist aboard.

• According to the internet, there's the deepest of deep cut Trek references in this episode. In the background of one shot aboard the Horizon, a book about Chicago gangs is visible on a shelf. This is supposed to reference the original series episode "A Piece of the Action," in which a ship named the Horizon was responsible for cultural contamination of an alien planet by leaving behind a book on Chicago mobs of the 1920s.

I give "Horizon" a D+, a mark I've bestowed so far on only one other Enterprise episode. Comparing the two poses a bit of a dilemma: is it worse to try something big and execute it badly ("Precious Cargo"), or just be boring ("Horizon")? It's a photo finish this time, to be sure. I certainly don't want to watch either episode ever again.

Teaming With Fun

As much as my husband and I enjoy playing board games, it's not generally something we turn to when it's just the two of us. So I don't generally pay much attention to whether a game is said to play well with two players. And I very rarely check out games meant for only two players. But every now and then, a two-player game is so celebrated in the gaming community that I feel almost obligated to check it out. Which is how I came to try Sky Team.

Two players take on the roles of pilot and co-pilot for a jumbo jet. An "instrumental panel" board between them shows various slots for dice, where specific numbers must be placed to control pitch and air speed, radio the tower to clear other planes, deploy flaps and brakes, and so forth. Your shared job is to land the plane safely within a limited number of rounds. Your method for doing this is to each roll four dice on every round, then alternate placing them in specific slots on the panel to get the plane ready in time.

Sky Team is a cooperative game, which will immediately make some wary gamers ask if it deals well with the "quarterbacking" problem of cooperative games -- does the system prevent one assertive player from stepping in to dictate decisions for the others? Sky Team already has a leg up on this because there is only one other player. Then it cleverly uses "hidden information" to solve the rest. Each player rolls their dice behind a screen, and only brings a die out when they place it on the instrument panel. Players are not allowed to discuss their rolls, not even by implication. And while this can make the game unfold in relative silence, it actually makes you work exactly in the way the title promises: as a team.

Certain slots on the instrument panel can be filled by one one player, the pilot or the co-pilot. Other slots are shared by both. Still other slots are paired: the pilot and co-pilot each must place one die every round, and the relationship of the two numbers together dictates what happens. When playing, you very quickly learn that success comes from leaving your partner more options. If you put a 6 in one of those "paired slots," where you need your total to be, say, 9 or better? You've given your partner a lot of information to work with. They don't have to worry about whether they should put the only 6 they rolled on that slot, and can use a 3 instead. If one of you needs to play a 1 to clear a plane from the landing zone before you move forward, and you don't play that 1 on your turn? It's a likely message to your partner that you don't have one, can they help?

If you master the game's system of implied communication too easily, don't worry, you have plenty more challenges in store. Each playthrough simulates a landing at a particular airport, each airport a mini-expansion of sorts that adds more mechanics to the game. Soon enough, you'll learn to deal with precise turns during your approach, additional planes that come into the landing zone, fuel management, and more. Then you can repeat landings on higher difficulty levels that leave less margin for error.

I've enjoyed Sky Team more than just about any other two-player-only game I can think of. Indeed, I've enjoyed it more than most cooperative board games I've played in recent memory. Sitting down to solve a problem with one partner (which, for many gamers like me, will be their partner) is just delightfully satisfying -- especially when the system almost entirely eliminates moments of coercion or recrimination that other cooperative games can have. Plus, it takes just 20 minutes or less to play a scenario, land or crash. It's easy to play several in a row, or squeeze in one in a narrow window of time, whichever is more suited to you.

I give Sky Team at least a B+. It might even be an A-, though I think I haven't played it enough yet to be sure. (Like I said... I don't often play two-player games; not even a good one like this.)

Enterprise Flashback: Judgment

The final Star Trek film featuring the entire original series cast, The Undiscovered Country, is widely beloved by fans of the franchise. In the episode "Judgment," depending on your perspective, Enterprise either offered up a loving homage to that film, or tried to bask in its reflected greatness by copying many of its visuals and plot elements.

Archer has been captured by the Klingons, and is put on trial for crimes against the Empire. Though it's clearly a show trial, Archer is gradually able to convince his lawyer Kolos to mount a defense against the charges -- and indeed, a defense of honorable values in the Klingon legal system. Yet it may not be enough to keep Archer from being sentenced to the penal colony Rura Penthe.

I said in my intro that one might charitably regard this episode as an homage, or critically look at it as a ripoff. To me, the truth is more nuanced; the episode is both at the same time. The script feels terribly lazy to me. It seems to care almost exclusively about the franchise shout-outs: getting us into that courtroom (with a judge wielding a sparky ball gavel), name-dropping some ancestor of Duras, getting Archer to Rura Penthe, and so forth. The episode doesn't even bother to explain how the Klingons possibly got Archer on his own to arrest him (because there could be no plausible explanation), nor does it show how Reed escapes Rura Penthe with him at the end. It doesn't even bother to have the trial itself be about something novel or interesting: it's just another Rashomon-inspired take on multiple perspectives, as many have done before (and Star Trek itself has even done in the context of a trial).

But if the point is just fan service, it sure is done with love and attention to detail. Film and television production is always getting smarter, better, and more cost-effective, and this episode of Enterprise came a decade after Star Trek VI. Still, it can't have been easy to recreate the Klingon courtroom and the mines of Rura Penthe (sets from a modesty-budgeted feature film) on the time and budget of a single episode of television. (And both complete with loads of extras in alien makeup.) The production doesn't stop there; we get a great exterior view of the planet where the trial is set, and a wonderfully dungeon-like cell in which Archer is held. We get a cool Klingon ship design, and an elaborate action sequence in which it chases Enterprise through a planet's ring system.

Still more money is put toward stacking the cast. Amid actors who have mostly been on Star Trek before (and some who have played Klingons in particular), we get J.G. Hertzler -- Martok himself from Deep Space Nine -- to return as the Klingon lawyer Kolos. He looks different, but you'd know that voice from anywhere. And he gives a wonderful performance that reminds you how a one-off character from Deep Space Nine developed into a major recurring presence on the series (even after they killed him off once). He gives no less than four big speeches and crushes them all: a grandstanding trial summation, a quiet moment where he opines about political power sublimating the power of the courts (hmmm), an outraged screed at the unjust verdict, and a noble farewell in which he pledges to keep fighting the system.

Although this is really a two-hander for Hertzler and Scott Bakula as Archer, there actually are a few nice moments for other characters. You can always count on John Billingsley as Phlox to find one, as he does here when bluffing the Klingon guards to get time alone with his captain. Later, T'Pol anticipates the empathy Archer will have for the refugees they've encountered, and is already enacting a plan, a nice little unremarked-upon demonstration of her growing emotional awareness.

Other observations:

• We see different flashbacks illustrating each person who gives testimony. Do we imagine that Archer's version is as exaggerated from truth as we know Duras' is?

• Regardless of whose version you believe, Duras is clearly outwitted and defeated in battle by a superior warrior. So... what exactly is the Klingons' problem here?

• We see that moment where Duras' ship is disabled in both versions. It's an expensive visual effect that turned out great, so you're damn right they're gonna show it twice.

OK, this episode doesn't end up just being Star Trek VI fan service -- the examination of political and judicial corruption is worthwhile, and casting J.G. Hertzler to make those points help them land with force. Still, this episode does feel like it's "standing on the shoulders of giants" to a great extent. I give "Judgment" a B.

I Only Wish I Could Have Savored It...

Season two of Star Wars: Andor has come and gone. (Too fast, but I'll come back to that.) This is the show I've been looking forward to more than anything else in 2025... all the while worrying that perhaps the excellent season one had set my expectations too sky-high to be met.

The narrative accelerated in season two, using multiple time jumps to fill in the gap between season one and Rogue One. In a way, that's a shame, because I would happily have spent multiple seasons with this collection of deep and well-written characters. On the other hand, this is the way that creator Tony Gilroy wanted to tell the story... and in the modern TV landscape of quick cancellations, I'm happy he got to tell the story on his own terms.

There are many things I could highlight about season two, but I'll contain my enthusiasm and pick just a few. I appreciated how much this season took the real-world subtext of resisting authoritarian regime and made it "text." The story highlighted one historical analog in particular, the French resistance of World War II, with the Ghorman storyline. All the key characters had French accents, their invented alien language was crafted to sound very much like French, and the core of their struggle mirrored that of real-world history: we're suffering while the world sits by and lets it happen. It all culminated in the excellent eighth episode of the season, "Who Are You?", that depicted an all-out assault as a true nightmare, not the escapist fun that Star Wars as a franchise usually presents.

I love the awareness of Tony Gilroy and his writers about tropes -- leaning into them when it's useful and steering clear of them when it isn't. In particular, it seemed with one particular character that they'd written themselves into a corner where "fridging" the character (killing them off as motivation for the hero's story arc) was the inevitable end. Instead, they pulled out of that particular nosedive in a satisfying way.

Despite only having 24 episodes total to work with, and a definite end point to get to, I love that the writers were willing to stray from the marked path at times -- taking advantage of unplanned things that were surely found along the way. I'm thinking of Elizabeth Dulau in the role of Kleya Marki. I can't imagine that when they cast Dulau back in season one, they were thinking to themselves "and then next season, we're going to actually make one episode of Andor that doesn't even have Andor in it, and she's going to be the star instead." But they recognized how amazing she was in the role, seized upon the talent they'd found, and did just that.

I'm also mostly satisfied with how Andor ultimately decided to treat "canon," that heavy weight hanging over any long-running franchise with rabid fans. That is, they mostly treated it like bumpers on a bowling lane more than a set of handcuffs. One key example came in episode nine, where Mon Mothma delivers an epic speech basically encapsulating the entire message of the show in the most powerful way. They didn't let themselves be deterred by the fact that "Mothma's farewell speech" had already been depicted on Star Wars Rebels; they knew they could write a better speech (and have Genevieve O'Reilly absolutely crush the performance of it), so they did their own version, and then a bit of hand-waving to bring things into continuity.

My only real complaint about Andor season two is how they chose to release it: three episodes every week for four weeks. I re-watched season one in the run-up to the new season. Re-experiencing that again made me realize what an episode meal at a three-star Michelin restaurant that was, and how there was really no need for me to take the "minus" on my "A-" review of it two-and-a-half years ago. I savored ever dish season one brought before me, and left more satisfied than the first time.

Season two was like being invited back to that restaurant... except that this time, I was being timed as I ate each course. If I didn't finish it in time, the dish would be taken from me. The annoying way in which the entire internet presumed everyone would watch three hours of television in one night was maximally annoying. Tiptoeing around spoilers was impossible, as everyone treated everything from the third episode in a crop of three as old news the morning after it had dropped. And even on the rare occasions where I did dodge spoilers, I was still being forced to gorge myself to be ready for next week when we'd do it all over again. Some day, I'll need to go back and enjoy the entire series again, slowly, luxuriously. Properly.

I think I'll be happy to do just that, because I give season two of Star Wars: Andor an A.

We Built These Cities

Titles are hard. I make board games for a living. I blog here almost every weekday. I am keenly aware that finding the right title to represent your creative work is a massive challenge. What's the perfect name that reflects what you've done, might break through the noise, intrigue the skeptical, ensure the faithful, make people crack a smile? There are countless considerations that go into a few words. And I know that plenty of times, you never quite land on the perfect ones. Still, I think there's no excusing the professional malpractice that went into naming the 2024 board game Cities.

Cities is a team-up of designers Steve Finn and Phil Walker-Harding. Together, they've created a clever little drafting game that lately is one of the most enduring and beloved types of games in my group: one that plays lightning fast (about 30 minutes, in this case) while packing more meaningful decisions than you'd expect in that amount of time.

The game is played over 8 rounds. In every round, players go around the table drafting one item at a time. By the time the round is over, they must have drafted exactly four different things, in the order of your choice:

1) A land card representing 4 squares in a cityscape. The cards place alongside one starting card you're given, forming a 3x3 arrangement of cards by the end of the game. How you place those cards as you draft them is up to you, though your later choices will soon be constrained by that 3x3 limit and the directions of your earliest choices.

2) A group of two or three building pieces. The pieces come in four colors, and must be stacked on a square of matching color on one of your land cards. You can stack pieces up to four high, creating skyscrapers in blue, red, yellow, and green.

3) Tiles that fill other squares on your cards. They might be decorations for parks, or activities in the water. For either of these, a diversity of features scores better at the end of the game. They might also convert a color-locked building site to "wild," allowing you to later construct a building of any color there.

4) A card with an endgame scoring condition. It might give you points for every square in your largest single park area, points for every yellow skyscraper exactly 3 pieces tall, points for every complete set of the four colors of buildings... or a variety of other things.

Each of these four things relates closely to the others. Once you have a particular endgame scoring card, you might be driven to want buildings of a particular color. The land cards you've chosen might leave you flush with empty park spaces, making you seek tiles with features to fill them. The game is not so complex (for the savvy gamer, at least) that these connections are unmanageable. But even if you know exactly what you want, that's where the drafting mechanism kicks in to make you think harder.

You must take exactly one of each of the four things every round. Maybe there are two endgame cards that both suit your developing city perfectly? You must choose. What if none of the city cards seems critical to your plans this round? Can you find one that might give you better options in the future?

More challenging still is when there's something you know you want in more than one of the categories. If you take that group of building pieces (that are all the perfect color) now, will that endgame scoring card (that's also perfect) still be there when the draft comes back around to you? Say you glance over at your opponents' cities, and see that two of them already have that park decoration you desperately want. Is it worth risking that your last opponent won't draft it this time around, so that you can instead grab the perfect land card now?

In a handful of plays of Cities, I have found every time that the game presents me with a steady stream of choices. Perhaps none offer the tremendous depth of a more advanced, hour-plus game... but neither do they cause the paralyzing indecision those games sometimes invite. And there's nice replayability to Cities as well; the game comes with what essentially are "scenarios" representing different major cities of the world. Each one lays out three different conditions where players race to be the first, second, or third to reach them to score bonus points (each condition evocative of a real-world feature of the city).

That name, though. Cities. It's hard to think of a less memorable, less internet-searchable, less compelling title. I've played the game perhaps half a dozen times now, yet still, when I suggest "want to play Cities?", I get blank stares and have to show people the picture of the pieces on the back of the box before they go "oh, that game!" Any time I've talked with a fellow gamer about what I've been playing lately, if I mention Cities, they answer "I've never heard of it." I'm not necessarily holding Cities up as a top game of all time, but it's a game that deserves a better title, for sure.

If you're looking for a speedy game to kick off a game night -- or perhaps a good "one more game" when you're tired but not yet ready to completely turn off your brain? Cities might fill that niche. That is, ssuming you can remember the name of it after you've finished reading this. I give it a B+.

Enterprise Flashback: The Crossing

Star Trek has a long history of "possessed by an alien" stories. Enterprise served up its own take in "The Crossing."

Enterprise encounters a race of non-corporeal "wisps" that seek to inhabit the bodies of Enterprise crewmembers and experience physical reality. But when it appears these aliens might be looking for more than a temporary exchange, the crew finds themselves fighting an invasion.

I find this to be a bit of an awkward episode for Star Trek. Our crew is exploring space to seek out new life and new civilizations... yet when the encounter a truly different one here, Archer immediately doesn't trust it and doesn't want to explore. And while his caution and skepticism is arguably more realistic than most Star Trek, the fact he turns out to be right -- and that these aliens turn out to be hostile -- kind of undermines the core values of a best Star Trek stories.

The logic governing these aliens feels very conveniently particular. They once had corporeal bodies, which is meant to explain why they have a physical spaceship. But they've been "wisps" for so long that they've forgotten most of what physical existence feels like. So how is it that their spaceship is only now critically breaking down? It seems to take no effort for them to displace a human consciousness (only Phlox is immune)... and yet they don't simply take what they want; no reason is ever given for their initial ruse. Or for them only ever taking control of part of the crew. Or for them not possessing Archer when he poses the biggest threat to their plans.

In particular, one "rule" we're given about the alien possessions is hard to overlook when its broken later. Travis learns by accident that the wisps can't go into the engine nacelle (allowing the production to reuse that expensive catwalk set). Except then Trip becomes possessed without ever leaving the catwalk, and remains possessed while inside it.

Whenever a human is possessed by one of the aliens, they act wildly out of character. On the good side, that allows most of the cast a chance to give a distinctly different performance. On the bad side, it makes you wonder why our heroes ever bother building an "alien possession detector" when it's immediately obvious who isn't acting normal. And on the worse side, a plot element involving a possessed Reed threatening sexual violence against T'Pol is utterly unnecessary. (The alien's big "pickup" line, that he wonders what it's like to be female, is patently stupid; it could just go possess a woman.)

There are moments that play better -- most of them (as usual) involving John Billingsley as Phlox. He's the first to realize that the aliens might commander a host against their will, and is clever enough not to be fooled by a possessed Hoshi. He even gets an action sequence in the end, where he has to don a spacesuit, be talked through an engineering modification, and physically wrestle with an alien to save Enterprise. The horror movie vibes of the episode generally work too, from the distant and haunted cadence the aliens use when speaking of their non-corporeal realm to the "body snatcher" vibes of Possessed Trip stalking Phlox.

Other observations:

• Non-corporeal entities in scifi stories always want to eat food. This episode honors this tradition by putting a veritable buffet in front of Trip.

• When Travis Mayweather is running from a wisp, he darts up a classic, vertical Jefferies tube just as the original series presented.

• Possessed humans have to die for the aliens to be driven from them, which forms the basis of the plan to free them all. But Phlox sure doesn't seem to be in a hurry to get around the ship and revive everyone.

Not every Star Trek episode has to have a moral. But if you're going to just do a "cool scifi ghost story" like this, I think you have to respect the "rules" you set out for your story. The rules of "The Crossing" are rickety to begin with, and then not respected at all. With only fun performances to balance that out, I give the episode a C+.

A Familiar Ring

On several occasions, I've written about (or mentioned) The Crew -- a pair of cooperative trick-taking games. Those two games (especially Mission Deep Sea) have probably given my play group more hours of fun than any other new games of the past several years. Which is why we're open to other games in a similar space, and how we came to try out the ponderously titled The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game.

The game follows the plot of the first volume of J.R.R. Tolkien's famous fantasy trilogy. Each chapter of the book becomes a scenario in a cooperative trick-taking game. Each player chooses by draft to take on the role of particular character, each one with a specific goal to fulfill during one deal of the cards. Characters change depending on the chapter, and so certain goals persist from hand to hand, while others swing in for just a chapter or two before going away again. That, along with a number of other setup changes to accentuate story, results in a series of 20-ish scenarios for you and your friends to work through.

Any cooperative game based on taking tricks is going to have to contend with the existence of The Crew. But one of the more intriguing aspects of The Fellowship of the Ring is how it demonstrates that even small tweaks to a game system can have a major impact on the strategy of playing it. Designer Bryan Bornmueller has chosen just the right tweaks for maximum effect.

The deck of The Fellowship of the Ring is quite similar to that of The Crew: there are five suits in all -- though one has fewer cards in it than the other four. (That one being Rings, compared to Hills, Mountains, Forests, and Shadow.) But unlike The Crew, where that short suit is also the "trump suit" that beats all others, The Fellowship of the Rings has no trump suit -- just a single card, the One Ring (literally, the 1 of Rings) that can optionally win any trick into which it's played. Enthusiasts of Bridge, who have played their share of "No Trump" hands over the years, will understand the implications of this. But if you've been brought up on Hearts, Spades, Euchre, and their like, you'll quickly find that the absence of a trump suit radically changes the strategic landscape of the game.

The persistence of characters and their goals from one "chapter" to the next also makes for an interesting change from The Crew. Even when characters recur, this "up to four player" game can have more than four characters to choose from. Newly appearing characters are always required to be taken in the draft. That in turn causes repeating characters to take on new strategic ramifications. (For example: Legolas' goal to win a Forest card of a particular rank plays differently when more Elves with other Forest interactions appear on the scene.)

This game also foregoes the big innovation that made The Crew's premise of cooperative trick-taking really work in the first place: the concept of "communication." In The Crew, players had a method to signal to everyone else key information about a single card in their hand. To take the place of that concept in The Fellowship of the Ring -- thus greasing the gears for cooperation -- players are allowed to "exchange" cards before each hand. Loosely, this is bringing in the concept of passing cards (from Hearts), that was never part of The Crew. But in practice, it's a story-motivated way of helping players tailor their hands for the challenges they've drafted. Gimli always gets to exchange one card with Legolas before each hand (and vice versa). Boromir can exchange a card with any player other than Frodo. And so on.

Together, these changes -- along with some inspired ways of capturing narrative elements from Tolkien's book -- make for an experience that felt quite new and distinct to my group, which has played hundreds (if not thousands) of hands of The Crew. But is it a "Crew killer," as the gamers would say -- a game that makes you never want to play The Crew again? I'd say no. We dutifully worked our way through a chapter or two of The Fellowship of the Ring at the end of every single game night we gathered for over the course of a few months, until we finished. But now that we have? I feel we're not super likely -- at least right away -- to go back and play through the whole game again. (Whereas we've played both The Crew: The Quest for Planet Nine and Mission Deep Sea each multiple times through all scenarios.)

But... would we be there immediately for the seemingly telegraphed release of a The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: Trick-Taking Game? (And later, The Return of the King?) You'd better believe it. Not many games give you as much bang for your buck as this one, and I'd certainly recommend it to fans of card games or cooperative games. (Or both.) I think it's a solid B+.

Enterprise Flashback: Canamar

By halfway through the second season of Enterprise, it was clear that the series regarded Archer, T'Pol, and Trip as their core trio -- their Kirk, Spock, and McCoy -- and that they weren't terribly interested in doing much with the other characters. Some episodes feel especially lacking because of this focus. One of these is "Canamar."

When Archer and Trip are mistakenly loaded onto an alien prison transfer ship, the question is whether anyone can set things right -- and set them free -- before the vessel reaches its destination. But the situation becomes more harrowing when other prisoners aboard the transfer ship stage a breakout, and Archer and Trip must play along.

Not long ago, I was commenting that the writers of Enterprise seem to enjoy putting Trip in danger more than any other character. And if someone else is going to be with him sharing the jeopardy? Odds seem to be that'll be Archer. So right out the gate, "Canamar" is saddled with a lot of "been there, done that" weight. A lot of the episode turns on Archer playing up his piloting skills to string the fugitives along... a story that could just as easily have been given to Mayweather. Trip's role in the story is mostly to navigate delicate situations with other prisoners... a story that might have played just as well with Reed, or even Hoshi Sato (if the writers had consider the option of a co-ed prison ship).

But no, we see two of the series' most familiar characters in what feel like too-familiar situations -- chained to benches as though being put to work on oars, suffering torture at the hands of indifferent guards, playing hero in a hostage situation, lying about their identities, and more. It's not exactly that Star Trek has done this stuff to death. It's that there's no particular Star Trek spin being put on this parade of tropes. The script brushes against being Star Trek at the very end, as Archer moralizes against this alien justice system, noting that there might be many more innocent people being wrongly incarcerated. But the episode barely engaged with that notion before this climax, with just one guest character noting that they were once innocent, before actually turning to a life of crime.

We don't get much satisfaction in the B plot either, which follows Enterprise on its search for the prison transport. The characters involved never really have to do anything. There's no need to convince an alien judge of Archer and Trip's innocence, since an alien leader immediately concedes the fact. They never really have to do anything clever to stay on the trail of the prison ship; they basically just follow it without diversion from point A to point B.

What's left to enjoy are a few fun action beats, delivered with the usual panache Enterprise brings to such sequences. (Even if it does seem hokey that a blow from a pair of rigid handcuffs could knock someone out.) The episode also does well with an unlikable weasel of a character, an archetype who always appears in a prison break story. Here that comes in the form of the alien Zoumas, played by guest star Sean Whalen to distasteful, annoying perfection.

Other observations:

• In the opening scene, set inside an empty shuttlepod, CG of the time isn't quite up to believably rendering the objects floating around in zero gravity.

• After seeing the electro-shock handcuffs throughout the episode, it's satisfying to see Archer use that feature as a weapon in his final confrontation.

"Canamar" isn't so much bad as utterly forgettable. I'll give it a middle-of-the-road C.

The Devolution Will Be Televised

The Last of Us is back and currently airing its second season. But I'm here to talk about a different post-apocalyptic video game-turned-television series, Fallout.

Hundreds of years after nuclear annihilation has befallen a retro-future society, a group of survivors is sheltered in every sense of the word inside one of a series of bunkers. When raiders invade and abduct their leader, his daughter -- the resourceful but naive Lucy MacLean -- sets out to rescue him. Meanwhile, a young "squire" named Maximus tries to better his standing in the harsh, caste-driven society of the surface dwellers. An ageless, mutated "Ghoul" wanders the wastelands as an outlaw gunslinger. And the destiny of all three is intertwined.

I never played the Fallout games (I was more a fan of Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series), but it seems the writers of the television series have chosen to adapt the setting of the games more than any particular main storyline. It's a sensible approach to adapting an open-world RPG for a narrative-driven format that would not tolerate "side questing." And by creating in essence three main characters, the television series isn't forced to focus on just one aspect of the setting -- it can follow several.

But of course, this approach means the average viewer is going to find some storylines more compelling than others. I was not super into the early episodes of the show, centered mostly on vault dweller Lucy, played by Ella Purnell. The show spends a lot of time reveling in her "fish out of water" qualities, challenging her politeness, forcing her into uncomfortable or outright gross situations, and generally beating her down as she learns the ways of the outside world. It's the only way for her to experience a good character arc... and yet it starts to feel repetitive awfully fast.

I was more pulled in by the story of Maximus, played by Aaron Moten -- a put-upon grunt in a military-like organization, serving as squire to an ungrateful and unworthy "knight." Like Lucy, he begins the stories with an idealized view of the world -- but his blinders come off much more quickly, before a similar sense of repetition set in for me. His storyline loses some steam later in the season, though by that point Lucy has developed in more interesting ways that allow her to take up the narrative slack.

But most of all, I was pulled in by the story of the Ghoul. At first, this was about performer more than anything else; the character is played by Walton Goggins -- who was pretty much everywhere in my TV viewing diet at the time I was finally catching up with Fallout. (He was also in season 3 of The White Lotus, the final season of The Righteous Gemstones, and voicing a character on Invincible.) Goggins had been cast as an imposing baddie with a charming wit -- basically his character from Justified, with makeup and visual effects. And if that was all his role ever was, I probably would have enjoyed it. Late in the season, however, we get more deeply into the backstory of the Ghoul, and suddenly Goggins was asked to do more than twirl his figurative mustache.

And that's pretty much how the arc of watching the series went for me. Early on, I kept watching more because my husband was enjoying it quite a bit, and I didn't dislike it enough to say "you can keep watching without me." In particular, some oddly recognizable faces in the smaller roles hinted to me that the show might be building to something better -- or at least, might be saying that a lot of video game fans wanted to be part of this; either might explain the appearances by Kyle MacLachlan, Michael Emerson, Matt Berry, Michael Rapaport, Chris Parnell, and others.

By the time the eight-episode season concluded, however, I was liking the series myself, and found myself disappointed that I couldn't forge right ahead to see what happens next. I'll need to get used to that disappointment; filming on the new season just wrapped, and lengthy post-production likely means we won't get more episodes until 2026. But that also means if you were late to Fallout like I was, you have plenty of time to check it out and see if it's for you. As I said, I thought it was a bit slow at first, but as a whole, I'd give the first season a B.

Twice the Horror

While not every horror movie is seeded with deeper meaning, the genre has a long history of social commentary. That subset of horror movie films is either being made more these days, or getting more attention; I'd heard about the recent movie Blink Twice, and wanted to check it out.

Frida is a nail artist and cocktail waitress who, along with her friend Jess, sneaks into an exclusive party being thrown by eccentric billionaire Slater King. When Frida has a chance encounter with him, and they hit it off, the two women are invited to his secluded island retreat. But once there, a darkness sets in. Strange flashes of... fear? memory? premonition?... seem to warn that terrible things are happening on the island, and that Frida may soon be fighting for her life.

This movie is the directorial debut of Zoë Kravitz, who also co-wrote the script. She definitely set out to make a message movie, and the message is one very current in the zeitgeist: basically, that if a woman in a vulnerable situation were to choose between being with a random man or a bear, she should choose the bear. Billionaire Slater King is a perfectly charming "prince" for that message, with a perfectly just-hidden sinister undercurrent.

The movie has a very interesting way of playing with narrative. Strange flashes are inserted between scenes, or even in the middle of them. It takes time for you to recognize just what's happening, and longer still to realize exactly how they fit into the story. Without getting too specific, I'll just say that they're well-considered clues to a larger mystery -- and when the "solution" arrives, it does so with the satisfying feeling of a reveal that was fairly telegraphed at every step of the way.

However, the decision to keep things close to the vest permeates all aspects of the film. There's actually a rather large cast of characters here, as many whodunnit mysteries have. But the characters don't pop in the way a whodunnit requires -- they aren't eccentric, and often seem interchangeable. The movie is relying on performance more than anything else to make you not only care about anyone, but to even keep track of them.

So casting is key. The movie trades on the fact that you'll know the actors in the secondary roles from somewhere else: Alia Shawkat, Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment, Genna Davis, Kyle McLachlan, and Adria Arjona. But it is anchored by two strong performances -- Naomi Ackie, walking a delicate line as Frida; and Channing Tatum, calibrating a balance of charm and menace, as Slater.

Blink Twice didn't blow me away -- perhaps because there have been a lot of good "message horror films" in the last decade. But it's a fun little suspense film that I'd say ranks a solid B.

Enterprise Flashback: Future Tense

Having just visited its ongoing Andorian story arc, Enterprise decided to check in on the Temporal Cold War arc with the next episode, "Future Tense."

Enterprise brings aboard a derelict one-person spacecraft, only to find a host of mysteries inside. It's larger on the inside than the outside. Its dead pilot has genetic markers of an unusual mix of alien species. And ultimately they learn: the ship comes from the future. Soon, Enterprise is pursued by several factions who want to claim the ship for themselves.

This episode is moderately entertaining, but it highlights a few things that I think are problems with the Temporal Cold War story arc as a whole. This doesn't really progress the story; by the end of the episode, everything has vanished and we're basically right back where we started. Temporal Cold War episodes seem to be a "puzzle box" only to be opened and then closed again -- not fiddled with while they're open.

All the characters tend to look extra dumb during a Temporal Cold War episode. T'Pol continues to insist that time travel is impossible, even in the face of her many experiences that demonstrate it isn't; her denial is taking on conspiracy-theorist proportions. When Trip and Reed go exploring inside the impossible alien ship, they almost specifically don't radio their progress up to Archer, so he won't find out the value of the ship for another couple of scenes. And when our heroes head to Daniels' quarters for intel from the future on their current situation, no explanation is offered as to why we aren't in there all the time for answers to our problems -- not even a flimsy moralistic explanation.

Mostly, though, my problem with Temporal Cold War episodes is that (because they don't ever advance their own story), they're pretty much just fan service, a way to get around the restrictions of this being a prequel series and have the characters all but wink straight at the audience. They speculate on whether a Vulcan/human child would have pointed ears. Archer wonders whether they've found the body of Zefram Cochrane, a tiny subplot that's there basically just to elbow fans of the original Star Trek series who know the episode "Metamorphosis."

But if you can just accept this as a roller coaster ride -- right down to the part where you'll end exactly where you began -- then there are a few thrills to take from it. Bringing the Tholians in is a bit of fan service that pays off fairly well; it's nice to use filmmaking techniques of some 35 years later on something the original series attempted. And the idea of temporal radiation causing little time loops is a fun one, and plays well in the climactic showdown (and also, satisfyingly different than The Next Generation's memorable time loop episode).

There are also a few nice character moments too. I like Reed and Trip's discussion of how they might use the ability to time travel. And I really enjoyed Phlox's scene with T'Pol, in which he points out that Denobulans believed they were the only life in the galaxy before they made first contact with aliens.

Other observations:

• When Archer first enters the mysterious ship, it's kind of ridiculous how long it takes him to notice the dead pilot sitting in the command chair -- the only object in the entire empty space.

• Doctor Who fans can feel smug knowing that show got to the idea of a ship that's bigger on the inside way before this.

• I have the memory that once the Xindi story arc began in season three of this series, they began to write Archer more and more like a George W. Bush type of leader. (They were really hitting their allegorical 9/11 nail on the head.) I feel like we get a glimpse of that here, as T'Pol offers valid reasons not to get involved in a (hypothetical) Temporal Cold War, and Archer basically just says "nope, we're doing it." He doesn't have reasons, but he's going to be the "decider." (Rewatching this series today, I long for the days when George W. Bush was the biggest imaginable dipshit in politics.)

"Future Tense" isn't exactly a bad episode, but it doesn't amount to much either. I give it a B-.

Creature Comforts

At some point in the last few months, my always-long television backlog overflowed. I'm used to having people pushing one or two more shows on me than I have time for, but I was at seven or eight. That's why I'm only just now finishing some entertaining shows that the rest of the zeitgeist got done buzzing about months ago. One of these is Creature Commandos.

Writer-director James Gunn has given us lovable teams of misfits with Guardians of the Galaxy and the Suicide Squad. Now that he's taken charge DC, he's doing it again in animated form. The seven episodes of Creature Commandos follows a black ops team of monsters on their covert mission to an eastern European country.

The series is a fun stew of different elements. It's a little bit sitcom; not only is humor often a main focus, but the bite-sized episodes of 20-something minutes are paced like a classic network sitcom with the commercials removed. It's a little bit Lost; each episode is constructed to push along an ongoing storyline in the present as flashbacks fill us in on the backstory of one of the main characters. And of course, it's classic James Gunn; each episode is chock-full of wit, irreverence, and snark.

You might argue that since this is James Gunn's signature formula, that there's a ceiling on how good the show can really be. And... fair enough. But others have tried to copy this formula without doing it nearly as well. And Gunn is hardly phoning it in here, with several episodes that really do pack a narrative punch: the episode about the inscrutable Weasel is surprisingly touching, and the episode about Nazi-hating G.I. Robot feels more on-point than I imagine anyone thought it would be while they were making it.

The animation of the series is quite good. But oddly, the show made me appreciate an often-overlooked aspect of animation: the audio editing. I happen to be watching several animated series right now, and a few in particular have made me notice how badly stitched-together the dialogue can sometimes be. It's long been the case the actors in animated films rarely record their dialogue together at the same time. (In this age of easy telecommunication and working at home, they often aren't even recorded in the same place.) It's hard for even skilled actors to generate believable chemistry under those circumstances, and harder still when audio editors do a bad job assembling the dialogue with subpar takes and unnatural pauses. Creature Commandos is very much not that; it has a very natural pace and flow.

Of course, that's helped by a solid cast. It's made of James Gunn staples both past and future, like his brother Sean Gunn and Frank Grillo; actors usually known more for their face than their voices, like Indira Varma and David Harbour; and animation stalwarts like Alan Tudyk. Plus, guest stars include Shohreh Aghdashloo (with her one-of-a-kind voice), Linda Cardellini, and you'd better believe longtime Gunn collaborator Michael Rooker.

And perhaps the most distinctive voice of all in Creature Commandos is that of Eugene Hütz, the lead singer of the band Gogol Bordello. James Gunn is also known for his killer needle drops, pulling great hits from decades past, or lesser-known bands from the present. Here, he happens to pull one I knew before, a self-described "gypsy punk" band whose unique sound is all over this show.

I give Creature Commandos a B+. I happened to regard it as a satisfying, self-contained story... but it seems that it will be returning at some point for a second season. I'm not sure what that will look like, but I have faith that it will be entertaining.

Thunderous Applause?

The Marvel machine whirred along this past weekend with their new movie, Thunderbolts*. (The asterisk is officially part of the title; for the explanation, you have to see the movie.) The film feels like the product of a long dialogue between the Marvel and DC film franchises that arguably began with Guardians of the Galaxy. After that "team up" movie featuring an irreverent collection of not-quite-heroes, DC responded with Suicide Squad, swapping the "screw-ups" for villains. Marvel has now done their version of that, drawing upon characters from their nearly two decades of blockbusters.

Suicide Squad certainly left room for improvement (even after James Gunn came along to do it better). So it isn't surprising that Thunderbolts* is a more entertaining spectacle. But if you ask me why I think it's better, it's all about the casting. Granted, almost all of this casting took place years ago, as the MCU gathered up actors like Infinity Stones to set in their almighty gauntlet. But the way these performers come together really shows how expertly they were assembled along the way -- the perfect combination of established names, stars on the rise, and capable lesser-knowns.

Foremost, Thunderbolts* is as enjoyable as it is because Florence Pugh is the star. The movie is the quip-tastic extravaganza that everyone has come to expect from a Marvel team-up movie... but it also tries to have more heart than the last several MCU films have mustered. Pugh excels at both of these things, getting laughs for her flippant handling of the one-liners as she powers her way through to the movie's more dramatic moments. She's at the center of pretty much all of those, making her damaged character feel like more than a cliche, and her efforts to find good in the villain feel noble. Plus, she does it all with an accent that, coming from anyone else, would seem too goofy to believe.

A solid second is Sebastian Stan. While this is far from his first Marvel rodeo, he isn't phoning it in. Within the narrow confines of his "strong, silent type" character, he's great at letting the mask slip just enough to show his character's feelings and motivations. (And, of course, he's great in the action sequences.)

Even though the rest of the cast is neither up at Pugh's level nor given as much to do, most of them have a history of being good in exactly this type of entertainment, and so they serve this movie well. Wyatt Russell developed his action hero chops in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, David Harbour did it in Stranger Things, and Hannah John-Kamen did it in Killjoys. They're all perfect to plug into this blockbuster team-up movie.

Meanwhile, Julia Louis-Dreyfus seems to be having a great time as her ongoing MCU bureaucrat. There's a fun bit of meta commentary in using her this way; after playing a bumbling narcissist for years on Veep, the MCU is showing us what happens if someone actively malicious and actually smart gets near the levers of power.

The plot is fine enough. Thunderbolts* does a better job of injecting personal stakes into the global catastrophe than many Marvel movies have done. But at the same time, the amount of "required reading" to enjoy this movie is off the charts; as someone who hasn't watched any MCU movie for a second time in nearly a decade, I often feel like I'm trying to carry water in my cupped hands when I watch one. And of course, Thunderbolts* was never going to be the movie to break that trend. (We'll see if the upcoming Fantastic Four can be the first truly stand-alone Marvel movie in years.)

But overall, I'd say Thunderbolts* did its job at entertaining. I give it a B+. I enjoyed watching it -- though it's not going to break that trend and be the MCU movie I expect to watch a second time.

I Reckon

Months ago, I blogged about Steelheart, the first book of the Reckoners trilogy by Brandon Sanderson. Now I'm back for book two, Firefight.

This trilogy is Sanderson's foray into a twisted version of a superhero story. In a version of our own world, the arrival of a mysterious celestial body seems to trigger the development of superpowers in a select few people around the world. Without fail, these "Epics" become corrupt tyrants who use their powers to oppress and control as they slowly destroy the world. The Reckoners trilogy follows one group of humans as they try to uncover the weaknesses of these Epics and fight back. This second book, Firefight sees the protagonist David traveling to another city to fight an Epic with a past connection to his group's leader. Once there, he finds there's also an important connection to his own past, sure to drive a wedge into his group if anyone else learns of it.

Firefight is an interesting "middle chapter" of a trilogy, with plenty I liked and some things I didn't. It's young adult fiction, which isn't always known for nuance: in this genre, you usually expect that the "good guys" and good, the "bad guys" are bad, and that's just all there is to it. But some YA stories like to explore the gray areas, and Sanderson chooses that more rewarding option here. Book one, Steelheart, ended with a revelation that things are not as black-and-white as the protagonist, David, might have thought. And now book two, Firefight, really follows through on this idea. The course of the story drives David to really resist the good/evil dichotomy even more, stirring up new conflict that's satisfyingly born of character and not plot contrivance.

Sanderson also builds out the world he's created in interesting ways. He could probably have stretched out an exploration of strange powers and weaknesses (and their ramifications) into dozens of books. (That's certainly what other superpower franchises do.) That he did not do so means that each "Epic" character who shows up in the story has a truly important role to play. Firefight digs deeper into how this world came to be, why people get the powers they have, and why the powers drive people inexorably toward evil. And as it does all this, it shifts the story to an interesting new setting that differs from the first book.

But Firefight also goes back on one of the things I liked best about Steelheart. In my comments on that book, I mentioned that blessedly, the conventional romantic subplot that shows up in every YA book did not follow its expected course. Firefight reveals that nope, we're actually going to do exactly the romantic subplot these stories always have. In particular, I didn't enjoy how much the main character was motivated by love -- particularly when it's portrayed in an (accurate) teenage way that might as easily be infatuation, lust, or something else. Even with a character in the story who openly mocks the idea of "love being the answer," I felt the story wasn't doing enough to depart from the trope. I guess Sanderson felt like he could only thwart so many conventions of the genre.

Still, Firefight offered a few nice surprises along the way, even if I sensed the gist of where it would end. The journey was rewarding, even if -- like the young sick child of The Princess Bride -- I would have preferred to skip all the "kissy stuff." I give Firefight a B+. I'll be curious to get to the final book of the series and see how Sanderson brings it all home.

Here, Here

Maybe it's time for me to give "gimmick" films a break.

Recently, I watched the alien invasion thriller No One Will Save You, mainly because of its unique premise of telling the story without dialogue. Then I watched the Robbie Williams biopic Better Man, because it was serving up a musical starring an ape. Both movies offered worthwhile moments, but ultimately couldn't rise above their gimmick to be truly good. Now I've completed my "disappointing movie gimmicks" trilogy with Here.

Here is a movie about a place. A locked-off camera remains completely still for the entire film as we hop backward and forward in time. We see one spot on Earth -- in the times of dinosaurs, pre-colonial natives, and the American Revolution. A house is built there in the early 20th century, and we're served glimpses of the lives of multiple families over the course of the next 100 years. Most our time is spent with the Youngs, a family who moves in just after World War II and lives there for over 50 years.

I was skeptical that a movie with no camera movement could be a compelling watch... but I was willing to take the chance that if anyone could pull it off, it would be director Robert Zemeckis. Besides him helming Back to the Future (my favorite movie ever), he gave us a masterwork of technical prowess in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and an emotionally moving story punctuated with tricky camera work in Contact.

But perhaps the past work I should have been thinking about was Forrest Gump, a treacly overdose of corrosive and regressive morality. The movie Here is a reunion of Zemeckis with the stars of Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. While I've loved separate work by all three, I might have expected that they'd come together again in service of something mawkish and trite.

It's almost stunning how many universal themes about life Here manages to touch upon in 104 minutes while hardly ever managing to evoke any feelings about them. Fortunately, unlike Forrest Gump, I don't think any messages are set in opposition to each other. Still, the emotional distance is as real as the physical distance, as events staged farther from the locked camera feel too far removed from the audience to engage the heart.

This is the reason I'm choosing to blog about a movie I essentially didn't like. I don't think Here set out to do so, but it winds up making a compelling case for the vitality of live theater. When you watch a live performance, you sit in your seat, your "camera" essentially locked off and giving you only one perspective on the action. The acting is happening at a distance (sometimes a great distance, depending on the size of the theater). And while not every live performance is emotionally transcendent, they sometimes are, in a way that Here really isn't.

Maybe that just means that if they made more movies like Here, some of them would be better -- just like those uncommonly good theatrical performances. Maybe. But I think the artifice of this storytelling device would weigh down any film, mostly because I can't imagine a movie working any better within the physical constraint than this one does. Here uses many clever transitions to evoke an illusion of motion, superimposing actions from more than one time frame on screen at the same time. Zemeckis stages the action so that most of the key moments happen as close to the camera as possible.

The movie also has actors working their asses off to overcome the artifice. Tom Hanks and Robin Wright are both very earnest and natural in their performances. Paul Bettany also plays a key role, and thanks to his work in the MCU, he's no stranger to acting through challenging technical constraints.

They're all assisted in the time-jumping aspects of the movie with much more credible "de-aging" visual effects than we usually get -- though I can imagine that being the combination of many factors. De-aging effects have thus far set the bar quite low; these actors all have long careers offering ample reference on how their younger selves looked; the fact that everyone is often quite distant from the stationary camera provides a way to hide the imperfections.

Indeed, Here is a clever movie. Having decided on its gimmick, it finds smart narrative ways to work within it, uses technology well to hold everything together, and employs good actors with enough experience to be up to the unusual challenge. All that adds up to something -- not as low a grade as you might expect I'd give the movie. And yet, the achievements end at the movie's cleverness. It doesn't make you laugh or cry; it can only make you nod politely and think, "I see what you're doing here." (Or "I see what you're doing, Here.") I give it a C.