A Long Look Back

The Long Goodbye is a movie I perhaps shouldn't have carved out time to watch. The 1973 film is directed by Robert Altman (whose work I've never especially liked), and it's based on a Raymond Chandler novel (though "film noir" is not a genre I'm generally enthusiastic about). Still, the movie had managed to pop up several times over the past year in various contexts -- enough to convince me that this was a foundational movie I'd probably do well to have seen. And while indeed, I did not love it, there were enough elements I responded to that I was glad after all that I'd made the time.

Chandler's famed detective Philip Marlowe becomes embroiled in a mystery when he gives a friend a ride to Mexico, and the wife of that friend is found dead the next day. Marlowe is held for questioning... but ultimately released when the friend turns up dead in Mexico. From there, the plot only thickens, as a seemingly unrelated case of a missing husband may have unexpected connections, and a gangster puts Marlowe on the hook for money his late friend owed.

One major point of interest for me in watching the film was learning, as the credits rolled, who wrote the screenplay. Leigh Brackett is known for the scripts of several classic movies, though geeks like me will know that one of her last projects before her death was an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back. If you can't help but notice how sharp the characters are in Empire, how sparkling the dialogue is compared to literally every other Star Wars movie to date? The conventional wisdom is you're seeing the work of Leigh Brackett shining through.

It's fascinating to see how a she, writing in 1973, negotiates all the cliches of the traditionally male-driven film noir format. The Long Goodbye hardly codes as "feminist," though I daresay I detect a greater interest in this movie's characters as characters rather than archetypes, as film noir usually reads to me. And certainly, the dialogue here is notably snappy; people have a way of saying things that feels perfectly heightened without being unnaturally "over-written."

Outside of these touches that I like to think are Brackett, I can't say I'm otherwise thrilled by the script. The story simultaneously feels stale and rather convoluted -- though that presumably all comes from Raymond Chandler's original book (which was already 20 years old at the time this movie was made; it has only aged more since). It also unfolds at the glacial pace typical of 1970s movies. The Long Goodbye is less than two hours and yet still manages to feel about 20 minutes too long. This has a lot to do with just how much time is spent setting up the world; we're almost 14 minutes in before it feels like the story really starts to heat up (and most of that opening 14 minutes involves the main character dealing with his cat).

Still, I was drawn into even the slower parts of the movie to some extent, thanks to the actor playing the main character. I've seen Elliott Gould in all kinds of roles over the years... though he has felt to me like an actor who was somehow always "old." Now, of course, I'm aging myself and that's surely affecting my perceptions. Yet still, I'd never seen a movie with a younger Elliott Gould like this. And he gives a good performance too. This version of Philip Marlowe talks to himself all the time, making quips only for "himself" and the audience, and Gould somehow manages to make all that feel plausible. (And that first 14 minutes that's mostly Gould and a cat? Well, it may have nothing to do with the plot, yet it still somehow is oddly compelling. And however it may have been found in the editing room, this cat gives an extraordinary performance.)

Gould is only the most notable (to me) of several interesting performances in the film. There's Henry Gibson, fresh off Laugh-In and playing massively against type. Nina van Pallandt gives good "femme fatale." And, uncredited, blink and you'll miss both David Carradine and, in a non-speaking role, Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Another noteworthy "performance" in the film comes from the composer, a name you'll surely recognize: John Williams. This comes rather early in Williams' career, and the score sounds nothing like what you'd think of as a John Williams score. He's still very much "Johnny Williams," hired here to do what many movies of the era did: have one song, remixed a half-dozen ways to sprinkle throughout the film. It's an interesting bit of film archaeology.

Overall, I didn't love The Long Goodbye. Indeed, these days, I tend not to even bother blogging about things that I have a generally mixed-to-negative opinion about. (As for why? Well, you could argue there's no point in me reaching out to swat down a 50-year-old movie that's on no one's radar.) And yet, there was just enough here that I don't want to fully swat this movie down. I give The Long Goodbye a C-. If you're a fan of noir, or Leigh Brackett (whether you knew her by name or not), or hell -- cat actors -- there might be something here worthy of your time.

Discovery: Mirrors

The final season of Star Trek: Discovery has now reached the halfway point with the latest episode, "Mirrors."

Discovery pursues Moll and L'ak, sending a shuttle inside a pocket subspace dimension. There, Burnham and Booker find a centuries-old, abandoned I.S.S. Enterprise from the mirror universe, learning something of its history. We also learn something of Moll and L'ak's history, through flashbacks that unfold as they clash with Burnham and Booker. Meanwhile, Rayner takes command of Discovery and must rally the crew to save the away team.

Unfortunately, I didn't feel that "Mirrors" was a very satisfying episode. It teased interesting story threads it chose not to actually pursue, while the story lines it did follow weren't especially compelling.

This is the last season, of course. (Though I hear the writers didn't know that when they were crafting it?) There is a certain logic toward circling back to the mirror universe themes of the first season to bring the story full circle. But this encounter with the I.S.S. Enterprise didn't feel like it amounted to anything. The entire appeal of the mirror universe is seeing the alternate versions of the characters -- watching the actors play against type in a story where anything could happen to them. An empty ship gives us none of that, only serving as a weak bridge between the original "Mirror, Mirror" and the Mirror universe as we saw it in Deep Space Nine.

Indeed, the scenario posed more questions than it answered. If this pocket dimension only exists because of the Burn (they did say that, right?), then how did the scientists get inside to plant a clue there centuries before the Burn happened? If hundreds of refugees from the Mirror universe -- including Saru -- crossed over and settled in the Prime universe, what happened to them? How many people were there two of wandering around? And how can you take us aboard the Mirror Enterprise and not give us a Mirror Spock, Kirk, Pike, or Uhura played by the actors of Strange New Worlds?!

Instead, the episode served to give us a back story I feel like we didn't really need or "ask for," that of Moll and L'ak. It is somewhat interesting to learn that L'ak is a Breen -- to see those aliens rendered on modern Star Trek and see underneath a Breen helmet. (Even if the whole "two faces" aspect was itself somewhat confusing.) But Moll and L'ak have been a mostly off-screen adversary so far -- not even actually appearing in the previous episode, and one of them only appearing in the final seconds of the episode before that. I haven't really become invested in them as bad guys who matter, and so I'm not yet ready to be invested in empathizing with "their side" of the story.

One character who should feel empathy -- it's kind of his thing -- is Booker. But the connection that both he and the writers are trying to force with Moll really isn't working for me. Discovery is usually so "of the moment" when it comes to matters of emotion and representation, that it kind of stuns me that they seem to be unaware of the #MeToo vibes of the dialogue they gave Moll and Booker in this episode. Booker is insisting that his mentor, whose name he took, was a great guy who never did anything bad to him. Moll is saying her experience is that the guy was a thorough villain who treated her horribly -- an experience that Booker just steamrolls over, telling her how she really just has to see the good in the guy. I feel like either this story must be leading toward Booker learning his mentor was not the man he thought, or the writers have shockingly missed the "not very sub" subtext of the story they set up here.

Amid an episode of missed opportunities and uncompelling flashbacks, you just have to subsist on the few moments that did work. Burnham and Booker do make a good team, and the bits of dialogue about them remembering/realizing that played well. The action sequences in Sickbay were pretty fun. And there was nicely subtle writing for Rayner in command -- he could have gone full ham and insisted on doing everything his way, but he really has internalized the lesson of the "time bug" experience to some extent, and tries to meet the crew halfway.

But overall, I feel like "Mirrors" was the most disappointing episode of the season so far. I give it a C+. That said, we've still got two more pieces of puzzle to find, and each of them can come with their own unique adventure that puts things right back on track.

Bloody Thoughts

It has now been 13 years since George R.R. Martin published the fifth novel in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. It seems ever less likely we'll ever get the next book, The Winds of Winter, (much less the one after that, meant to conclude the series). And after the final season of the TV adaptation Game of Thrones, many former fans have simply decided they don't care.

But Martin has been busy this last decade, writings and editing all sorts of things that aren't The Winds of Winter. One of these, his 2018 book Fire & Blood, seemed almost like a challenge to anyone who might count themselves a George R.R. Martin "fan." It was a book set in Westeros -- just not the one everyone was waiting for. It recounted the history of past Targaryen kings, assembled in part from previously existing novellas, and (in its last half) forming the basis for the spin-off TV series House of the Dragon. But also... it was a project that Martin himself jokingly dubbed his "GRRMarillion," in reference to The Silmarillion -- J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth book that's so dry that it wasn't even published in his lifetime, and hasn't been read cover-to-cover by most of his fans. Was Martin implying his book was equally dense?

Well, the coming of House of the Dragon season two later this year inspired me to actually give it a shot; I recently finished Fire & Blood. And mostly, I was entertained. Thankfully, while the book is very much a history, it's not dry at all. It essentially reads like engaging non-fiction, like an author gathering up 150 years of a country's history and trying to lay it all out for you in the most compelling way possible.

There's an extra twist in Martin's approach here, as he writes not as himself, but as a "maester" within the world of Westeros who is himself setting down this history. Part of the conceit here is that the author openly sifts through conflicting accounts written at the time they happened, editorializing on which is more likely true. This allows Martin to lean into one of his greatest strengths as a writer: writing from the entrenched perspective of a specific character. The Ice and Fire series itself famously trades character viewpoints from chapter to chapter; here, Martin takes on one character's viewpoint for an entire book, as the character himself in turn comments on other characters. It may sound like an unnecessary contrivance, but I believe it's a key part of what keeps Fire & Blood from being too dull for all but the most devoted fans.

And it's not like the gimmick gets in the way. The maester character doesn't assert his presence on every page, or anything so overt. Mostly, the narrative just flows naturally. It is more compressed than Martin's more traditional novels, but there are many scenes that feel just as engaging, just as easily conjured in the mind's eye, as anything from the Ice and Fire series proper.

That said, the book purports to be examining the entire Targaryen dynasty from the first King Aegon I all the way to the end of the lineage. There are two problems with that. One is simply that some material is simply not compelling enough that it would have been included absent the narrative conceit. There's a reason why most people have heard of Henry V or VIII, or Victoria, or other monarchs whose tales have been told over and over. But unless you're a student of English monarchs, I'm guessing you've never heard of Cnut? Or Eadwig? My point is, not all of the content in Fire & Blood is as exciting as the chunk seized upon to create House of the Dragon.

And the second issue is that at the conclusion of this 700-page doorstop of a novel, Martin has still not told the complete Targaryen history. In terms of number of years, he's actually a bit less than halfway; so if indeed he ever means to complete this story, he has at least one more volume to write, and maybe two. So yes, you've got that right: George R.R. Martin set aside his epic unfinished series to take up another project and not finish it. If you choose not to reward this behavior by buying the book, I can't say I blame you.

But if George R.R. Martin is not "dead to you," then I have to say that Fire & Blood is at times a quite fun read. It cannot compare favorably to the imagined book we all wished we'd gotten, the sequel to A Dance With Dragons that begins working toward a conclusion we all find more satisfying than the one given to us by the television adaptation. But this book is here, and can actually be read, and I'd give it a B overall.

Voyager Flashback: Lineage

Star Trek episodes often use a science fiction metaphor to examine a real world social issue. The franchise doesn't necessarily strike the right balance of fiction and reality every time; one occasion I think they missed a bit was Voyager's "Lineage."

When B'Elanna learns she is pregnant -- and in particular, just how much Klingon DNA she is passing on to her daughter -- she is deeply shaken. Overwhelmed with memories of her own difficult childhood, she sets out to genetically modify her daughter in the womb, to make her more human.

Children bully one another for all sorts of reasons. Some of the ill effects of that are fairly universal, while others can be quite particular to the reason behind the bullying. "Lineage" is a sober look at what it is to be picked on for having a mixed racial heritage, and how that can still leave you scarred as an adult.

I do like the laser focus this episode gives to that issue. There's no artificial jeopardy to the ship here; the episode is entirely about a character and her feelings, and how that impacts others around her. Star Trek: Voyager is now just half a season from ending, and so the writers are actually willing to take risks when they know they don't have to live with the consequences in future seasons. Tom and B'Elanna have a child? Why not!

Still, B'Elanna would have been much better served as a character had we seen these flashbacks to her childhood much earlier in the show's run. It goes much deeper than the bullying; we learn that she effectively blames herself for her parents' divorce. We've known all along that B'Elanna's issues with her Klingon side colored her relationship with her mother, but now we know she feels her father rejected her. It goes a long way to explaining "why she is the way she is," and it's a shame we're only getting this now, in sight of the series' finish line.

But I think the science fiction overwhelms the story here. Ultimately, the episode is a fight over genetic modification -- and B'Elanna's stance is so extreme as to essentially be pro-eugenics. The episode doesn't really explore that issue. Nor can it. For one thing, there really isn't a "both sides" to the issue. For another, Star Trek has thoroughly covered that ground with one of its most well-known characters, Khan. (Indeed, genetic modification is banned in the Federation, a fact that isn't even mentioned in this episode.)

When B'Elanna goes so far in her crusade that she hacks the Doctor and rewrites his program so he'll support her, she has clearly has crossed a line. That there are no repercussions for this seems ridiculous; at the very least, the Doctor should be angry with her (rather than eager to accept an invitation to be the child's godfather). I suppose you could argue that what's going on here is that "hurt people hurt people," but again B'Elanna is underserved as a character by not giving us this background earlier. It hardly seems like she could have been as stable as we've seen her for six-plus years if this wild a decision was in her nature. (I suppose you could chalk it up to really intense Klingon pregnancy hormones?)

But before the episode turns serious, and everyone is still basking in the news that Tom and B'Elanna are expecting, there is fun to be had. Almost every character has a nice exchange with one or both of them. In my mind, Tuvok's talk with Paris is the most poignant, with the Vulcan offering genuine parenting advice from his own experience. (We aren't reminded often enough that Tuvok is a father.)

Other observations:

• At the start of the episode, Tom notes how chipper B'Elanna is and asks "what did you have for breakfast?" Their quarters aren't that big; shouldn't he know?

• I guess Harry has officially given up clarinet and plays saxophone now. It seemed like a continuity error when introduced a few episodes ago, but twice is a pattern.

I like the underlying themes here. I like that the episode is character-focused. But until now, Voyager as a whole hasn't been interested enough in fleshing out its characters to earn B'Elanna behaving this wildly. I give Lineage a B-.

Fine Fellow

I've noted before that "bingeing" isn't really part of my television diet; I tend to watch a series "one episode a week" (at best), which often leaves me behind the pop culture curve. But there are some series I'd wager no one binge-watches, owing to the heavy themes at play that all but demand the viewer takes a break between installments. I recently finished a mini-series like that, Fellow Travelers.

Based on the novel by Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers is the decades-spanning, complicated romance story of Hawkins Fuller and Timothy Laughlin. The two men meet in Washington D.C. in the 1950s, a time and place where staying carefully in the closet is a matter of survival. We get that stage of their lives alternating with flash-forwards to the 1980s, when Tim is dying of AIDS and Hawkins flies across the country (and away from his wife and family) to see him. Over the course of eight episodes, both stories move in parallel, along with (ultimately) glimpses of the couple's separations and reunions throughout the 60s and 70s.

Make no mistake, Fellow Travelers is a "hard watch." This is a story about how poorly this world treated gays and lesbians, and even how poorly this led them to treat each other. There's very little uplifting "within the text"; you have to compare the time frame depicted to where things stand now to find any sense of inspiration. Fellow Travelers nonetheless feels like a topical story, in light of the ways that not everyone under the LGBT+ umbrella has been embraced as well.

Along the way, the mini-series makes a number of other potent points. It shows, for example, how it can take only one person in the "right" place to cause real harm: the real-world history of Senator Joseph McCarthy is woven throughout the 1950s story line. It shows how being closed off ("closeted" specifically, yes, but more generally) can lead to behavior both self-destructive and damaging to those around you. It also demonstrates that no amount of fairy tale "meant for each other" can overcome two people not being ready for each other at the same time and place.

Even the subplots of Fellow Travelers are emotionally heavy. The story also tracks another couple, Marcus and Frankie, as they navigate a relationship of their own amidst additional issues of racism,  gender non-conformity, and activism. It follows Lucy, the eventual wife of Hawkins, who gradually comes to understands the true nature of her husband and their relationship. For a time, it even tracks the relationship between two men who work for Senator McCarthy, using their position to "do unto others" as they absolutely would never have "done unto them."

The air of this story is so thick that even the romantic moments, which might be a prurient distraction in many other tragic love stories, aren't especially light. That said, Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey, who star as "Hawk" and Tim, are excellent throughout this series, both individually and as a screen couple. So are Jelani Alladin and Noah J. Ricketts as Marcus and Frankie; and Allison Williams makes the character of Lucy more interesting, I think, than the story itself seems to be interested in her. All five of these actors play their characters believably in four different decades, and garner audience sympathy in key moments of the story.

I give Fellow Travelers a B+. It was rarely the show I "wanted" to watch (and never the show I "enjoyed" watching), but I found it powerful and moving, and well worth it.

Discovery: Face the Strange

One of Star Trek: Discovery's best episodes to date (certainly one of its most memorable early episodes) was the time-looping adventure "Magic to Make the Sanest Man Go Mad." Now, as the series is even closer to its ending than that episode was to its beginning, we get a new time-hopping adventure in "Face the Strange."

Moll and L'ak use a Krenim "time bug" to lock Discovery in a twisted time loop where the ship hops back and forth to different points in its own history. But there is a way out: Stamets is aware of the time jumps, thanks to the tardigrade DNA mingled with his own. And by coincidentally attempting to use the transporter during the initial attack, Burnham and Rayner are also manifesting in each time frame, and can work with Stamets to undo the damage.

This episode arrived just as I was posting my review of a Star Trek: Voyager episode it resembles quite a bit: "Shattered." Both episodes allow the show to visit its own "greatest hit" episodes from the past (and both arrive in the final seasons of their series). Both episodes -- to different degrees -- espouse a moral along the lines of "our relationships are what makes us strong." Shocked as I am to say so, though, I feel the Voyager episode was actually the (slightly) stronger take on this story.

I mentioned in reviewing "Shattered" that Voyager (to me) didn't have as many standout "greatest hits" episodes to revisit as other Star Trek series might. That problem is even more pronounced for Discovery. First, they've always been about season-long story arcs, and so they simply don't have many individual "memorable episodes." Second, Discovery has a tendency to raise the stakes so high with such regularity that -- at least in retrospect -- there isn't a lot of differentiation between their jeopardies. "Flying through a timestream in pursuit of the Red Angel" didn't look or feel much different from "the ship is under attack by Osyrra" as we revisited three-minute snippets of both.

But Discovery has also always been a show where the characters are very forthright with their emotions, as they truly change and grow. That was the element that made "Face the Strange" an enjoyable episode. It was great to highlight just how far Burnham has come over five seasons, by showing us the Burnham of the series' opening episodes -- and so much like Discovery to give us both the emotional subtext-made-text of that, and give us a visceral fist fight between past and present Burnhams. (And I would be remiss not to mention another Discovery hallmark: being the best-looking Star Trek series to date. The visual effects of the Burnham-vs-Burnham fight were top-notch.)

Signs of change were peppered all over the episode in ways big and small. There was the big moment where Burnham had to confront and persuade Airiam, of course. But also, we got to see just how much more nervous Tilly was in the beginning, and have Stamets comment on just how irritable he used to be. And of course, Rayner was in the middle of his own journey of change, as he experienced the benefits of trust among a close-knit crew.

So the Discovery episode ends up begin good in my eyes for embracing the uniquely "Discovery" tone to this perhaps familiar story. From there, it winds up being a touch less enjoyable than the Voyager version of the same thing because of what it leaves out -- namely, appearances of other characters from earlier seasons. I understand you're not going to get Academy Award winner Michelle Yeoh to show up again for one scene; nor would Jason Isaacs likely want to return to Canada for one day of filming not central to a story. Still, I felt the absence of Georgiou and Lorca. You can't even give us a scene with Ash Tyler? How about Christopher Pike? Spock? (Anson Mount and Ethan Peck are still employed by the Star Trek industrial complex.) Was it required to give Doug Jones the week off? (Saru has gone through more changes from the first episode that most characters. No acknowledgement of that?)

I give "Face the Strange" a B. Looking back on "the road from there to here" is a natural thing for a show to do in its final season. Star Trek: Discovery had some fun with that, though I feel it could have done more.

Voyager Flashback: Shattered

Notoriously, one of the worst episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation was the made-on-the-cheap clip show "Shades of Gray." But revisiting the "greatest hits" of a TV series' past doesn't have to be terrible. Star Trek: Voyager found a way to make that clever indeed with "Shattered."

A temporal distortion splits Voyager into a dozen different time frames, and only Chakotay is free to pass between them. His efforts to unify and restore the ship are challenged by trials from the ship's adventurous history, including a Janeway who doesn't yet know him, a Kazon takeover, the threat of macroviruses, Tom Paris' holodeck characters, and more.

"Shattered" is basically pure adventure, and purely for the fans, though it's not wholly without moral quandary -- as a "pre-Caretaker" Janeway is faced with the classic theoretical dilemma: "if you had to do it all over again, would you?" (She really does have to be convinced that her future self hasn't made a series of dreadful mistakes.) This is the very rare Chakotay-centric episode that's actually good -- and even works best because it's him and not some other character, as he is truly the best option to struggle in trying to persuade a skeptical Captain Janeway to help.

The episode gets great boosts from both the actors and the production team. Subtle performance shifts by Robert Picardo and Kate Mulgrew really sell you on them playing earlier versions of their characters. Great visual effects appear throughout, including the weird aging distortion on Chakotay's face, or what passing through a time rift looks like. Blending performance and production: Jeri Ryan endures the Borg makeup again to take us back to her character's first appearance.

The fact that this comes in the seventh and final season of Voyager, rather than at the end of two generally weak Next Generation seasons (as "Shades of Gray" did), helps a lot to provide a wide variety of past episodes for this story to time travel back to. Just hearing Chakotay describe some of Voyager's adventures, and seeing Janeway's dumb-founded reaction, is enough to get you smiling. (In one part of the ship, Chakotay can't even be sure which of two different times the entire crew was knocked out they're actually in.) But it isn't all just fun and games, and it isn't all just about the past -- two of the more effective scenes involve an "alternate present" death of Tuvok, and an encounter with "possible future" versions of Naomi Wildman and Icheb

But the thing about a "greatest hits" episode is that it helps if you actually have great hits. Reach into a figurative bag and pull out an episode of Star Trek: Voyager at random, and chances are you're going to get a decent episode -- arguably better than the average you'd pull from a Star Trek: The Next Generation bag. But nowhere in the Voyager bag will you find a "Darmok," "The Inner Light, "A Measure of a Man," etc. Sure, none of those episodes I just named would work well in the context of a "part of the Enterprise has time-slipped back to when this episode was happening" story. But I think you take my point: I'm excited by the concept of "Shattered" overall, yet I'm not eager to revisit any one past episode in particular via that concept.

Other observations:

• Chakotay hides his liquor in the one of only two rooms on the entire ship where a child sleeps.

• Janeway's fiancé gave her a copy of Dante's Inferno as an engagement gift? Weird subtext on that.

• One of the unwritten rules of this scenario makes no sense from a story perspective, but perfect sense from a production perspective: each character appears in only one of the fractured time frames. (Isn't it just as likely that one person could appear in any number of time frames on the ship?)

• Dozens of time frames, no Kes. (But yeah, this also makes sense from a production perspective.)

• The resolution has one of the nitpicks you can level at most time travel stories. When time is restored and Chakotay has only seconds to prevent the ship from being split, there's no particular reason he has to be successful this time; he would seem to have as many attempts/cycles at this as required. 

• It's a bit funny, but Star Trek: Lower Decks did an episode that in many ways felt like this one. In showing Voyager turned into a museum, with different exhibits of "different episodes" installed throughout, "Twovix" is kinda-sorta this exact episode without the sci-fi conceit.
  

"Shattered" is a fun idea and enjoyable to watch. But essentially, a chef is only as good as their ingredients, and so "Shattered" can't be any better than the various episodes it revisits. I give it a B+.