A Trout in the Milk

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. continued its time-tripping final season with a trip to the 1970s with its latest episode, "A Trout in the Milk."

Our heroes arrive in the 70s to find HYRDA, decades ahead of schedule, poised to unleash their nefarious Project Insight. That's only one of many changes to the timeline, and the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents step up their efforts to keep history on track. But the Chronicoms are learning to anticipate their meddling.

The final season's time-travel conceit continues to be a fun gimmick for wrapping up the series. Each new decade they visit is a new opportunity for fun costumes, jokes about fashion and pop culture, and references to the show's own history. In particular, the opening titles this episode -- which have changed with each new setting this season -- were a delight, with grinding guitar and voice-over.

Ming-Na Wen is being handed a real gift with May's story line this season, and is doing a great job playing it. Her "drunk by proxy" stagger and her enraged crashing into pedestrians on the street were comedic highlights of the hour. (Though, of course, nothing could top Enoch's deadpan "Come with me if you want to continue to exist.")

It was also fun to see Patrick Warburton back -- and not in an archival corporate video this time -- as Stoner. Warburton's delivery will never not be funny to me; it's just a question of whether a TV show can place him appropriately for the laughs. This show is definitely having fun with him (and his "woke" for the 70s behavior)... and with all the other references that were definitely loaded up this time: we met a young Gideon Malick, heard mention of Whitehall, got a name drop on a young Bruce Banner, and generally just played Marvel's hits in a relatively fun way.

There was a fair amount of hand-waving in the episode too, though, and that was not as effective at swatting away questions as the writers probably hoped. "We can't just shoot down the rocket or it'll give away our position" felt like a flimsy excuse in the moment. Retroactively it seemed even worse, as they dove into the most elaborate Plan B only to watch it fail and then return to "shoot down the rocket" anyway. I expect some serious consequences to this in the next episode to justify all the effort.


They've also stretched the "where's Fitz" thing past the point where I feel teased and well into the point where I'm just annoyed now. Explicitly mentioning him so much in the dialogue, and highlighting that there's something strange with Simmons, all without even beginning to suggest any of the answers -- it's just flat out not working for me. Was Iain de Caestecker off shooting a movie for two months when they filmed all this? Could the writers just not resist one more contortion in the FitzSimmons relationship and just give us a happy couple in the Final Freaking Season goddammit?! Seriously, this has stopped being a fun mystery for me and has become something that is actively making each new episode without Fitz worse.

But I did find it all an improvement over the moody and indulgent film noir diversion of the week before. And overall, pretty fun to watch. I'd say it was about a B- for me.

DS9 Flashback: His Way

The sixth season Deep Space Nine episode "His Way" asks a lot of fans: you have to accept the answer to the series' long "will they / won't they" between Odo and Kira (they will), and you have to welcome to the show the character of old Las Vegas crooner Vic Fontaine. If you're into all that, though, it's a lot of fun.

Julian Bashir shares an interesting new holosuite program with his friends that features Vic Fontaine, a worldly and friendly lounge singer with keen insight and awareness of his own nature as a hologram. A casual observation about Kira and Odo captures the latter's attention, and soon Odo is visiting the holosuite regularly for advice from Vic on how to open up to her for a romantic relationship.

This episode was a long time coming for Deep Space Nine. The idea that Odo had feelings for Kira had been inspired by Rene Auberjonois' performance in a single scene, then grew into a major element of multiple entire episodes. According to show runner Ira Steven Behr, he felt by this point in the series that time was running out to actually play a potential relationship. Moreover, he claims, he already knew at this point that the end of the entire show would see Odo leaving his friends behind. He wanted there to be a real sacrifice in that, and felt that Kira could represent that.

The actors were less sure, having both maintained for years that their characters should remain friends only. (Nana Visitor even plays that well in this very episode. Watch in the opening scene as Odo enjoys the music; you can see that Kira's enjoyment is in watching that Odo enjoys it.) Rene Auberjonois thought this script was "silly" the first time he read it, though said that on a second reading, after letting go of his own attachment to the emotionally painful aspects of his character, he was convinced this was the right way to go. Visitor apparently never quite came around, though she noted that it did all at least "make sense," and that she always wanted to "pick [her] fights." (My translation: as long as the writers never compromised in Kira's attitudes toward Dukat, a relationship with Odo was something she could find a way to play convincingly.)

You'd never detect any reluctance from the actors from their performances in the final episode. (Of course not; they're acting!) Auberjonois gets to do a lot of non-verbal work, from a meaningful cutaway to his face when Shakaar is first mentioned, to the scene in which he first fakes playing the piano -- a long scene in which you actually see Odo move from discomfort to joy. The character really does change in this episode: early on, he's mortified at the thought that anyone might see him relaxing on the holodeck; later, he's not at all embarrassed when Sisko catches him singing and then joins in.

Visitor turns a similar corner in the episode. You can really see the moment in the episode (during the dinner) where Kira really looks at Odo and realizes she's seeing a new side of him. When she speaks later to Dax about having had a moment of pure clarity, you sense how much it has rattled her. Plus, of course, Visitor delivers a wonderfully sultry version of the song "Fever" (her own suggestion to replace a different song originally selected, and inspired by a real-life childhood encounter with Doris Duke).

The two actors are equally great together. That dinner scene really makes the episode, each character being vulnerable with the other. The betrayal they both express when they realize Vic has tricked them is bottled up just enough, in a way that makes it more potent. Then there's the kiss in the end. Sure, the argument-leading-to-a-kiss is such a cliché... but it works well here because the two actors play it well.

This episode marked another culmination in the introduction of Vic Fontaine. For seasons, Ira Steven Behr had long wanted a lounge singer hologram to dispense advice. He'd written a sample scene two years earlier to pitch to Frank Sinatra Jr. (Sinatra turned it down; he apparently loved Star Trek, but wanted to play an alien and not a version of his famous father.) A year later, Behr even put a scene into an episode script, but Steve Lawrence, Robert Goulet, and other choices also passed on the role. (That script ran long and the scene was cut anyway.)

Knowing there wasn't that much time left in the series, Behr decided it was time to do every idea he'd ever wanted -- so he expanded that lounge singer from a single scene to an entire episode. Not every Trek fan responded to the character, particularly those who maybe saw him as a retread of Guinan's wise confidant from The Next Generation, or who didn't appreciate hearing "You're Nobody Till Somebody Loves You," "Come Fly With Me," and "I've Got You Under My Skin" performed almost in their entirety during an hour of sci-fi television. (The music rights to this episode must have been a lot of work to nail down!)

For me, the juxtaposition is what I like about the character. On the one hand, Vic Fontaine is throwing around Rat Pack era slang in an episode with tuxedos, a hideous (and appropriate) "throwback Vegas" color palette, and references to Victor Borge. On the other, he's a self-aware character who calls himself a light bulb, hacks other holosuites and communications channels (okay -- maybe that's a little creepy), and can modify his own program on the fly. He's not really one simple thing.

I also quite like the performance from actor James Darren -- quite a casting coup in the end, considering all the people they reached out to first. Darren not only sings the songs wonderfully (enough so that Star Trek fans drove the recording of two albums of classic songs in the years to follow), he's also marvelously at ease in the acting. My sense is that fans who don't like Vic Fontaine don't like the idea of him; the performance itself is nothing but charismatic.

Other observations:

• The two other characters who knew about Odo's feelings prior to this -- Quark and Dax -- get some nice scenes. Quark regards Kira as a deal Odo waited too long to close, and quips how he himself is far more lovable than the uptight constable. Dax is there at the key moment to say, with seven lifetimes of experience, how rare a true moment of clarity is. We see the reactions of both characters to the momentous kiss.

• The musical score adopts a jazzy tone at times to better blend in with the world of Vic Fontaine.

• A "Warp Core Breach" is a great name for a cocktail. Greater still that it comes in a glass of such ridiculous size.

• Odo's morph into a tuxedo is one visual effect that doesn't really hold up today. A fun idea, though.

"His Way" is an unconventional episode -- a light romantic comedy playing an almost Cyrano de Bergerac story and loaded with songs. But for me, it works. I give it a B+.

Tripping on the Runway

There are tons of worker placement board games about building things or farming things. Those might in fact be the "factory default settings" for the genre, which is why it was nice to come across the game Prêt-à-Porter. It's a worker placement game about running a fashion empire -- you juggle finances, gather fabric, and exhibit new looks in regular fashion shows. It's been in and out of print a few times since its original 2010 release, but I recently got to play its new Third Edition.

The game is divided into 12 rounds, or "months" -- and that year into four seasons. In the first two months of each season, you place three workers at various spaces around the board: hiring workers for your firm, buying real estate from retail stores to warehouses, purchasing fabric, and acquiring fashion designs.  In the third month, you must exhibit one or more looks at a fashion show. Each look requires two fabric tokens of different colors (out of six possible colors). You earn money and prestige by up to four different metrics: the Trend of your looks, their Quality, your PR presence, or the sheer quantity of looks you showed.

Early in the game, the first exhibition season brings just one fashion show in which all four categories are scored. As later seasons come, there are more shows each time -- but fewer categories in which they score. You have to focus on what's going to be important in the next season, while being mindful that you have only two rounds (six actions) to prep each time.

It sounds pretty straightforward... but the rules actually feel a few notches more complex than they need to be. I was reminded somewhat of the board games Vinhos and Viticulture -- both about wine, but the former considerably more complicated than the latter, and not actually better for it. Prêt-à-Porter feels like the more complex version of a simpler fashion game, incorporating a few too many elements compared to something else that might exist out there somewhere.

Take the money management. You have to "make payroll" and "pay rent" on your buildings; if you can't, you end up taking out a loan you'll have to pay back with interest. That's all fine. But you can't just take the automatic loan for voluntary expenditures like buying new fabric. In that case, you must spend an action to go to a bank space and "take out a line of credit," essentially a different form of loan -- payable on the same time frame, but with a slightly better interest rate and multiple terms to choose from. To me, the game really doesn't feel like it needs the subtle differentiation of these two elements.

Or take the way you buy cloth in the game. There are three different areas of the board you can do it, a "local supplier" from which you can get as much as you wish of a single color, a "warehouse" from which you can buy just one token each in any or all of the six colors (at a higher price), or a "foreign supplier" that is back on the as-much-of-one-color method (but at the highest prices of all). Each purchase comes with varying numbers of Quality tokens, one of the facets on which you're judged in a fashion show. But when you only have six actions to take before each show, you really don't wind up spending too many of them to pick up fabric. Furthermore, there are lots of cards you can pick up that cheat the buying in one way or another. The long and short of it? There's not as much competition for these spaces as you'd think, and so it seems like all the mixed-up ways of acquiring the fabric aren't entirely necessary.

And about those cards? They really seem to break the game wide open. I could grouse about this particular card or that one; no doubt a different group of players would argue that these cards are the ones that are really imbalanced. My point is that each card does a lot, creating huge work-arounds of the game's core rules, and enabling wildly powerful engines for you to lean into as a strategy. The core mechanics don't really get a chance to shine -- which is a shame, because explaining them the first time you play is rather complex. Instead, the game feels like before the halfway point, it has devolved into a competition of who can abuse the card they picked up more thoroughly.

Now, if you're the one who masters that abuse? Prêt-à-Porter can provide a few thrills. And like I said, the theme is novel. But even dressed up in "fashion," it's still a worker placement game at the core, and one I found far less polished than others in the genre. I give the game a C+.

Caff-fiend

Here's another memento of the Before-Time: another road trip, another short Audible original audiobook. And another one with a bit of a podcast vibe to it (like the one on dinosaurs), even though this non-fiction presentation was not interview driven. This audiobook, by author/journalist Michael Pollan, was called Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World.

Clocking in at just over two hours, Caffeine attacks its subject from three major angles. The first is from the view of science and biology, laying out in detail exactly what a caffeine molecule is, how it acts on the human brain, and what properties it has been observed to have in various tests on humans and animals. This part can be a little dry in moments if you're not into biochemistry, but then Pollan is smart enough to know this and interpolate these facts throughout the entire piece to keep from overloading the listener.

The second angle is historical, with lots of information about the history of coffee and tea. How were the effects of caffeine discovered and these beverages created? How did their use spread? I found this to be the most engaging prong of the storytelling here, as I learned lots of fascinating factoids about culture and commerce. It's trivial at times, yet feels in many cases worth knowing.

The third angle is personal, as Pollan details an experiment on himself: cutting out caffeine for several months and chronicling the effects. At the time I listened to the podcast, I felt a bit scolded when listening to these elements of the audiobook. But in the days after I'd finished, these were the parts that stuck with me.

It's not that caffeine was presented as "bad" for you (indeed, Pollan mentions that many ill effects have been imagined over the years, then subsequently proven untrue); it's just that caffeine's principle effect is to negate the undesirable side effects of consuming caffeine. It's a vicious cycle! And any time I find myself having any caffeine over the days after listening to this audiobook, I couldn't help but think about it as I hadn't (and wouldn't have) before.

Overall, I'd say Caffeine rates a solid B. It's food for thought, and entertainingly told. Perhaps if your podcast backlog is running a bit thin, this might be a way to fill in for a couple of hours.

DS9 Flashback: In the Pale Moonlight

"In the Pale Moonlight" is arguably the biggest break from "Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek," from the morally uncompromising humans of the 24th century, in all of Deep Space Nine. It also shows up regularly on lists of the series' top episodes.

Sisko records a lengthy log entry detailing his actions of the past two weeks, actions he now realizes were an inexorable descent into moral compromise. Desperate to bring the Romulans into the Dominion War as allies, Sisko has worked with Garak to fabricate evidence of a Dominion double-cross.

I hadn't actually watched this episode in full since it originally aired, and I did remember it being a series highlight as widely claimed. Rewatching it today, while I do still think it's quite good, I felt its punch didn't land as hard as it did in its time. That punch, I believe, is the shock that Benjamin Sisko would slip down this road of lies: consorting with criminals, threatening violence, becoming an accessory to murder -- and that not only would he accept it as being for the "greater good," but we the audience would too.

Two decades later, there's been a lot more darkness in Star Trek that makes this look less like an outlier. Not just in "modern Trek" (Discovery and Picard) either, but in episodes of Voyager and Enterprise. But also, watching Deep Space Nine itself regularly, without a summer hiatus or reruns between episodes to spread the experience out over seven years, this story is not as much an outlier as you might think. Sisko has played the "bad guy" for noble intentions in increasing degrees through "Past Tense," "Through the Looking Glass," and "For the Uniform" (destroying an entire planet in that last one!). The road he walks in this episode is just a continuation of that larger journey.

Making the audience so complicit with Sisko is a fresh trick of this episode, though. The log entry framing device is not your average "two weeks earlier" flashback gimmick. Avery Brooks delivers a performance that comes right through the screen to look directly at you, challenging you to disagree with or judge anything he's saying. He drinks, he slowly sheds layers of clothes as he peels back layers of his story, and makes the audience an accomplice in a secret he says he can't even reveal to his closest friend Dax. Some of that righteous fervor Brooks displayed in "Far Beyond the Stars" is here harnessed for entirely different ends in an intense, intimate performance.

Garak, of course, figured well in many wonderful Bashir episodes. But the series has increasingly paired him with other characters -- Odo, Worf, and O'Brien -- to great effect. Pairing him here with Sisko is another win. As actor Andrew Robinson put it, his role in this episode is to teach Sisko that "you can't go to bed with the Devil without having sex." Garak knows that deep down, Sisko means what he says, that he'll do anything to bring the Romulans into the war. But he also knows that Sisko would balk at what "anything" includes if he knew it at the outset. So he masterfully weaves a patented Garak blend of lies and truth, telling Sisko a plausible version of "the plan" that he knows isn't actually The Plan.

I've noted lately that the sixth season Deep Space Nine model is to focus an episode on one character while throwing a single scene to the rest of the cast. That's still the model here, but the "single scenes" for the other characters are much more organically incorporated than the common bit of comedy at the top of the episode. Dax engages in a fun debate with Sisko, role-playing as a Romulan. Quark forces Sisko to bribe him to not press charges on a criminal vital to the plan. (Quark got stabbed while protecting a dabo girl's personal space; perhaps that's about watching his bottom line more than any objective respect for boundaries.) Bashir pushes back against Sisko's order to sell a dangerous compound to unsavory people.

Though if you're going to talk about making a big impact in just a scene or two, you have to talk about guest star Stephen McHattie in role of Vreenak. Of course, he was a meme before memes were a thing with his wild delivery of the line: "It's a faaaaake!" (Which, for me at least, does work in the moment, enormous as it is.) But his prior scenes with Sisko are really great -- withering disdain and sustained tension. The conversation about flaws in replicated Romulan spirits is especially fun, relating directly to Vreenak's ability to spot flaws in the phony hologram he's about to be given. (And even if Sisko were to learn something about how he might deceive Vreenak, it's too late; it's been established that the Cardassian data rod can only be recorded on once.)

Other observations:

• The original story idea for this episode was a sort of All the President's Men story in which Jake tries to "Watergate" First Minister Shakaar, coming into conflict with his father once it's clear he's protecting the Bajoran leader. According to staff writer Ronald Moore -- who was ultimately the uncredited writer on the script they did film -- this idea never quite clicked. The relationship between father and son was too strong, and it was too hard to believe anything coming between them. Excising Jake and bringing in the confessional log gimmick is how the story finally came together.

• To really raise the stakes on the war, we hear that the planet Betazed is taken by the Dominion. The writers considered Vulcan for this story beat, but decided that would be a little too momentous.

• "Proconsul Neral" is mentioned in dialogue, connecting back to a Next Generation episode that featured the Romulan character. Next season, he'd appear on Deep Space Nine -- with a significant promotion.

• You wouldn't really expect it from the story, but there's a lot of costume work in this episode. Garak changes outfits several times as the weeks pass. Criminal Grathon Tolar has loud clothes to match his loud alien makeup. And of course, there's that flashy new shirt Quark is sad to have lost.

• Avery Brooks' delivery of the last few lines is a really excellent display of clear choices and intentionality in acting. He repeats essentially the same line three times, each time with a different meaning. First: "So I will learn to live with it." (I really don't have any other choice.) Then: "Because I can live with it." (Fake it until you make it.) Then finally: "I can live with it." (Resolve. He can.)

There was a time I would have given "In the Pale Moonlight" an A without reservation. I think when the shock factor is gone, it drops just a touch to an A-. It's still a highlight of the season and the series.

A Walk Down Memory Lane

Last year, I wrote about a new series of "escape room in a box" board games, Escape Tales. The first of the series, The Awakening, introduced a couple of key innovations breaking both with real-life escape rooms and their board game counterparts: a more detailed story, and a relaxed time frame. Those design choices are back in play for the second installment, Low Memory.

Set in the near-future, Low Memory tells the story of a woman whose life is threatened due to her husband's mysterious work in cutting-edge technology. The details, of course, are meant to be discovered in the course of playing the game -- but once again, playing an Escape Tales game is like participating in a Choose Your Own Adventure book with a branching narrative.

Telling a story this detailed goes hand-in-hand with not limiting your experience with a timer, as other escape room games do. In Escape Tales, you receive action tokens and spend them as you see fit to explore potential puzzles. Running out of tokens is how you incur penalties that affect your final "score," encouraging players to be efficient, but not necessarily fast. Take your time to read the story, to discuss possible clues with the other players, and share puzzles with everyone -- because time is not a limiting factor. As with The Awakening, I find this aspect to be the best thing about Escape Tales: Low Memory.

It's possible, though, that the designers (Jakub Caban and Bartosz Idzikowski) leaned into the narrative of the game a little too heavily though. They've got a lot of story to tell, and made a lot of game to hold it: Low Memory is broken up into three separate sections, meant to be played in three different game sessions. The box says that each of these sessions will take you three hours; they certainly took us more than two each. I suppose if you find yourself really drawn into the story, spending as much as nine hours with it might be a selling point for you. I felt like the story started strong, but didn't remain engaging for as long as the gameplay did, petering out before the end.

I think it was perhaps also a bit harder than it needed to be. Low Memory is definitely a more challenging experience than Low Memory. The puzzles are more numerous, more intricate, and more difficult. Again, this will be a selling point for some. Our group felt we had to take clues just a little bit more often than we'd have liked; we do like struggling occasionally so we can feel that thrill of a mental breakthrough, but we struggled enough on this game than some of the team began to check out of the experience to some degree.

Still, Low Memory did have a very satisfying diversity of puzzles. In our group of four players, everyone contributed something critical to a puzzle solution at some point or another, because different puzzles played well to different escape room strengths. And if the story of the game did seem a bit too long, it did at least reach a more satisfying conclusion than The Awakening. Ultimately, your choices do affect how "good" an ending you get, and it may just be that in Low Memory, we made better ones. But where The Awakening had an oddly deflating ending that let down that experience a bit, Low Memory had a good one that for me restoked some of the enthusiasm that had started to flag a bit in hours 7 and 8 of the experience overall.

If you liked Escape Tales: The Awakening, you should definitely check out Escape Tales: Low Memory -- especially if you felt the first game could have been a little more difficult. I prefer the original myself, but I'd still give Low Memory a B. Either one would be a fine place to sample the Escape Tales system if you like escape room games but haven't tried this series.

Out of the Past

Your reaction to the latest episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. may depend greatly on your enthusiasm for the film noir genre and all its tropes -- because "Out of the Past" was an unabashed homage.

Agent Daniel Sousa has a rendezvous in Los Angeles to deliver technology important to the future development of S.H.I.E.L.D. But it's also a fateful rendezvous, as history records he died in the effort. As our heroes hide the truth from Sousa and debate the wisdom of meddling with time, Deke is abducted by goons and taken to an intimidating meeting with Malick. And May learns the nature of her emotional extremes.

This episode was a film noir meal with all the trimmings -- Dutch angles, moody black-and-white cinematography, and dispassionate narration. It even opened with an explicit shout out to Sunset Boulevard: a dead body floating in a pool. But while it all looked pretty great, I found the genre to be a harsh clash with the narrative content. The stated justification was that LMD Coulson was on the fritz, seeing a world leeched of color and having an uncontrolled inner monologue. But half the scenes didn't even include Coulson, puncturing the logic. And too many of the series' elements stuck out like a sore thumb in the throwback style. Outside of, I suppose, Blade Runner, there aren't a lot of robots in film noir, nor cloaking airplanes, futuristic guns, and so forth.

Because the trappings were already keeping me at a distance, the story itself wasn't reaching me very effectively either. It was essentially playing an "Edith Keeler must die" type of narrative, in which a good person must be sacrificed to preserve the future. But both getting into and out of that story was a bit awkward. You'd think if 1955 was the year Sousa died that someone might have mentioned it last episode; it felt like it came out of the blue this week. And any drama inherent in the premise was lost when they found a way to cheat fate and have it both ways -- save the future and Sousa.

So no, not a favorite episode of mine... though there were some good elements in the spaces between the main plot. Showing the Macguffin of the episode -- a featureless metal rod that's somehow the origin of the future -- made for some fun, from those who revered it to those thoroughly unimpressed by its blandness. There were also good laughs at the expense of poor Enoch, who waited two decades to reunite with his friends only to become their switchboard operator for a brief time... and then be abandoned again. (We're not heading toward angry, alienated Enoch as the season's surprise Big Bad, are we?)

Then there was the material surrounding May, which I enjoyed more than I expected. After teasing that she might be repressing, and suggesting a PTSD-themed storyline ahead, we instead learned that another previously non-powered character on the show has contracted a case of superpowers. May's empathic gifts has obvious applications; but the lack of her own emotion seems like a hell of a drawback. Ming-Na Wen made the most of her scenes; seeing May act positively giddy was more unsettling in its own way than even her full panic attack last week.

So, call it a C+ overall? Perhaps destined to be a B- in retrospect, depending on where the May and Sousa stories end up later this season? The odd stylistic choices here were clearly a one-off, so this was hardly a dive the show can't pull out of. Still... I need some Fitz, stat!

Obscurity

Some time ago, I wrote about the game Mysterium, and the unique way it synthesized inspiration from other games into a new experience. Part Clue, part Dixit, and all cooperative, the game was about players trying to solve a mystery together. Now it seems someone has taken that game and spun off a new creation of their own: Obscurio.

Obscurio sees players teamed up, trapped inside a sorcerer's magical mansion and looking for the right doors to escape. A "grimoire" player non-verbally tries to lead them to the right doors, offering clues through surreal illustrations on cards. So far: Mysterium, with a different story draped over the top. But then the big difference: one of the players on the team is secretly a traitor, trying to mislead the team and keep them trapped in the mansion long enough to win alone. The grimoire knows the traitor's identity, but can't tip off the team; instead, they must hope their own clue-giving is strong enough to best the traitor.

The difference between a fully cooperative game and a "team-vs-a-traitor" game is substantial -- enough that the game doesn't really need any other changes to be a different experience. But there are a handful of differences. But in my group, at least, each adjustment chipped away at what made Mysterium fun, resulting in a weaker game. That includes the traitor mechanic itself. The illustrations in the game are simultaneously hyper-detailed and quite open-ended. Giving an effective clue is hard enough without having a traitor in the mix who gets to pick other cards that also seem like plausible answers. Perhaps this game is for people who have played Mysterium so much that they now find it trivially easy?

There's a timer mechanism in Obscurio. Players have 3 minutes to debate the meaning of the grimoire's clues. But after each single minute, they're penalized for being slow to act: in the next round, some sort of obstacle will be added to limit the grimoire's clue-giving. It's a mechanism that really doesn't work at all. The penalties are so harsh that even one makes clue-giving essentially impossible. Any player who would dare to bring a penalty into the game through one minute of inaction is going to look like the traitor -- it's that simple. So no one will ever risk looking so guilty, and thus there's no reason for the time limit to ever be more than a minute. (As for whether even a one minute time limit is required, that likely depends on how prone your group is to analysis paralysis and endless debate.)

Collectively, the group has a certain number of wrong guesses before they lose. When they get near the end of this pool, the players have the chance to vote on which of them they think is the traitor. If they're correct, the traitor is expelled from picking doors for the rest of the game (though they still get to rig incorrect clues). If the group is wrong in pegging the traitor, they lose some of their few remaining guesses, shortening the fuse even more. And they must keep voting until they either identify the traitor correctly, or burn all remaining incorrect guesses.

Like with all the other new elements of this game, it's an extra degree of difficulty that simply isn't necessary. The game is short enough that it's quite difficult to build evidence on who the traitor is. By the time the vote comes, no one really has enough information to go on -- unless your traitor is particularly bad at laying back in the weeds and letting players make mistakes on their own. (And if they're bad at disguising themselves? Well, this game probably wasn't for you anyway.) I suppose this "accusation" phase is good for accelerating the inevitable ending of an unwinnable game. But the problem is that the game is essentially unwinnable to start with. Again, it feels like it's designed for people who played Mysterium to death and now need something harder.

Your group might love traitor games. Based on how mine has reacted to them, they possibly have a niche audience. We're only able to get Secret Hitler to the table -- sometimes -- because there, the traitors themselves are a team working together. In my group, not many enjoy being the one person whose fun comes at the expense of everyone else's. Perhaps you have a gaming group that thrives on this sort of competition.

Yet even if you do... I simply can't find anything to this game that Mysterium doesn't do better, and more simply. Obscurio feels like a game made for the design team who built and playtested Mysterium, and hardly anyone else. It has some pretty art, and some fun flavor... and that's about it. I give Obscurio a D+. If you're thinking of getting it and don't yet own Mysterium, you should absolutely get Mysterium instead.

Middle of the Row

I'd heard from a handful of people that there was interesting stuff about the Amazon original series Carnival Row. And indeed, there was. But it also really wasn't quite what I'd call "good." And had I looked up its checkered history before watching the eight-episode first season, I might have thought twice about watching it in the first place.

Carnival Row is a sort of fantasy story told in a Victorian England inspired setting, an almost steampunk blend. A series of brutal, Jack the Ripper style murders are being carried out in the Burgue, a city run by humans, but heavily populated by immigrants from fairy lands. The fairy people are the targets of harsh, systemic racism throughout human society; we learn more of how the characters fit in with this reality as the season and its mystery unfold.

The setting of the story is quite tantalizing. Nothing on television (nor, indeed, in any movie I've seen) looks quite like Carnival Row. The ingredients in this stew are all familiar, but they're well chosen, and in the right proportions, making a savory "broth." Not that this ever would have been a n episodic television show, but it it were, the world feels rich enough to easily sustain 100-200 episodes of something made to be syndicated some day.

Of course, these aren't those days, and Carnival Row is in fact built to tell one story -- the investigation of these grisly murders by one police inspector Rycroft "Philo" Philostrate. But the show often drifts from this, much to its detriment. It regularly becomes mired in the political machinations surrounding the Burgue's Chancellor, Breakspear, fancying itself to be another West Wing or Game of Thrones in its examination of intrigue and jockeying for power.

And it always keeps hitting its metaphor hard. The message at its core -- an examination of systemic racism -- is noble. You might even argue that the story line of Imogen Spurnrose, a spoiled heiress who gradually is made to face her own beliefs, is the most compelling of the season's recurring plot threads. But it's all handled with such blunt force that at times it feels more condescending than clever. Now granted, I watched the series before the current waves of protests and the surge in support for the Black Lives Matter movement; perhaps the show would feel less obvious and more inevitable if I watched it now. Still, the show seems convinced that because of its 19th-century trappings, you might miss how topical and current its themes are -- but there's no way to possibly miss them.

Or perhaps the themes are outsized because the characters are so small. Carnival Row is stacked with one-note, shallow characters. Philo the investigator broods. Vignette the fairy is a hothead. The Breakspear family schemes. So on down the line, each player with a single all-consuming trait that, for most, never develops over the course of the eight episode season. There are decent actors performing many of these roles, including Orlando Bloom, Cara Delevingne, Indira Varma, and the always excellent (when you give him the material) Jared Harris. They feel squandered to me in service of this.

As I was coming up on the final episode of the season, I had to know: had this show actually been renewed for season two? Yes, it had. But in learning that, I learned of its checkered history, which may explain the spotty quality. Carnival Row had first been conceived years ago as a film, and it was buzzed about as one of the best unproduced scripts floating around Hollywood. At some point, its creator Travis Beacham reimagined it as a television series, and that change was enough to get Amazon to bite... though an established television producer was brought on to work with him to develop the series. After the season was completed, Amazon insisted on extensive reshoots, over which this other producer apparently resigned in protest, only to be replaced. Then, with the season complete, Amazon agreed to renew the series... insisting on more creative changes that drove both the new producer and Beacham to leave; someone entirely new will be running season two.

There are several ways to read that chaos that could explain what you see on the screen. Are inexperienced writers letting a complex production get the best of them? Is a meddling studio sanding off any rough edges, resulting in a milquetoast product? Are there simply too many cooks in the kitchen? Was Travis Beacham a rigid, uncompromising force whose idea wasn't actually that good, and who rejected any help in improving it? It could be any or all of these things.

All I can say is this: Carnival Row remained a compelling setting, an intriguing universe, from beginning to end. Also, every episode I watched was almost the last one I wanted to watch. Perhaps the wait for season two will give me the time and distance to no longer care about continuing. Or perhaps I'll tune in to see if someone else steering this ship can make something better out of the quality parts lying about. But season one? I'd give it a C+ at best.

DS9 Flashback: Inquisition

After seasons of associating with spies and pretending to be one on the holosuite, Julian Bashir finds himself embroiled in a real spy game in the Deep Space Nine episode "Inquisition."

An investigator from Internal Affairs comes to the station, and Julian Bashir is in his sights. Sloan is convinced that Bashir's genetic enhancements allow him to compartmentalize his mind so completely that the Dominion has turned him into a sleeper agent without his even knowing it. And a look back at Bashir's career -- the choices he's made, and the big secret he kept for years -- provides abundant circumstantial evidence to support the accusation.

This episode was rather controversial among devout Star Trek fans at the time it first aired. It introduced the idea of Section 31, an amoral secret police operating inside the Federation. It was an idea that some fans thought that Gene Roddenberry would have emphatically rejected -- and they may well have been right. But the idea that "it's easy to be a saint in paradise" is one Deep Space Nine has explored before. How does one maintain a paradise? Section 31 is certainly one plausible answer to that question. And it was such an enduring idea, flexible and modern over decades, that it kept showing up in Star Trek, becoming a plot point in Enterprise, Into Darkness, and Discovery.

Oddly, the episode started out as a comedy. Staff writers Bradley Thompson and David Weddle pitched a story mocking bureaucratic red tape: Bashir saves an entire planet, goes to leave, and finds his runabout ticketed and towed. He winds up navigating a Kafka-esque Trial to get home. Show runner Ira Steven Behr quickly reformed the idea into one about a covert Starfleet organization. Give Bashir a chance to be a spy outside of a holodeck! (Ironically, the final version of the story takes place almost entirely in one.)

This episode shows how two chefs can prepare very different meals from the same ingredients. There are aspects of this episode that feel quite similar to a variety of Next Generation stories: "Future Imperfect" (Riker's in a holodeck and doesn't know it), "The Mind's Eye" (Geordi has been turned into a sleeper agent), "Frame of Mind" (Riker is being manipulated into doubting his reality), and "The Measure of a Man" (a lawyerly captain sticks up for one of his officers). But "Inquisition" really doesn't feel much like any of those episodes.

Part of that is the sense of paranoia, which is really amped up here. Bashir is deprived of sleep and food to set him off balance. His room gets searched -- not completely tossed, but with just enough out of place to be noticed. Sloan's questioning starts sweetly, but turns dark after O'Brien warns Bashir to expect trouble. Julian's own innocent behavior comes off suspicious, like when he's digging under his couch when security walks in on him. Guards threaten him with vengeance for friends they lost in the Dominion war, and Odo's not around to offer a sense of safety.

Another key difference is that this episode is steeped heavily in the history of the Deep Space Nine episodes before it. Numerous past episodes are referenced, and in totality, Sloan is able to paint a quite damning portrait of Bashir through his own past behavior. Things even get a little bit meta, as Sloan becomes a critical Star Trek fan pointing out plot holes in those episodes. Why did the Dominion leave the runabout orbiting that Dominion prison camp? Was it really the best idea to share classified information with a group of mentally unstable people?

Perhaps most significantly, the bad guy here doesn't just have a scheme -- he has a point. Sloan remains villainous in his disregard for individual rights... but he makes a powerful argument for "the ends justify the means." Bashir lied to get into Starfleet, but how many lives did he save once there? He's also a clever villain, crafting a scenario to test Bashir that slowly peels his friends away, and gives him ample opportunity for self-doubt. And it's logical in the end that it turns into a recruitment pitch; Bashir has shown a devotion to the greater good before, and that's what Section 31 is all about (in Sloan's own mind).

The episode is open-ended, suggesting that Sloan will be back in the future. And by this point in the run of Deep Space Nine, you can be confident that any pieces put on the board like this will be played sooner or later.

Other observations:

• There's a lot of dry Star Trek conference humor in this episode, from Odo's quip that doctors always schedule theirs on resort planets, to the recurring theme that people traveling to conferences are in serious danger of being abducted by bad guys.

• This is the second episode directed by Michael Dorn. Like the first, there isn't a lot of flashy camera work or staging here, but he shows that he can get great performances from the actors. Alexander Siddig and guest star William Sadler are both excellent.

• At the end of this episode, Bashir, Sisko, Kira, and Odo engage in a discussion about what it means that Starfleet has a nefarious organization like the Tal Shiar or the Obsidian Order. Bashir asks if "when push comes to shove, we're willing to throw away our principles in order to survive?" Sisko does not have the answer... yet. The very next episode puts him at the heart of this very ethical dilemma.

"Inquisition" is a good episode on its own, but also tantalizing in what it sets up for the future of both Deep Space Nine and later Star Treks. I give it a B+.

You Get What You Pay For

Another pre-virus road trip earlier this year was another opportunity to listen to another Audible audiobook exclusive. This time, it was a Interview With the Robot, by Lee Bacon. A 12-year-old girl named Eve is taken into custody for shoplifting, where she proceeds to unspool an amazing tale to the child services worker who questions her. Eve is a robot, and recounts her creation in a secretive lab, the scientist with a particular motivation for building her, and how she came to be on the run.

Audible has a program where you periodically can receive a free original audiobook. I've found that most of them have been better than you'd expect for "they're just giving this away." Interview With the Robot was not. For 3 hours and 42 minutes, it filled our long drive, and was entertaining enough to stick with. But that was probably about the extent of it.

It starts interestingly enough, with an engaging opening chapter that gets you interested in the main character Eve and her story. Once you're in that far, if you're like us, you're probably in for the duration. Still, the story is rather predictable. There are twists and turns, but you're likely to see many of them coming.

This is a fully cast drama without a narrator, different actors voicing the different characters. This has mixed results. Some of the cast is pretty good, particularly the soothing-yet-creepy scientist who is Eve's "father." But the directing leads others in the cast astray: robots early in their development speak in monotone voices that are quite grating. (And you will hear them a lot.) Another actor, playing a teenage boy, adopts a Josh Gad style voice that mostly sounds like the affectation it is.

But all the actors are working to overcome some really awkward dialogue. Lee Bacon has written a story that's engaging enough (even if you anticipate the plot), but he's quite awkward at integrating description into the dialogue in this audio drama format. Characters often describe their surroundings and their actions in ham-fisted ways. It often shows a lack of faith in the audience, because the context alone is usually enough to get you there.

We've listened to some Audible freebies I would gladly have paid for. Interview With the Robot isn't one. That said, we did have other options for listening on hand, and yet still we kept with it to the end. So it really couldn't have been that bad. I'd say it's about a C+. If perhaps your podcast queue is empty and you too can get your hands on it for free, it might be worth a listen. Otherwise, I wouldn't seek it out.

Alien Commies from the Future!

The latest episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. took the final season's time-hopping shenanigans to the 1950s, and the results were plenty of fun.

Transported to 1955, the team determines that the Chronicoms will infiltrate the S.H.I.E.L.D. base at Area 51. While the rest of the team tries to extract intel from a bigoted DoD agent, Coulson and Simmons head in undercover -- but their cover collapses when Agent Daniel Sousa arrives at the base.

I do like that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. threw a bone here to fans of the canceled-too-soon series Agent Carter. That said, as much as I liked actor Enver Gjokaj on Dollhouse, he rarely got much to do on Agent Carter. That was (rightly) Hayley Atwell's show, with the most memorable other character being Jarvis. Put another way: I've never really spent any time since the end of that series wondering whatever became of Daniel Sousa.

But if we're not going to get Agent Carter herself, having Simmons pose as her was a pretty fun way of invoking her presence. The infiltration with Coulson also led to the funniest material on the show in at least a few seasons -- the interrogations to find the Chronicoms. Each gag was funnier than the last; just when I thought they'd topped out at Coulson's repetition of the word "moist," he pulls out the Voight-Kampff test from Blade Runner (and terrorizes an old lady in the process). Chef's kiss.

The time-hopping does seem like a means for the show to refresh itself every episode or two here in this final season. (And a lot of fun for the various production departments; costuming in particular seems to be having a field day, with great new looks for each character in this new time frame.) But I am hoping that they pick up the pace a little on some of the running plot threads. May and Yo-Yo not wanting to talk about their respective issues made for a fun jokey exchange between them, but the stakes are pretty high for everyone to keep ignoring what's going on with them.

And I'm more than ready to have Fitz back! Given that there's always drama between him and Simmons, the writers are probably deferring a more serious story line about what happened between them during the "missing time" (a subject Simmons is clearly avoiding) until the levity of the season is firmly established. But this is the final season of the show! Having one of the main characters wholly absent from so much of it just doesn't feel great.

Besides, it's not like the show is totally avoiding the more serious stuff anyway. Again this week, they strove to thread the needle between an overall light tone and acknowledgement of the more open racism of the time periods they're visiting. Arguably, they weren't as successful in that balance this week (Deke's "stupid white privilege" line might have pushed a bit too hard), but it was nice to highlight the diversity in this show's cast by having so many of them interact with the prisoner.

I'd give the brilliantly titled "Alien Commies from the Future!" a B. Not a stunner, but another fun entry in the series' final lap.

Hair Today

For whatever reason, the "memory game" seems to be a popular subgenre of children's board games. I've played quite a few in my time -- though I couldn't tell you exactly how many. (Hmmm... maybe that's the real memory game.) One of the more recent I tried is called Leo, and if you're ever going to find yourself playing a game with kids that you probably wouldn't have chosen yourself (the game, not the kids), this one is actually rather satisfying.

Leo is a lion who really needs to get to the barber for a haircut. (It the age of COVID-19, you might relate.) A line of tiles are shuffled and arranged face down like stepping stones, with the bed Leo wakes up in every morning on one end, and the barber on the other. But Leo is easily distracted by conversations on his way to the barber, and if he loses too many hours, the barber will close before he can get there. Working as a team, players have four chances (days) to get Leo his haircut.

Play proceeds around the circle, with each player playing one card from a hand of four. Each card moves Leo from 1 to 4 spaces, and reveals the tile he lands on. It's always an animal of a particular type and color -- the type being the number of "hours" Leo stops to chat (from 1 to 5), and the color being your chance to avoid that loss of time. If the card you played to move Leo is the same color as the tile he lands on, you lose no time at all. (You also lose no time if Leo lands on one of a handful of "signposts" also shuffled into the pack.)

You have 12 hours to work with each day -- and a lot of tiles to get through. Without a lot of luck, you're going to fail on day one. But that's where the memory aspect comes in. At the end of a failed attempt, players study the tiles Leo stepped on before hiding them again and starting another day. Next time around, you have two strategic angles to work: try to play a card that will make Leo land on a matching color, or try at least to make Leo land on something that costs only 1 or 2 hours rather than more.

The teamwork aspect of this game makes it quite a lot more enjoyable than your typical "flip over two cards and see if they match" memory game. That's also good if you have a child not yet able to really deal with the lesson that "sometimes, you lose a game" -- you're all in this game together.

It's also nice that you can approach the memorization in several ways -- carving up sections of the path for different players to remember, or tasking some people with focusing on color while others focus on number. It's not deep strategy, of course, but it's infinitely more than many children's games bother incorporating.

Being honest, of course, it seems unlikely I'd ever play a game of Leo if there weren't kids around. On the other hand, if the situation ever somehow presented itself, it wouldn't be crazy to actually play a quick 10-minute game just with adults, unlike other "games" for kids. I might say Leo merits a B. If you're a gamer parent hoping to raise a young gamer kid, you might want to check this one out.

DS9 Flashback: Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night

On Deep Space Nine, the relationship between Major Kira and Gul Dukat was endlessly fascinating to the writers -- even though Nana Visitor never wavered in her take on her character: to Kira, Dukat is Hitler, and would always be a villain. This resolve may even be the thing that spurred the writers to repeatedly use Dukat to torment Kira. They took it to a new level in "Wrongs Darker Than Death or Night."

Dukat contacts Major Kira with a taunting revelation: years ago, he had a long-standing romantic relationship with her mother Meru. Increasingly tormented by the possibility, Kira consults the Orb of Time and is sent back into the past the see the truth for herself. She learns that the stories her father told about her mother were lies... and her relationship with a mother she barely remembers is complicated indeed.

This story might be unique in science fiction: it's a tale featuring time travel into the past in which concern about changing the past is barely a consideration. Because of this, you have to overlook a lot throughout the episode -- Sisko giving his blessing for her time hopping, Kira's misguided faith that Prophets who don't even understand linear time would stop her from messing something up, or that Kira would fail in the end to "kill Hitler." (That's the one thing you do with a time machine, isn't it?)

Then again, there are far more conventional elements the episode also doesn't quite take seriously. Kira spends a day as a "comfort woman" to Cardassians, but it never feels particularly dangerous -- just a bit icky. Dukat seems not to have aged a day in almost 30 years. (But what do we really know about Cardassian aging, I guess?) And he held the same job, running Terok Nor, for two decades? In all these years of interacting with Major Kira, why did Dukat sit on the information about her mother until now? (I guess because until now, he was always trying to seduce her?)

It's a lot of issues to overlook. But much of the rest is good enough to help you do that. The evil of being a collaborator is embodied in Basso, played with smarmy venom by guest star David Bowe. The character wields the little power he's been given with sickening gusto, acting almost more oppressive than the oppressors, and instantly making you hate him. Dukat's initial approach to Meru, a carefully rehearsed lie, is both perfectly on-brand for him and exactly the sort of stunt that seduces people into liking bad men. Kira's scene with a handsy Cardassian Legate may not feel particularly dangerous, but it is a good illustration of a man flexing his power at a vulnerable woman.

Then there's the rapport between the Kiras, Nana Visitor and guest star Leslie Hope (who would later play Teri Bauer on 24). The story is working toward a morally murky ending, where you're meant to be unsure whether Meru has done the right thing. A lack of specificity is basically an impossible acting challenge. But Hope helps the story reach that ending with a series of strong scenes that hit different emotional targets. She sheds tears over the loss of Meru's family, and shows giddiness in how smitten she is by Dukat. She even hits both extremes in one scene, as her joy in feasting after years of starvation devolves to sorrow that her family isn't there to share in it.

Nana Visitor has an equally tough job, in that she has to feel some measure of sympathy in the end, even though she shows very little along the way. In a series of carefully deployed looks, we see Major Kira's growing disgust with her mother and her emerging resolve to treat her as she would any other Cardassian collaborator. But she also is strong in the episode's final scene, confessing her conflicted emotions about her mother to Sisko. (Reportedly, Visitor pushed for that scene to be rewritten, the first draft falling too much on the side of forgiveness for an emotional wound so new and raw.)

Other observations:

• Perhaps some of the rough areas of this episode can be explained by the speed at which it was written. The writers had less time on this after scrapping a story they couldn't get to work: the "ghosts" of Cardassian children were appearing at random aboard the station. Ultimately, it would be revealed that a Josef Mengele-like scientist had been sending them from the Occupation into the future to gather intelligence for the Obsidian Order. A cool nugget of story, but one can see reasons why they couldn't make it work -- Bajoran kids as Cardassian intelligence assets?

• The sixth season has firmly established a formula of giving almost every character a brief scene in every episode. Here, it's Worf and Dax arguing playfully about throwing another big party, Quark procuring flowers for Kira's remembrance of her mother, O'Brien and Bashir first discussing the Battle at the Alamo on the holosuite (which would be a recurring thing for the rest of the series), and Odo giving Kira the push to go do something about her feelings rather than stew in them.

• We've heard before that Kira has brothers. This episode does make me wonder, though... had brothers? You might expect at least one not to have survived the Occupation.

• Guest star Thomas Kopache, returning as Kira's father Taban, is strong in his two scenes -- particularly the last one in which he's acting opposite no one (since it's a recorded message.) That's the moment we have to accept to believe that Kira saves her mother, and it works.

There have been stronger Kira episodes, but I'd say that overall this one comes out pretty good. I give it a B.

Know Your Onions

Last week's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. may only have been the second episode of the season, but it was already redefining expectations of what the season will look like. We're not in for a playful romp in the 1930s, but rather, a time-hopping adventure throughout the past.

As Deke and Mack protect Malick on a bootlegging handoff with secret significance, the rest of the team hides out with Koenig at his speakeasy. Meanwhile, aboard the Zephyr, May reawakens and clashes with Enoch.

This is all fertile ground for the final season of a television series: set up a premise that lets them play around with the history of the show itself. Yet I'm as much nervous as I am interested in what's to come. It's the larger MCU that's causing my concern. Avengers: Endgame kind of just did this "time travel into the series' past" gimmick (and very well), so there's an extra challenge here to take a similar concept and do something notably different. Adding to the challenge: season 6 of the show (in the aftermath of Avengers: Infinity War) saw an abdication of the "we're all in the same universe" conceit. That was almost certainly the right choice for the series, but it does mean that whatever rush you're supposed to feel when, say, our heroes brush up against Version 1.0 of the Super Soldier Serum is considerably diminished.

Fortunately, though, the series seems wisely more interested (so far) in its own history than that of the film franchise. The episode almost felt like an elaborate contraption built to imply to the audience where the identical Koenigs of the future come from. Besides being a great showcase for guest star Patton Oswalt, the episode suggested that maybe this time travel story isn't one about changing the past, but about going back and causing things to be the way you've always known them to be.

It's good that somebody spoke up as the voice of "when you have a time machine, you use it to go back and kill Hitler" -- or in this case, Malic. Daisy's a fitting choice for that role. It feels like there's a lot in her past she'd happily risk, and she's always been more impulsive than cautious. Her role in this story was really the best character showcase of the episode.

There were other character-focused elements... though I think it remains to be seen how effective they'll really be. Yo-Yo's story about PTSD and the loss of her powers feels like it hinges on the question of "why now?" She's endured many traumas before this; is there something about this time that makes it different? And May's story about "coming back from the dead, but emotionally numb" has sort of become a genre staple. Hell, even this series has already done versions of that with Coulson -- so I think the writers had best either tie this thread off quickly or spring a very clever plot twist on us soon.

There was fun to be had in this episode, for sure. But it also didn't feel as slick or polished as last week's premiere. I give "Know Your Onions" a B-.

A Ho-Hum Life

Alien is a classic film with some recent sequels that have arguably chipped away a bit at that greatness. Then there are the movies that are clearly inspired by Alien without actually being sequels -- movies like 2017's Life.

Set aboard the International Space Station, Life follows a crew of six as they research a biological sample returned to Earth from Mars. Their initial excitement at confirming the existence of life away from Earth soon gives way to horror, as the growing creature threatens all their lives.

The cast was the main draw for this movie, an assemblage of people you'd imagine wouldn't hop on board for total schlock: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds among them. (Well... hmmm... Ryan Reynolds has had some spotty "role radar," with at least one terrible movie to every good one. Perhaps his presence here should have been a warning?) But like these characters, who don't know what they're getting into when they start toying with alien life, I didn't really imagine the dark side of what I was getting into with this movie.

The truth is, this movie isn't that bad. But it is incredibly uninspired. Or perhaps over-inspired, in that it's largely derivative of Alien, with bits lifted from Gravity and Psycho for good measure. The characters are quite shallow, with barely enough personality to do more than perpetuate jeopardy with their bad decisions.

Visually, it is quite strong. From a creepy creature design to impressive zero-g simulation to cramped sets that at least feel credible for the ISS, it all looks pretty convincing. The camera work is fairly inspired too, juggling the sense of claustrophobia with the vastness of space. And it all opens with an eye-catching 8-minute "single take" that takes you all around the station as the camera moves and even rotates fully in all dimensions.

There are also some unsettling deaths -- and for a certain kind of horror fan, this might just be the single most important ingredient. The creature gets a dopey and common name that would totally undermine its menace... if it didn't off the characters in truly gruesome ways. For my money, though, I'd like to care a bit about the characters before they become so much meat for the grinder.

In an alternate reality where Alien had never existed and this movie arrived? It would probably blow your mind wide open. As it is? I bet you already forgot this movie existed, if you even heard about it when it was new three years ago. Three years from now, I'll probably have forgotten it too. I give Life a C-.

Sphere Itself

AquaSphere is among the well-regarded board games by designer Stefan Feld that, until recently, I'd never had a chance to play. Now that I've tried it? Well... I feel that Feld doesn't make bad games, and he didn't here. But AquaSphere didn't become one of my favorites.

Set in an underwater research station, AquaSphere is a game in which you program robots to prepare for future actions, then move around the board to deploy them. It's considerably more complex than most of the favorites among my group of gamers, though not the most elaborate thing we've played. There are a lot of intriguing ideas thrown into this game, but some of that feeling of complexity comes from the sense that they don't necessarily gel with each other.

For instance, cool idea #1: the way you have to plan ahead in this game. Worker placement games are always like chess, in that a good player will be thinking several moves ahead of where they are now. AquaSphere forces you to think ahead, though, because taking any action requires at least two turns.  You have a personal game board on which the different action types are shown. You have to take a turn to load up a robot on a specific action space, then later take another turn to deploy that robot to your location on the main board to actually take that action. Every move you're considering is telegraphed ahead of time to your opponents, and if any opponent also has that particular robot/action already prepped? Well, then they can beat you to the punch. It's a clever way to visualize something that's usually hidden in a game, and get players thinking about thwarting their opponents' plans.

Then there's cool idea #2: There's a side board for preparing actions, a sort of hopscotch mini-game you need to play. You begin each round by choosing one of two spaces in the first row. After that, you hop to one of three spaces in the second row -- but one of those three won't be accessible, because it won't be connected to the space you chose in the first row. Finally, you'll hope to a third row of spaces -- and again, your choice might be limited, depending on where you stepped in row two. Each round, you shuffle up exactly which type of action goes in each space. It's all a clever way of narrowing a player's range of choices, making certain things mutually exclusive to one another, and forcing you to consider what your priorities really are.

Both these two systems are quite clever... but also feel a bit at odds with each other. The narrowing of options by that side board is good for trying to keep the pace up in a complex game. But both systems are about getting you to look ahead, and seem a little redundant to each other in that respect.

There's an interesting curve ball in the scoring, too. Points in the game are scored in fairly large bundles at once. At regular intervals on the scoring track, there are hard lines that you must stop at... unless you spend a particular resource in the game used only for the purpose of moving by the hard line without stopping. It's another "look ahead" element; if you know you've got a large scoring moment coming up, you need to get one of these resource tokens. Otherwise, you may only get partial credit for all those points, when you hit that hard line and have to stop there.

That's an unusual resource in a board game... though it joins an array of other things you also have to think about. Time tokens, spent to move around the station. Octopuses, which build up around the station and must be examined, lest they cost you points for amassing in the parts of the station you control. Oh, yeah -- you also have control in different sectors of the station. And enhance a personal lab board to let you keep more resources on hand. And crystals, and submersibles.

Um... it's a lot. And while the artists did a noble job with it, it's a quite busy bunch of game boards trying to show it all. There are little icons strewn about, trying to remind you which consequences go with which actions -- but they're kind of easy to overlook amid the colorful visuals. There's so much at play that you can't really imagine a board that would make it much clearer... but maybe this makes it a bit harder than it needed to be.

Maybe that's my takeaway from AquaSphere in general. I liked it... but maybe it's a bit harder than it needed to be. No doubt that the complexity would become more natural with more plays. But it's a heavy and long enough game that you'll have to be really devoted to it to want to play it that regularly as opposed to more accessible fare. At least, that's how it's going to go in my group. I could see pulling it out every now and then, and having a reasonably fun time with it -- while being rather confounded all over again each time by the challenging decisions the game presents.

I'd give AquaSphere a B. I like seeing a designer who I love stretch and try more. But Stefan Feld's catalog is so large at this point that there are many other games of his I personally prefer.

Trekking On

A while back, I wrote about the elaborately titled The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek. It's a collection of interviews with the key people involved in the original Star Trek series and the first six feature films starring the original cast. Much of the material overlapped with information in Marc Cushman's These Are the Voyages books, but was nevertheless interesting for its reminiscence-driven format.

Less has been written about the Star Trek spin-offs, however. The second volume, The Next 25 Years, dives into the rest of the franchise, up through the 50th anniversary release of Star Trek Beyond. The Next Generation and its movies, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, and the "Kelvin timeline" films all get coverage, and it's a compelling read for any Star Trek fan.

Each series gets an unvarnished examination. While some key players apparently declined to be interviewed for this book, you still get a variety of perspectives on each show -- praising the good moments, but not attempting to paper over the rough patches. The latter is probably of more interest to the sort of fans inclined to read this kind of book. It was to me, at least. It transcends tawdry gossip, though; the book is often a confirmation of behind-the-scenes turmoil that explains periods of lower on-screen quality.

The story of The Next Generation, unsurprisingly, is of a show struggling at first to find its way. Any fan will tell you how rough the first season and much of the second was, but this book really shines a light on just how much more upheaval was going on than was even apparent from the product. The transition from writers of classic Star Trek (who weren't listened to enough) to multiple other show runners is a rocky road indeed. Even in season three when they landed on Michael Piller (who would shape Star Trek for years to come), the team was just barely sprinting ahead of the runaway boulder to get the work done.

Deep Space Nine is a very different story, of the child that feels unloved and underappreciated. Many of the people involved seem to still have a chip on their shoulder about the neglect... but that made them bond with each other in a profound way, staying devoted to the show more deeply than others were to the other Star Treks. And that relative lack of a watchful eye also meant a creative freedom they definitely made the most of.

Voyager is a tale of intermittent strife and smoothness. In began with the struggle to find a star, and then settled when Kate Mulgrew took charge as Captain Janeway. But stability on the set hid a lack of inspiration behind the scenes. Creative doldrums then led to the addition of the Seven of Nine character, which caused tensions and unhappiness among the cast that was never resolved. Voyager is a tale of missed opportunities, with many of the people involved wondering today what they could have done better, what might have been.

Enterprise is a tale of lofty ambitions never realized. So much forethought went into creating something new and different... only to wind up being more of the same once it went before the cameras. The book gives a good account of how it somehow all happened as it did despite no one actually setting out to do that, and reveals how the show almost had the plug pulled after three seasons instead of four (which would have kept us from getting the one season fans generally agree was the best one).

The book concludes with a look at the first two J.J. Abrams Star Trek films (with the third he produced just around the corner at the time of publication). The material on Star Trek Into Darkness is particularly interesting, since very little time has passed to gain perspective on it, compared to all the other Star Trek chronicled here. The conflicting opinions on that experience are an interesting contrast to the widely praised success of the first movie.

The Next 25 Years is a great read for the deep Star Trek fan who's watched it all. There's a bit of an imbalance here, what with 25 seasons of television and 6 movies crammed into about the same space as another book that covered much less material. Still, it's hard to imagine the die-hard Trekker who wouldn't like it. I give the book an A-.

Not Clued In

I absolutely love deduction games, likely going back to Clue being one of my favorites as a kid, long before I discovered the wider world of board games. This puts me in a bit of a tough spot with my gaming group, because I love this genre so much, and most of them do not. I would play Code 777 or Sleuth any time, anywhere... but generally I'd have to be the one to push for it.

Whenever a new deduction game works its way into the mix, I quietly hope that this will be the one that everyone somehow loves, so that I can scratch that core gaming itch of mine more regularly. Recently, these hopes were pinned on a game called 13 Clues. But unfortunately, this game was not the one.

Two to six players each receive their own unique three card mystery to solve in the Clue archetype: a person who did the crime, a place they did it, and a weapon they used. These are selected from a pool of 10 suspects (5 male, 5 female), 10 locations (5 indoor, 5 outdoor), and 10 weapons (5 hand weapons, 5 ranged weapons). These same 30 cards are also divided into 10 "suits" (colors) with 3 cards each -- so there are several angles on which to investigate information.

Each player's three-card mystery is displayed on the outside of a secret screen, so that all their opponents can see them, while they themselves cannot. Inside the screen, each player has a worksheet for tracking information, and two randomly dealt cards from the leftovers -- card they can see but no one else can. In games with fewer than six players, remaining leftovers are placed face down in the center of the table. The game takes its name from the fact that each player begins the game with "13 clues" to sort through: cards they can't see that are possible answers to the mystery.

The gameplay involves each player on their turn directing a question at one of their opponents: "how many red cards do you see?" or "how many outdoor locations do you see?" That player must report back a true answer, surveying the screens of all their opponents (each with its own displayed mystery), plus the two secret cards they're holding behind their screen. When an opponent reports a number that doesn't match with what you see, you have to determine whether that's because of your own three card mystery, or because of those two secret cards that opponent has hidden.

There is one tweak to the deduction genre here that's clever: whenever you aim a question at a player, you pass them a token. Those tokens each then represent a question they get to ask on their turn. The more one player is "picked on" by the group, forced to give away information without gathering any for themselves, the more questions that player gets to pose during their next turn, making up for the knowledge imbalance.

Unfortunately, the rest of the game simply isn't as smart as other games in the deduction genre. "Everyone else sees your cards" works so much better in Code 777, because you're restricted in what information you can seek each turn. (You draw a card that gives you a question to ask -- you only have control over which opponent you ask.) The freedom of 13 Clues lets you zero in on information with razor precision in fairly short order.

And the value of an "I see nothing" response is immeasurable. Unlike Sleuth, or even Clue, where there is an advantage in sussing out exactly which cards are being secretly held by each player, in 13 Clues, you really only need to learn the 3 cards in your own mystery. And that mystery comes unraveled at lightning speed. One moment, you're trying to deduce whether one player's answer meant they have a particular card, or you do (in your mystery). The next moment, a happenstance "I see zero pink cards" answer completely removes those cards from contention for everyone.

Accusations are even more revealing. On their turn, a player may guess at their mystery -- and the rules require that all three of the cards they guess be cards they cannot see anywhere. There's no using the strategy of Clue where you inquire misleadingly about information you know to help zero in on one piece of information you don't. When a player makes a wrong guess, you immediately know that player can't see any of the three cards they guessed. It only takes one or two of those to blow the game wide open.

Basically, the deduction matrix here simply isn't as wide as it looks at first glance. In the beginning of our play, each of us was bemoaning the difficulty of crafting a note taking system that would hold everything we might learn. In actuality, the game took exactly 9 turns total (individual turns, not rounds), speeding to an uneventful end.

I'd be willing to give the game another chance, just to see if maybe players wising up with experience makes information more difficult to ferret out. Or perhaps someone gave an error in responding to a question when we played, causing a cascading sequence of wrong accusations that brought the game to a premature end? But I suspect I'll never find out. Like I said, deduction games are hard to get to the table in my group --  and I'd much rather push a beloved one into the mix than try to champion this noble effort that flamed out so hard.

At best, I'd say 13 Clues is a C-. And even that mark is probably only that high because I have such a soft spot for the genre.