Too Much of a Good Thing

It's natural to want more of a good thing. When a board game is a big hit, it gets expansions, spin-offs, updated editions... anything that get the fans engaged again. And quite often, these add-ons can be very good, with game designers finding exceptionally clever ways to grow a system that felt complete and contained the first time around. Sometimes, though, a game is just too perfect as-is for it to be expanded upon.

 

That's The Mind. Which has now spawned The Mind Extreme.

 

The Mind is a fantastic little cooperative card game with simple rules. Players are dealt cards from a deck of numbers 1 through 100. Without speaking to each other, they must play all the cards together in a single pile, in increasing order. There are a few wrinkles to that, but the core concept is that simple. And it's deceptive just how much fun that actually is, and how much of a challenge it can be. I've played The Mind dozens upon dozens of times: questing with the same group to complete all its levels, trying it with different mixes of friends to see how it affects the experience, and even playing it at a convention with people I don't often get to see. The Mind is always a fun experience, and succeeding at it feels great.

Naturally, the world would seem to need a sequel. But The Mind Extreme can't help but be worse than its predecessor. And the core problem is really that there just isn't much you could do to add to that original experience that doesn't diminish it.

The Mind Extreme divides that 100-card deck in two: there are white cards and red cards both, each numbered 1 through 50. Your job each round is to play the white cards in one pile in ascending order, and the red cards in a different pile in descending order. With your focus split in two places, mistakes are more likely. Getting a sense of the gaps between numbers -- is it time for me to play this card yet? -- is harder. It's definitely "Extreme," but it isn't necessarily any more fun.

Still, that alone wouldn't be that much lesser a different experience than The Mind. Which I can imagine was the problem during the design process. I envision playtesters talking around a table saying: "Yeah, but it's all the same rules, just with two half-decks shuffled together. That's not really different enough from The Mind, is it?" I can imagine designer Wolfgang Warsch, the man whose recent games come loaded with extra mini-expansions, looking at that and thinking, "this really isn't different enough!"

So The Mind Extreme adds another element: some rounds require you to play the cards in one or both of the stacks face down. You play through the entire level, then flip the stack over at the end to see whether you got everything in the right order (losing one "life" in total if there are any mistakes). My group found this to be an utterly uninteresting element in the game, going so far as to simply ignore it after one or two playthroughs. It's all but impossible to play a face down stack in the right order, succeeding at it isn't actually that big a thrill (since it feels close to random), and being able to mess it up as much as you want while only losing one life isn't enough of a deterrent to make you really care to try to get right. It's simply a moment in the game where "now we lose one life." The "split deck" aspect of the game at least still taps into what made The Mind compelling. The face down aspect misses the thrill of the original entirely.

The Mind was a game my group played compulsively for many months on end. I suppose you could use the fact that we did stop as evidence that an expansion/sequel was needed. And yet, having now sampled The Mind Extreme, I'm not sure we'll be playing it much. There's no siren lure to beat all its levels as there was for the first one. It's the sequel you may have thought you wanted that probably shouldn't have been made.

Even though it's firmly in the shadow of its parent, I couldn't go so far as to call The Mind Extreme a "bad" game. Particularly if you play without the face down element, you do still get some thrills, enough that I'd probably call it a B-. I would play it, every now and then, given that there's a copy now within my gaming circle. But the simple truth is, if you don't own The Mind, you should buy that. And if you do, then you don't need this.

Fits for a King

I've written before about legacy games, board games with evolving gameplay that permanently changes over a campaign of multiple plays. Recently, I completed a very different kind of legacy game with a much heavier emphasis on story, The King's Dilemma. It casts the players as the advisory council of a largely inattentive king in a fantasy world. The council must debate and vote on how to respond to crisis after crisis.

The mechanics are actually quite straightforward. In each round, a new card is revealed, telling the story of a "dilemma" facing the council. Each outcome will affect some of the five different tracks in the game -- raising morale while lowering wealth in the kingdom, increasing knowledge while decreasing security, and so forth. Each player has power tokens to throw behind voting one way or the other in each dilemma. They also have money, used in handful of ways -- including bribery of other players to coax them into voting the way you want. A regimented system of voting around the table is used to settle the matter. Players on the winning side give up the power they pledged, players on the losing side retain the power they bid, and players who stayed out of the matter entirely divide up the power that was spent by the winning side on the previous dilemma.

Within that simple framework, there are a lot of strategic considerations. The player who contributes the most power to a winning side also essentially takes ownership of the policy that is enacted. That can take the form of a sticker brought out onto the game board, gaining or costing you power for the next few games. What's more, each player is given a particular "house" to role play throughout the campaign, with set goals you're trying to achieve. Plus, each new game deals you a specific goal to manipulate the tracks to a certain configuration by the end of the game. Sometimes, those goals will be compatible, and sometimes not so much. Balancing those considerations is the core of the strategy.

But you might also feel compelled to ignore strategy here and there because of what the story is presenting. The game box warns you that some of the content of The King's Dilemma addresses very serious topics. In the course of the campaign, the government you oversee will adopt policies in regards to criminal justice, foreign aid, civil rights, and more. And the story is painted in enough detail that you can get caught up with it and feel an emotional pull in a certain direction.

Unlike most legacy games, the mechanics of play don't change much over time. There are a few wrinkles introduced here and there, but there's never really a point where you're adding fundamental new rules to change the experience. What does evolve, though, is a story that's very much based on your collective decisions. There are a great many forks in the narrative, and choosing one path forever closes off the others. In the course of a campaign, you'll only experience about half the story The King's Dilemma has to offer... and you may often feel very curious to know what the "road not taken" would have looked like. (Especially when you were on the losing side of a key vote that set things in the "wrong" direction.)

It is a political game, with all the benefits and drawback that concept entails. You can be ganged up on, with opponents refusing to enact any policy you appear to want too much. Manipulating others and obscuring your true goals are absolute keys to success. When we ultimately "scored" the entire campaign, I was dead last of five players, in large part because I think I played too much of the campaign too brazenly. Yet I still enjoyed the experience, and would absolutely consider playing a new copy of The King's Dilemma from scratch; I'd be guaranteed to have a different experience with a different story if I did.

I'd give The King's Dilemma a B+. That is to say, there are other legacy games I've enjoyed more, but I still liked this one very much. If your gaming group is prone to taking slights personally, you might be asking for trouble. If you need mechanical depth to sink your teeth into, you might be disappointed. But the story depth here is remarkable, and I think the overall experience very satisfying.

The Dev-olution Will Be Televised

Several years ago, the movie Ex Machina wowed me so much that I basically pledged to give any future endeavor from writer-director Alex Garland a try. Since then, the movie Annihilation tested that resolve a bit. (I didn't really like the movie, but man, was it pretty.) Now something has come along to restoke my faith: not a movie, but a mini-series.

Devs revolves around a mysterious division of a California tech company, doing mysterious research at the direction of its mysterious CEO. As the eight-part series opens, software engineer Lily is celebrating that her boyfriend has been accepted into Devs, and the two are preparing to deal with the secrecy this will introduce into their relationship, him unable to tell her about his work. But it turns out there's already secrecy between them about to be exposed. And the secret of what Devs is actually creating is more profound than anyone could possibly imagine.

Although Devs is stunning on many levels, it's difficult to praise it too much because its surprise twists and turns start coming right in the very first episode, and keep coming right up through the very last. It's a very well-written story that shows what's possible in the format of a limited series; when mysteries don't have to be doled out on an uncertain and open-ended time table, a steady flow of answers (leading to more questions) can be plotted out.

Devs upends expectations with regularity. 10 minutes into episode one, you're unsure where it's heading, but you've been given what you think are enough anchors to set expectations. By the end of that same episode, everything you thought you knew about what the series would be has been tossed out the window. In retrospect, once you've seen the entire series, this unpredictability seems profoundly ironic. Yet it isn't the surprises themselves that are the real trick; it's how the show remains compelling every time it seems to reset the table.

The story doesn't exist only to surprise, though. There are many interesting characters, each with powerful personal motivations that give the story meaningful stakes. There's a potent juxtaposition of the sentimental and the creepy. Back-to-back scenes can draw you in with empathy, or unsettle you and make you recoil. Occasionally, these moments are layered into the same scene.

Visually, the show is a work of art -- as you would expect from the maker of Ex Machina and Annihilation. There's beautiful aerial photography of San Francisco, gorgeous sets with eye-popping colors and evocative lighting, and striking camera framing that routinely makes each scene seem suitable for a gallery wall. The music engages fully in this artistic endeavor; the score is unusual in every way, from its instrumentation to its rhythms to the very moments where music is deployed (or not) and the volume it's played at. Carefully chosen classic rock songs often bookend episodes, the repetition itself a clever means of reflecting on what you've learned over the course of the previous 45 minutes. Occasionally, even the storytelling retreats to a more artistic place. Many episodes open with a teaser scene before the title that's more a tone-setter than an addition to the narrative. 

The acting is great, and the casting superb. Relative unknowns like Sonoya Mizuno (as Lily) and Jin Ha (as Jamie) make a huge impact in what should be breakout roles for successful careers to come. Recognizable actors are positioned to play against type in effective ways: there's not a trace of comedy in Nick Offerman's role (as CEO Forest), only alternating anguish and menace; Alison Pill, who used to play the ingenue and more recently has hinted at a darker side (in Star Trek: Picard) is downright villainous here (as Katie). There are also great appearances from long-working character actors, including Stephen McKinley Henderson and Zach Grenier, in layered and interesting roles.

I would have to admit that perhaps the ending of the series doesn't quite live up to the engrossing journey... but only because the bar is set so high. There's certainly no better ending lying in plain sight, and the one we get doesn't undermine what's great about the series.  Overall, I'd give Devs an A-. Now that Alex Garland has shown his skill in this medium, I'll be quite curious to see if his next production is a film for the big screen, or a series for the home screen.

DS9 Flashback: Shadows and Symbols

With many balls thrown in the air in Deep Space Nine's seventh season premiere, it's up to the second episode to catch them.

The Sisko family heads to the desert planet Tyree in search of the Orb of the Emissary, bringing along newly joined Trill Ezri Dax. Martok and Worf seek to destroy a Dominion shipyard in Jadzia's name, with Bashir, O'Brien, and Quark along for support. And Kira mounts a blockade against a Romulan armada with Odo at her side.

There is a lot packed into this single episode, yet nothing feels rushed and there's plenty of room for interesting character arcs. Most significant, of course, is the full-fledged introduction of Ezri Dax. It's handled quite nimbly, giving you a strong sense of the new character without letting her overwhelm the episode.

That character did not come easily, though. Staff writer René Echevarria says the only thing they knew for certain was that the new Dax host would be a woman, as they knew Kira could not be the only female main character on the show. Casting efforts reportedly came up empty until Echevarria suggested mapping their struggles finding an actress to the struggle of being a new host. What if this Dax was a host only by circumstance, unprepared for joining? Show runner Ira Steven Behr embraced this and expanded on it, conceiving Ezri as a neurotic character hearing voices in her head.

It's fun and quite different to see a Starfleet officer who isn't completely put together. Ezri gets space sick thanks to her joining. She can be impulsive. Still, she's also positive, even bubbly -- she's not haunted by the strange memories now in her head, though she easily could have been. Indeed, if you really think about it (and later episodes do dig into this), her plan for her life has been completely disrupted. She can't even trust that any given urge she feels is her own and not those of a former host.

The one thing she can trust is her friend in two lives and now a third, Benjamin Sisko. It says a lot that for all Ezri's uncertainty, she can put faith in that friendship. It says even more about him that he's instantly welcoming, with a big smile and with no reservation. The "family" of Deep Space Nine, people that in a way Ezri has never even met, is stronger than the family she's related to. (This will also be explored in later episodes.)

But Ezri's not the only one hearing voices. Indeed, Benjamin is experiencing this more literally as he's drawn into a revisit of his Benny Russell vision from the previous season. Last time was said to be a vision from the Prophets, while this time is said to come from the Pah-wraiths. Common to both is the appearance of Trek actors without their alien makeup; the fact that Casey Biggs wasn't available last time works out here as he gets to play the villainous Dr. Wykoff. Also common to both is a needle-pegging performance from Avery Brooks. Because no profound message about civil rights underpins this story, his crazed laughter as Benny Russell comes off a bit like "yeah, maybe he is a broken man in an asylum." Maybe it is a little over the top.

Then again, the ideas at play here are getting pretty big. This major revelation of this episode is that Sisko is quite literally part "god," in that his birth was arranged by the Prophets and his mother had been possessed by one. Sisko has been a messianic figure from the very beginning of this show, but this is still a pretty big leap for a science fiction show, especially one as traditionally secular as Star Trek, to take. But I think it works. And it puts a concrete answer on "why Sisko is the Emissary." 

If this big idea isn't your thing, maybe some big visuals are. The Worf story line features some impressive images of the Dominion shipyard, Martok's ship flying dangerously near a star, and spectacular destruction. But there are nice character moments leading up to this. I'm not entirely sure Worf is in the wrong when he snaps at Bashir, O'Brien, and Quark for coming along -- two of the three of them have pretty much told us they're there because they were in love with Jadzia and wished she'd picked them over her husband. But there's always fun in watching Quark clash against Klingon culture, and in seeing the friendship between Martok and Worf -- two Klingons that actually smooth each other's rough edges rather than sharpen them.

Kira may be a Colonel now, but her story line represents some major growth (yeah, I did that) when you really stop to think about it. Her actions here amount to a sit-in, a non-violent protest. This is such a dramatic shift in strategy from her Resistance fighter days that one imagines her past self couldn't even have conceived of it. Along the way, she draws strength from Odo, and from a timely and inspirational return of the wormhole.

Other observations:

• I feel like there's a nice rapport between Ezri and Jake. I could imagine the world where they ended up as a romantic pairing. (Maybe the Dax part of Ezri Dax makes that too awkward?)
  

• Damar is trying to drown his frustrations not only with drink, but with women. The quick scene where he's trying to impress a date by bringing her into "HQ" is fun, especially Weyoun's casual threats that bring down the mood.
  

• Don't touch a Bajoran artifact without permission. They'll throw you 20 feet. It's just what they do.

• Part of me wishes that Quark had been able to contribute in some small way at the end to drive home that it was good having him along after all. But most of me appreciates that it would have been far too convenient for it to play out that way.
  

• To fill the walls of Benny Russell's room with writing, the production reportedly took episode synopses from a working draft of the Deep Space Nine Companion book and had everyone in the art department take turns transcribing it by hand, with a pencil. Authenticity!
  

I give "Shadows and Symbols" a B+. It completes the solid opening to the final season.

Polished Brass?

It's not every day that you get to play one of the Top 10 games (according to Board Game Geek) for the very first time. But I got exactly that when I recently played #3, Brass: Birmingham. Of course, expectations on a game rated this highly are impossibly high, and perhaps even more for this game than most. #1 and #2 are Gloomhaven and Pandemic Legacy: Season One, a campaign and legacy game respectively, which makes Brass: Birmingham the highest-rated "single session" board game there is.

Brass: Birmingham (a sequel to an earlier game, Brass: Lancashire) is a game about building a manufacturing network in the Industrial Revolution. You pay to claim routes between cities, use supply lines to make deliveries, and buy and sell commodities. There have been many other board games playing in a similar space, both mechanically and thematically, which only increases the already high expectations.

Needless to say, that puts special emphasis on the aspects of the game that are different from others I've played (or at least, other "network building" games I've played). First is a system of generating and spending resources that's so cutthroat, it's diabolical. When a player constructs a building of a certain type in one of their cities, a quantity of one of the game's resources is placed on it. But any player with a route connected to that city can spend that resource, and they don't need your permission.

Using up all the resources in one of your buildings is how you score points... but you might have particular empire-building plans for the resources you create, plans that will absolutely be thwarted by your opponents. Every time you construct a building, your turn ends, and each opponent gets the chance to spend its resources before play comes back around to you. So the game is a devilish balance of isolation and encroachment, of making plans but also keeping ready to pounce on sudden opportunities.

This mechanic meshes well with another one in the game: the way that turn order is selected each round. Whoever spends the least money in one round goes first in the next (while the player who spends the most goes last). Acting last, letting every opponent play before you, is a real sacrifice. But is it enough of a sacrifice to not build your empire as best you can by spending a bunch of money this round? Can you maybe chain together a clever pair of rounds by going last in one round, setting up a golden opportunity, but spending the least money so that you can go first next round and play back to back? It feels like a very deep puzzle you can spend many plays trying to crack.

Another big wrinkle in the game that you don't fully appreciate your first time through is a major "halftime" reset of the board. Midway through the game, the vast majority of the early buildings that players create are cleared away. Paths connecting cities are lost, the points everyone was earning disappear, and you have to start over... not quite from square one (particularly if you've had an eye toward this halfway point the entire time), but enough to really gut a smoothly running strategy you may have set up.

This reset is so extreme, in fact, that it might slow down the game a little too much. It's quite possible that lack of familiarity was a major factor here, but it seemed as through the first "half" of the game was really more like the first "third" of the game; even though players took the same number of turns before and after, play went much more slowly in the back half. Just when everyone was feeling like, "okay, I understand this," we all found out that we really did not. It was both tantalizing for what future plays could bring, but also a bit disheartening in how a deep-thinking game that had actually kept a brisk pace suddenly bogged down in an unexpected way.

Also -- and this may not matter for many gamers -- the story and visuals for this game leave something to be desired. Brass: Birmingham is a dark game. The player mats are dark, the pieces are dark, the game board is super dark. And that's all even before you flip over to the "nighttime" sides of all the boards, a purely cosmetic shift that makes everything darker still. I suppose it's supposed to be evocative of the time period (or at least, or modern conception of it) for everything to be so leeched of color and drab, but it's awfully oppressive to look at for one to two hours.

And don't try to make logical sense of the gameplay. Spending two of the game's three goods -- coal and beer -- requires a network of canals or railways connecting to a city; the third resource -- iron -- just moves anywhere. (The rulebook's hand-waving justification of this feels half-hearted at best.) Every sale you make in the game is apparently done over drinks in a pub, because you have to have beer to close the deal. When trains are invented, everybody apparently forgets how to use canals; that's the "halftime" point when all existing networks are inexplicably destroyed. It all works great from a mechanical standpoint, but if you're the sort of gamer who needs a story closely tied to the gameplay, Brass: Birmingham will leave you flummoxed.

Overall, I did enjoy the game. In particular, I enjoyed it a good deal more than other games that are judged to be of similar complexity by the gamer community (my own tastes usually falling more in the middle of the spectrum, by Board Game Geek standards). I think Brass: Birmingham a game that gets good strategic mileage out of its complexity, where other games often just feel complicated for the sake of coming off as a "gamer's game." On the other hand, I have played games that are easier to wrap your head around that do scratch a similar itch; Medieval Merchant is a good one that comes to mind. (Though I haven't played that in an age; perhaps it only seemed great at the time?)

I'd say Brass: Birmingham deserves a B+, with the possibility of rising were we to play it more. I also will be checking out its predecessor, Brass: Lancashire (also highly regarded) to see how similar/different it is.

Temporal Edict

Comedy can be rather subjective. But to me at least, I thought the latest episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks was notably funnier than the first two, and a nice step forward for the series.

When Captain Freeman learns about the "buffer time" her officers are building into their work schedules, she overreacts by regimenting every minute of their lives. This quickly leads to burnout, and a disastrous diplomatic misunderstanding with an alien race that Mariner and Commander Ransom fight to repair (as they fight with each other).

I hadn't thought of it as the "sweet spot" for me and Lower Decks, but it seems totally obvious to me in retrospect: the more the show is like Galaxy Quest, the more I'm going to love it. That movie lampooned every cliche about Star Trek, but did it from a clear place of love for the franchise and its fans. It cracked wise every minute, but not at the expense of actually telling a real story with stakes and growth. Though a parody of a Star Trek movie, it was kind of the best Star Trek movie.

Lower Decks does feel like it's coming from the same place, but it got the "intermix ratio" better this time than it had before. There was a quasi-serious look at what keeps a "dream job" being a dream job once you have it, a message about down time being important to productivity that seemed coincidentally extra-resonant in the age of COVID-19 and working from home. There was also a nice character arc for Mariner, who for the first time in the series didn't actually know everything; she learned that Commander Ransom has some skills too.

And that's just about all the seriousness a half-hour comedy format can hold, and wisely where the writers stopped. The rest was loaded it with those loving pokes at Star Trek tropes. None less than Scotty himself has voiced the concept of "buffer time" before, albeit without using that term. But this episode dialed that up to 11, as comedy animation is wont to do. Elsewhere in the episode: you might have thought every possible joke about Captain Kirk's frequent shirtlessness and ridiculous fighting style has already been made, but Lower Decks managed to put its own amusing spin on both. (Kirk Fu may look silly, but it works.)

For a while, I thought I was even getting my wish for everyone on the show to lower the volume a bit and stop shouting; with Boimler happily in his element for most of the episode, actor Jack Quaid was allowed to stand a normal distance from his recording mic. But filling the void was Captain Freeman, whose character took a pretty big hit this week. To clear the rails for the plot, she had to become a buffoon unable to see the consequences of her extreme actions -- and she tripled her volume and intensity to boot. It's the nature of the beast that Lower Decks is never going to be a "realistic" Star Trek show, but I hope that the concessions for the humor don't always come at the expense of a major character.

And it's not like they always did this week. Some of the best jokes were quick little pops like Boimler humming Jerry Goldsmith's Star Trek theme in the turbolift, the running gags about the ineffectiveness of spears against the power of phasers, and that final blow about the most important person in the history of Starfleet: Miles O'Brien.

This was my favorite Lower Decks episode yet, a solid B+ in my book. The series could hold at this level and I'd be perfectly happy. That it's been steadily trending upward from week to week, though, makes me hopeful that we'll see even better at some point this season.

A Dice Improvement

The board game Race for the Galaxy has spawned plenty of expansions and spin-off (including one I wrote about not so long ago). This is fairly common for any hit game. But it's not so common for one of the follow-ups to improve upon the original. Yet that's just what I think happened with the dice off-shoot, Roll for the Galaxy.

Like Race for the Galaxy, Roll for the Galaxy sees each player managing an interplanetary empire: adding planets and technology to expand it, producing goods then converting them to money or victory points, and looking for potent combos along the way. Both games make reading your opponents and anticipating their choices an important element of the gameplay. But I think Roll for the Galaxy makes all of these elements more satisfying in every way.

Each round is divided into five phases -- but some of these phases get skipped over. Each player secretly chooses the one phase they want to make happen, and then everybody acts in it. By looking over at what your opponents' empires look like, you can anticipate what they might pick. If you know someone else is going to trigger a phase, then it's not on you to pick it -- it'll happen either way. Meanwhile, if you plan for the coming round knowing you're going to trigger a phase no one else is planning for, that's a big advantage for you.

Race for the Galaxy does all that with card selection: select the card for the phase you want, and you also get a bonus for yourself when acting in that phase. Roll for the Galaxy is more mysterious. You first roll your pool of dice behind a secret screen, with the various symbols that come up identifying the number of times you can take an action in each of the round's five phases. One of those dice, you select to activate one phase; and there's no inherent advantage in being the player to choose it. As long as someone picks a phase, every symbol you rolled for it can be used.

But the array of possibilities is so much more dynamic this way. You might be able to intuit what an opponent wants to do this round... but did they roll the symbols that will let them do that? You rolled a bunch of a symbol you weren't quite planning on... so do you use some of the game's costly mechanisms to convert those rolls, or do you go with the flow and get more bang for your buck? You rolled a diverse spread of symbols, and you'll get to do it all as long as somebody out there activates every phase... so which one phase do you pick, and which others do you count on your opponents to pick?

Race for the Galaxy had its appeal, but it also always felt to me a bit like tandem solitaire, with each player not too deeply invested in what the others were doing. (I also wasn't the biggest fan of its "currency" system, paying the cost to play a card by discarding other cards from your hand.) Roll for the Galaxy feels more interactive to me. And even though you're at the whim of dice, I feel like the it's rarely the game's systems that give you a "feel-bad" moment -- it's your own mistaken guesswork about what your opponents would do.

There are arguably more different planets and developments (tiles in this game, rather than cards as in the original) than are absolutely necessary. The diversity is great for replayability, no doubt, though it can still sometimes give you that feeling of not quite understanding what your opponents are doing, nudging you slightly back toward that multiple solitaire. The game also plays much better digitally than in person; I've had the chance to do both in the Age of COVID, and the automation of Board Game Arena makes playing a breeze, where dealing with the quite-tiny dice of the physical edition is a little tedious at times. Still, I find it all a big improvement on the original Race for the Galaxy.

I haven't yet played Roll for the Galaxy as much as I played Race for the Galaxy back in the day -- I mean, that game was everywhere for a while. And yet I already feel like I'd never likely want to play Race for the Galaxy again if a copy of Roll for the Galaxy is available instead. It's a very clever distillation of the first game's ideas into a more concentrated experience. I give it a B+.

A Widder-ing Look

When I tried a sample of supernatural LGBT fiction, I found that Wolfsong wasn't quite what I was looking for. But I decided to try the genre again with Widdershins, by Jordan L. Hawk.

Set in Massachusetts in the late 1890s (in the titular town), Widdershins is the story of bookish language expert Percival Endicott Whyborne, employee at a museum who is recruited against his wishes to aid the investigation of detective Griffin Flaherty. What starts out as a dive into dead languages turns into clash with the actual dead, as reanimated animal monstrosities begin attacking around the town. And what starts out as a chilly relationship between the two men develops into something more meaningful.

This is, in many ways, a take on Sherlock Holmes with the subtext some fans have conjured up made text. The story is set in the same time frame (albeit in the U.S.), and the characters initially have a passingly similar dynamic. But where Holmes and Watson often investigated "impossible" mysteries eventually revealed to have quite common explanations, here the common gives way to the supernatural. And where a romantic relationship between Holmes and Watson has always been just the purview of fan fiction, this story is crafted specifically to bring its two male protagonists together as a couple.

Widdershins is not masterfully written, but it's still a brisk read. Jordan L. Hawk has taken a lot of the techniques of the most popular current fiction and deployed them here: ending nearing every chapter on a cliffhanger, keeping those chapters to a short and punchy length, and not letting slavish adherence to period accuracy get in the way of keeping things fun. Rarely did a sentence ever catch my attention as well-polished; indeed, certain words popped out over time as overused. And yet, there was a "can't put it down" quality to the thing that led me to finish the book faster than many things I've read of late.

Still, I do wish the book had more effectively integrated its two distinct elements of the supernatural and the romance. The experience of reading the book is not unlike twisting apart an Oreo to eat it. The first third is a fast-paced set-up of a slightly macabre genre tale. The last third is the even faster-paced conclusion to that tale. The center is a series of sexual exploits in which the plot hardly ever intrudes. Depending on why you're here to read the book, that might well be the "tasty center" you're looking forward to. Or, perhaps, had to wait too long for? Both elements of the book do work, more or less, on their own. I just would have liked a bit more interpolation of the two.

Widdershins turns out to be the first of a staggering 11 books in a series, with additional short stories inserted along the way. I can't say I was so taken with book one that I would try another. It's sort of fun like cotton candy, but evaporating-on-contact in the same way. I give Widdershins a C+.

DS9 Flashback: Image in the Sand

After the fast-paced action of the sixth season finale of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the seventh season premiere slows things down to good effect. It also serves up an effective cliffhanger, just introducing a new main character in the final moments.

Months have passed since the collapse of the wormhole and the death of Jadzia Dax. A promoted Colonel Kira has taken command of the station in Sisko's absence... but she isn't calling all the shots. Admiral Ross forces her to welcome a Romulan Senator as a permanent presence on Deep Space Nine, and the relationship starts friendly but quickly sours. Also sour: a grieving Worf, who's looking for a glorious battle to win in Jadzia's name to secure her a place in Sto-vo-kor. Meanwhile, Sisko must first find himself to find the Prophets; a vision reveals a truth he never knew about himself.

When people talk about Deep Space Nine being ahead of its time and forging the future of more serialized storytelling on television, they often cite the six-episode arc that opened season six, or the 10-episode arc that concluded the series. I also see a modern television sophistication in this short arc. This episode is willing to risk being quiet, even contemplative, when every other season premiere of basically every science fiction show is bombastic and large. It may be the first episode of a two-parter (or the middle of a three-parter, depending on how you look at it), but it doesn't necessarily feel that way. Several plot threads are put in play, and to my mind, you could imagine maybe they'll be wrapped up in one more episode? Or maybe they won't? There's an open-endedness here.

Each story line is grounded in the emotions of the characters involved. The disrespectful death written for Jadzia Dax at least becomes a useful plot point: Worf can't begin to heal until he rights that wrong and honors his wife with a victory in battle. The action isn't in this episode, but we do get nostalgic memories of the Enterprise with O'Brien, surprising sympathy from Quark, and a pledge to help from Julian. We also get a Vic Fontaine rendition of "All the Way" that's quite moving, even before it provokes Worf's violent reaction.

On Earth, Joseph Sisko's typical old man crankiness gives way to true venom when his dark secret may be exposed. His fear rings true: that the fact he's kept a secret from those he loves for so long is actually worse than the secret itself. Benjamin is so adrift and desperate that he physically shakes answers out of his father, recoiling from his own intensity.

Kira has received a promotion (at Nana Visitor's suggestion), plus a new uniform and hair style. Her story is a short little roller coaster of trying trust where her instinct was suspicion, opening up to this "not like other Romulans" Romulan, Senator Cretak... only to learn in the end that she should have trusted her instincts all along.

There's even pathos in the snippets we get of Weyoun and Damar. The latter's alcoholism, previously an almost comedic plot convenience, is a more serious concern now, ridiculed by Weyoun but not, you sense, by the show as a whole. (And the nasty, viscous nature of "kanar" somehow makes his addiction even that much more sad.)

Along the way, there are well-executed moments of humor -- Joseph Sisko swearing to take his other secret (his gumbo recipe) to his grave, Quark noting of the comparison of Sto-vo-kor to his bar: "Would you want to stay here for eternity?" There are weightier moments -- Odo noting that "in times of trouble, some people find comfort in hate and fear," Kira keeping Sisko's empty baseball stand on the desk as a symbol of hope. There's also depth added to the previously monolithic Bajoran religion, as we learn there are "Pah-wraith worshipers" emboldened by recent events.

There's also much to say about Ezri Dax, of course. But since we get only a tease of her here, I'll hold onto those thoughts until next time.

Other observations:

• I'm not sure it was made explicit before, but it's clear here that Joseph Sisko lives above his restaurant. As I suppose any workaholic would.

• Benjamin's attempt to construct a facial composite of the woman from his vision feels a little like making an RPG avatar. (My husband joked that he was getting ready to play Skyrim.)
  

• It feels like nearly every type of ship shows up in shots of the station: Federation, Klingon, Romulan, and even Bajoran.

I can't quite put my finger on what it is about this episode I find so effective. Yet even though it's largely just setup for the next hour, "Image in the Sand" is a strong B+ episode in my book. I think it's a great jumping-off point for the final season.

The End Is at Hand / What We're Fighting For

It's actually shocking that Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. managed to last seven seasons and well over 100 episodes, when rafts of other Marvel TV shows fell by the wayside for low ratings, creative doldrums, or active interference by a corporate Voltron looking to take its toys back. You could even argue that the series lasted perhaps a little longer than it should have. (I sort of will here, in a moment. With SPOILERS aplenty.) But overall, the finale was a solid and fitting end to a series that managed -- quite often -- to be better than you might expect.

Together, the two final episodes see Daisy, Mack, and Sousa rescuing Simmons and Deke from the Chronicom ship as Coulson, May, and Yo-Yo try to defend the Lighthouse. Finally, Fitz arrives from "the original timeline" to explain everything and help the team complete one last mission together.

Overall, I enjoyed parts of season six and seven enough that I wouldn't trade them away. But I would argue that seasons four and five were really the creative peak of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. And its season five finale (which at the time was written thinking it would be the series finale) not only would have been the perfect ending for the series, but was quite possibly its single best episode.

Still, I respect that the writers knew they had to come up with something else for this ending, and I think they did a pretty good job with that overall. I like that they essentially wrapped everything up with 10 or 15 minutes to spare so that they could give us a long, character-driven coda showing us where everyone ended up.

It was a bittersweet conclusion, interesting in that it didn't turn on any of the main characters being killed off (as with the season five finale). Instead, the sadness was in the explicit statement that these characters would never again go on a mission together. They aren't out there experiencing stories left to our imaginations; this is it. And given that this was all written and filmed more than a year ago, it's almost prescient that their final moment "together" was a holographic Zoom call with everyone dialing in for a long-distance reunion.

The sweetness of it, though, was that each individual in the team was given a nice and fitting ending for themselves: Coulson and May coming to terms with their new, changed natures (and doing so separately, not as a couple), Daisy and Sousa together out in the cosmos, Fitz and Simmons settling down with their family, Mack finding a balance between his leadership duties and his techie roots, Yo-Yo now leading a team of her own, and Deke off in another reality as the bona fide spy leader he once pretended to be. (I've heard there was talk of a post-credits scene showing Deke in a trench coat and eye patch. Why-oh-why did they decide not to film that?!)

So yes, the ending was good. But yes, some of the steps getting there were a little shaky. The twin desires of wanting to maintain surprise and wanting to withhold Fitz (and actor Iain De Caestecker) until the very end meant there was a lot of exposition explaining to us what had really been going on all season. A whole act's worth of exposition. And I don't think it really holds up to much scrutiny.

If this was all about Kora all along, why would Fitz not warn any of them how important it was to save her? What was all the time-hopping about in the half-season before Kora came along? (Was it just for Enoch to plant machine parts all over the place? Could there maybe have been an alternative approach there that wasn't at risk of failure if any one of a dozen people didn't survive to make it to the safehouse?)

There were some other moments that didn't play that well, even if not because of shaky story logic. Malick remained a weak villain to his end -- and there didn't seem to me to be any mileage in pretending Daisy died only to bring her back to life 15 seconds later. (I'm not saying they needed to kill her off; I just mean that her "sacrifice" didn't really resonate with me when it was so quickly undermined.) The fluctuating allegiances of Garrett and Kora didn't mean much to me, either.

On the other hand, there were plenty of moments that did land well. Elizabeth Henstridge was great playing all the wild extremes of Simmons' slowly returning memory. The material surrounding Fitz and Simmons' child (though not a surprise to me) were still moving. Seeing a few returning characters right at the end was nice: we not only got Piper and Flint, but a back-as-an-LMD Davis, and even a new version of Coulson's car Lola. More comedic elements worked too, from Deke's pretty solid Fitz impression, to the torpedo duct-taped with Chronicoms, to the unceremonious death of Garrett.

So while overall not as good a finale as Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. had one of the previous times the writers thought it was ending, it hit the notes you'd want it to hit. I give these final two installments a B+. Godspeed, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Envoys

The second episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks definitely kept the same general tone as the first episode, but felt just a bit more polished to me.

Boimler and Mariner are stuck together in an alien city when a drunken Klingon makes off with their shuttlecraft. Meanwhile, Rutherford considers a department transfer to be able to spend more time with Tendi, trying brief stints in other areas of the Cerritos to varying results.

In many ways, "Envoys" felt to me like a second pilot episode of the series, in that it had a similar story structure and rang most of the same bells as "Second Contact." Had the revelation about Mariner's relationship to Captain Freeman been in this episode, rather than the other, this almost could have been the first episode -- and in my view might have been a better choice. "Envoys" felt to me a little less manic in pace, and a little more successful with the jokes.

We got another A story about Boimler's uptight "book learnin" clashing with Mariner's freewheeling experience, with the two ultimately reaching a balanced resolution -- almost literally repeating the first episode's "Mariner is going to be Boimler's mentor" thesis statement. But it was a fun enough journey through plenty of Trek trivia, with obscure references to the animated series, easily-accessible jokes about Klingon naming conventions, and appropriate mockery for TNG-circa-season-one Ferengi characters.

I think this episode highlighted a bit more the different ways that Mariner and Boimler are real characters with a "cartoon character" streak. For Mariner, it's something of a toggle-switch; she's a devil-may-care, cartoonish agent of chaos until the moment to be serious comes. Then it's quickly made clear that she really does care, and will personally sacrifice to help someone she's chosen to help. She becomes a more typical live-action Starfleet paragon. Boimler is more of an "average" of the two poles. Characters as uptight as him actually do exist on live-action shows (he's, say, a bit "Sheldon-y" to me), with the concession to animation being in the performance: Jack Quaid is clearly being directed to stand back from the mic a foot and yell all his lines.

I was actually more engaged in the B story line, that saw Rutherford on a grand tour of all the divisions of the ship. I felt the comedy here was more naturally integrated with the Star Trek-iness of it all, with affectionate needling of Star Trek tropes about security officers, medical officers, and more. I also liked the way that Gene Roddenberry's TNG-era "no conflict between Starfleet officers" edict was deployed here for comedy: when Rutherford requested a transfer and braced for a scene, everyone was instead all too happy to see him "be true to himself."

I'd say "Envoys" was still probably a B- like "Second Contact," though it maybe moved from the lower end of that range to the upper. I hope the series keeps moving in that direction.

Lordy

The Cloverfield movies might be one of the weirdest film franchises around: a not-truly-connected anthology featuring a found-footage take on the classic city-destroying monster, a brilliant psychological thriller with an oddball twist, and a subpar space horror dumped to Netflix. The only real common thread to the Cloverfield movies is that they're released by Bad Robot, J.J. Abrams' production company. And because of this, people not wanting to be fooled again are always wondering when a new and mysterious Bad Robot movie comes along: is this another Cloverfield?

So it was in 2018, with the release of Overlord. The movie's secretive premise was barely teased in its promotion: you got monster movie in my World War II film? It was a cast peppered with "I know that guy from somewhere" actors, but without any big names most people would know. How much was it a war movie? How much was it a monster movie? What kind of monster movie was it? Alien invasion? Zombies? No one really knew. Maybe it was a Cloverfield movie but not explicitly labeled as such, after The Cloverfield Paradox had sort of tainted the brand?

Without giving those secrets away, I can say that Overlord plays it straight for an almost uncomfortably long time. For the first half hour of the less-than-two-hour movie, you're watching a normal "important mission for the war effort" movie. It's punctuated by elaborate (though not always convincing) visual effects and flashy camera tricks, but it's standard war movie fare from the stock characters to the stock plot elements. Though it is familiar, it's not quite boring... unless you actually know too much about the movie. If you're unaware the story is heading for a sharp turn, you'd probably stop expecting one. If you're wondering when the pulp sci-fi is going to arrive, the wait is awfully long.

When the fantastical finally does arrive, it's very much more "horror" than "sci-fi." And in particular, the subgenre of horror not as interested in suspense as in extreme violence and gore. Here, not knowing what to expect perhaps works against the movie; while there are great movies of this type, you're never going to "sneak one" on an audience member who doesn't like gore and make them enjoy it. Maybe the assumption is that war movies are an often-violent genre, so getting this gross shouldn't come as a surprise?

In any case, if you like the bloodiest of the bloody horror movies, Overlord may well be for you. There are veritable fountains of blood in this movie, along with body trauma and tons of upsetting imagery. And this is decidedly not in the school of filmmaking that tries to put you in the action all the time with a shaky roving camera. Most of the time, the camera lingers on these horrific images for you to take them in in all their gory. If the digital effects aren't always top notch, the makeup effects and live-on-set gags definitely are. The movie knows what kind of movie it wants to be, and spends its production dollars accordingly, aiming straight at the bullseye for viewers into this sort of film.

Like I said, most people would not know most of the cast. Still, there are a few people in it who give fun performances. Pilou Asbæk, who had fun chewing the scenery as Euron Grejoy in the later seasons of Game of Thrones, here plays another villain reveling in being a villain. Bokeem Woodbine has fun as a leader tossing off war movie tropes. Iain De Caestecker gets to use the tools from his Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. toolbox, being outwardly weak until a big moment when he isn't.

The reason I keep harping on expectations here is because I believe there is a particular type of horror movie fan that would probably really like Overlord. Generally, I like not to be spoiled about anything before watching a movie, but I have to concede that in this case, I might have liked this one better had I known a bit better what tone to expect. But as I came to it, I found it a pretty average C. It felt to me like two separate movies that didn't quite go together -- either of which might have been built out to something stronger on its own.

Listen All Y'All

My gamer group is willing to try out just about any "hidden role / traitor" game that gets within our gravitational pull. At the same time, there are some in the group that really aren't that into lying to their friends, even in the context of a game. That's totally fine; it just means that a game like this needs to be pretty stand-out in some way to get more than a play or two. Saboteur isn't going to make the cut.

Saboteur is a card game in which the players are all trying to mine a path through a cave to reach a treasure of gold. It's played over three rounds; at the start of each, everyone is dealt a secret role to help the group or betray them. They're then dealt cards from a shuffled deck, some cards representing paths through the cave (straight paths and bends; Y or + junctions), and other cards representing either the failure or restoration of your mining equipment (lantern, mine cart, etc.) On your turn, you play a single card, then redraw and pass play around the table.

Path cards are played in a grid. To one side of the table, the players start on a + junction card. After a gap of several cards, three destination cards are placed face down to the other side -- one is the secret treasure, while the other two are empty. As you fill in the gap between with cards, you must respect all pathways from one card to the next, either trying to connect to the treasure (if you're helping), or twisting the path in a bad direction (if you're a titular Saboteur).

The equipment cards are played on another player. If any piece of their mining equipment has failed, they can't lay path on their turn until they (or someone else) plays a repair card on them to remove the block. These cards are used to hinder players you think are on the other team, or bring them back into action.

The game really only came onto our radar because of COVID-19. It's one of the games you can play at Board Game Arena, and one of the few there that can actually take a larger number of players. (After weeks of not seeing each other in person and countless games of 7 Wonders, we were open to alternatives.) It's easy to teach and fast to play -- and it would be with a physical copy of the game too. So: easier and faster than most hidden role games.

It also isn't especially satisfying. The gameplay is so straightforward that the hidden role element simply doesn't work. There's essentially nothing you can do as a saboteur that doesn't instantly give you away. So every round plays out in the same way: you go around the table about once before the traitors have to make a move, everyone figures out who's bad, and then the randomness of the card draws determines which side succeeds and which side fails.

Even the scoring has a dash of randomness to it. It's not quite at a Fluxx or Killer Bunnies level of chaos, but it's going to leave most experienced gamers cold. Grafting an ineffective hidden role aspect over the top of it doesn't really do much.

I think I'm going to give the game a C-. It's probably not even really that good. But it's so fast that I feel like if someone were really eager to play, I'd just suck it up and play it -- once -- before insisting on something else. It was kind of hard to actively dislike. It just also felt equally hard to like, to me at least.

DS9 Flashback: Tears of the Prophets

The sixth season finale of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is a jam-packed episode that tees up a great story for the next season... and says goodbye to a main character.

The Federation has decided to go on offense in the Dominion War, striking a target in Cardassian space... if they and the Klingons can persuade their Romulan allies to join them. At the same time, Dukat is waging war in an entirely different way, reaching out to the Pah-wraiths for a direct attack on the Prophets. And meanwhile, Worf and Jadzia are making plans to have a baby.

This is episode is so full that you might even say it's overstuffed. When you watch, there are signs throughout that either more footage was filmed and cut for time, or was pruned at script phase to the bare bones. There are whiplash cuts between plot threads. We jump into conversations that already seem well underway. Characters like Garak and Weyoun seem to appear not because they have anything important to do, but because it's a season finale.

And yet, it's not like the episode has no moments where it stops to breathe and serve the characters. Indeed, there are several nice ones. Odo and Kira have their first serious fight, with the fun element that Odo dwells on it long after Kira has forgotten it entirely. We find time for a Vic Fontaine song, a meaningful "Here's to the Losers" sung to Quark and Bashir -- apt and oddly touching, assuming you're not just put off by them still being rather skeezy about not ending up with Jadzia Dax. Plus, the time is rightly given to some fantastic visuals during the big battle scenes; it's a proper Star Wars-ian action sequence (right down to the "one vulnerable spot" our heroes are after, though they must use Star Trek ingenuity to hit it).

Then there are the quick and pithy lines peppered throughout that truly did make me smile: Jadzia declaring she hopes her daughter does look like her father, Martok being goaded by an aggravating Romulan diplomat, Jake threatening to ride into battle on a Klingon ship if his Dad won't take him on the Defiant, Weyoun dismissing other religions as superstitious because the Founders are gods.

But to power through to these moments (and to the ending it wants to reach), the episode also really leaves its "construction debris" in plain sight. Since we last saw Dukat, he's worked through his mental disorder, decided he doesn't blame Damar for killing his daughter, and has done a deep dive on Bajoran religion -- because that's what the plot demands. Sisko starts out experiencing the highs of interacting with Bajoran children and receiving an award named for Christopher Pike, specifically to contrast the low of ending the episode scrubbing clams in the alley behind his father's restaurant

And foremost, in my view, a pretty terrible ending for the character of Jadzia Dax.

The story of Terry Farrell's departure from Deep Space Nine has evolved a bit over the years, perhaps in part due to drifting recollections, but also clearly due to an increased willingness over time to air dirty laundry. At the time, the official story seemed to be "Terry Farrell just wanted to leave and do that sitcom Becker instead." Today, a more plausible story has emerged, that seems to fit with executive producer Rick Berman's pattern of sexist behavior:

Where other actors were offered raises to renew their contracts for a season seven, Farrell was told she should be grateful just to keep her job, that she'd "would be working at Kmart instead" if she walked away from the show. Farrell says she didn't want to leave, and tried floating the idea of 13 episodes for her character instead of the full 26 -- a better per-episode rate for her but less money for the production over the whole season. (Plus more likelihood of good material for her when her character did appear.) Head writer Ira Steven Behr says he would have leapt at that chance to keep Jadzia Dax around, and had always thought Farrell just wanted out. Farrell says she was given an ultimatum: do all 26, for the same amount of money, or leave. She chose to leave.

 

If it had been pretty much any other actor leaving the show, their character wouldn't necessarily have had to die. But I think the prospect of "just stick Dax in a new host" was too tempting for the writers; you get to both kinda-sorta keep a beloved character around and have new interactions between characters to explore. So it's no surprise that once Terry Farrell was out, Jadzia was fated to die. But you'd think that Star Trek would have learned a lesson about Tasha Yar's unheroic, unceremonious death (which they ultimately took a "do-over" on) and not repeated the same mistake with Jadzia Dax.

Dax stays behind on this mission out of pure plot convenience, even though on any other mission, she'd be off with the others on the Defiant. She doesn't die trying to save the day; she's simply in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets zapped in a split second by Pah-wraith Dukat. (Just like Tasha, by Armus.) That "wrong place" is particularly wrong for the character of Jadzia Dax. She's always been a scientist and skeptic, and particularly unimpressed by religion. The one moment she sets foot inside the Bajoran temple in... well, possibly ever? Dead!

And nearly as much as it's a disservice to Jadzia to kill her this way, it's a disservice to Sisko that he should shoulder the blame for it. True... people blame themselves irrationally for things all the time, and Sisko shouldn't be immune to that. But what exactly could he have done to prevent Jadzia's death had he heeded the Prophets' vague warning and stayed on the station? Were the Prophets going to suddenly possess him, put him in the temple at exactly that moment, power him up with magic, and stop Pah-wraith Dukat? Unlikely.

But given these lemons, Terry Farrell and Avery Brooks make some fine lemonade. Jadzia's excitement over becoming a mother again is palpable, and her final words to Worf about that very thing are truly heartbreaking (thus, Worf's death yell comes off quite dramatic when it could have been silly). Sisko's monologue to Jadzia's torpedo coffin is powerful and vulnerable. He seems deflated when he literally takes his ball and goes home (in a great bit of dramatic resonance with the prior season finale).

Other observations:

• Money was spent not just on visual effects, but on background actors. The conference room where the Federation, Klingons, and Starfleet meet has never been so crowded.

• The Pah-wraith angle came into this episode a little later in the story development. According to the writers, they latched onto the idea that because the prophecy of "The Reckoning" was unfulfilled, that meant the Pah-wraiths weren't defeated, and thus there was one for Dukat to call upon for aid.
  

• The kid who talks to Sisko about the Orbs all having gone dark lays it on pretty thick.
  

The breathless pace of this episode does work in its favor most of the time. There are good moments throughout. And there is no denying that it ends in a great cliffhanger that teases so many possibilities for the next season -- Sisko in spiritual crisis, Dax gone, the wormhole closed! But the way Dax's death is handled does take a huge bite out of the experience for me. In all, I give "Tears of the Prophets" a B.

As for season six as a whole? There are many who regard it as the best season of Deep Space Nine -- and indeed it has episodes that are both favorites with fans and my personal favorites. (Though I'd say season five hit at a more consistently high level, albeit without having any Top 10 episodes of the series.) My picks for the best five episodes of season six: "Rocks and Shoals," "Far Beyond the Stars," "In the Pale Moonlight," "A Time to Stand," and (silly as it is in concept) "One Little Ship."

Next up: season seven, the final season of Deep Space Nine.

Brand New Day

The latest Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. hung a blazingly bright lantern around the concept the whole season has been slowly building: we're not in the Marvel Cinematic Universe anymore. (Well, that's been true since there was no Thanos snap, but hey...)

Nathaniel is taking his stolen ship into Earth orbit, and tries to pry Fitz's location from Simmons' mind. Daisy, Mack, and Sousa give desperate chase. Meanwhile, Coulson, May, and Yo-Yo remain at the Lighthouse, trying to get through to Kora while preventing a cyber-attack by Sybil.

The series may have made us wait 10 episodes, but I won't wait any longer here: we finally got Fitz back! In flashbacks only, for now, but we got him back! And in a tightly packed couple of scenes that served up ominous dialogue to speculate about. Blood work? While it sure seemed like the show wanted you to think that some sort of terminal disease is being discussed here, I'm placing a different bet. They hit pretty hard the idea that in building a time machine, you could go slow and take all the time you wanted. I think Fitz and Simmons had a baby, and that forgetting about that child was the extra trauma that drove Simmons to tears when her memory block was briefly removed.

Speaking of memory blocks, part of the cliffhanger ending we got was that Simmons' block has expanded massively, leaving her no recollection of Fitz at all. Were this another point in the series, this is a plot thread I could see the them playing out for many episodes. But we're just two from the end of everything now, so this is likely just a short bump in the road that Deke will be there to help take care of. (Even if his attempt this episode to pull off a Die Hard -- which he specifically mentioned! -- didn't go as planned.)

Elsewhere, the episode pulled off a tricky bit of juxtaposition. The whole season has been a nostalgic trip through history, name-checking highlights from the series' past and the MCU in general. But suddenly, we get an episode specifically talking about how all that is gone, and could be replaced with something better. Sure, Kora (whose "villain or not?" status wasn't especially compelling to me) didn't sell that concept super well, what with all the murder talk. Still, tearing down the pillars of show even while trying to celebrate the nostalgia is a delicate balance that I think has mostly worked.

Things among the villains remained less than compelling, with the newly reintroduced Garrett barely present in the episode, and Nathaniel still feeling all that menacing. But that's probably not where I'd want the focus to be this late in the game anyway. That focus was put on the main characters, in effective little mini-arcs: May and Coulson having to embrace their new strengths to help the team, Mack having a fatherly talk with Sousa (that had a lot of fun mocking the nickname "Quake"), and Daisy having to give serious thought to what might come after all these thrilling adventures.

I give "Brand New Day" a B. Next, the two-hour finale to end this ride.

Second Contact

Move over, Star Trek: Picard. There's a new new Star Trek TV series in town. (The town called CBS All Access.) Star Trek: Lower Decks is the first animated Trek series in over four decades -- and the first Trek series period with a primary mission of humor. In these respects, Lower Decks is very different than the rest of Star Trek. But in another way, it feels very much like most Star Trek: we'll probably look back one day on this first episode, "Second Contact," and say "that wasn't really the series at its best."

To be sure, there's plenty about this first episode that I did enjoy and find promising. There were a lot of characters thrown at us, but they do seem to be interesting people with interesting relationships to mine in future stories. The late revelation about Mariner's ties to Captain Freeman was fun; Star Trek has a long, proud tradition of main characters who don't get along with their parents, but we don't usually get to see that play out over multiple episodes. The odd couple pairing of relaxed Mariner with stuffy Boimler is a classic comedy formula. Wildly enthusiastic Tendi, newly-minted cyborg Rutherford, pompous first officer Ransom, and quintessentially grumpy cat Doctor T'Ana all seem like fun flavors to toss into the stew.

But the balance of "Star Trek vs. humor" didn't seem quite calibrated yet. Lower Decks might be the show we all expected The Orville was going to be before we saw the first episode and learned that Seth MacFarlane was pretty earnest about just wanting to make more Star Trek: The Next Generation. There's nothing wrong in principle with a Star Trek that wants to take itself less seriously, and indeed, some of the jokes that worked best were the ones that took an irreverent view toward some franchise staples: for example, how the holodeck would totally be your first stop on a starship... and what you'd really use it for.

Yet a lot of the episode really didn't feel like Star Trek at all, from the gore-tastic zombie plague sweeping the Cerritos to the alien sliming endured by Boimler. That material had a Rick and Morty kind of vibe... without really being a Rick and Morty level of funny. Yes, that's a high bar, but I feel like this first episode was all but begging you to make that comparison.

And my husband tagged it all with, I think, the perfect word: this episode was hyper. From the breathless way it crammed a full hour's worth of Star Trek plot into a half-hour format, to the way most of the actors seemed to be yelling their lines with a Cartoon Network level of intensity, to the dozens if not hundreds of one-off Trek references there to test/delight the fans, this episode was pretty intense. I could stand taking the volume (literal and figurative) down a notch or two, at least until I get better acclimated to all the characters.

To be clear: I'm certainly not trying to be a guardian of Star Trek, trying to keep this new series out. I think there's potential here. Hopefully, Lower Decks finds its way faster than, say, The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine did. I'd give "Second Contact" a B-. It did have a few genuinely laugh-out-loud moments, but I'll be rooting for it to grow more consistent over the next nine episodes of its first season.

Here There Be Monsters

Earlier this year, I sang the praises of the deck-building game Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle. Since then, I've played all the way through the game's first expansion set, The Monster Box of Monsters, giving me another chance to recommend this fun cooperative card game.

The Monster Box of Monsters continues the original game's campaign system, adding four new boxes of new materials to open in sequence and add to the game. The major new mechanic of the expansion is creatures, a new group of cards to supplement the villains you must normally defeat during a game. Some of them have a new way you must defeat them (using the resource you normally spend on deck-building), but beyond that, the key difference is that old cards that work on villains don't work on creatures, while new cards that work on creatures don't work on villains.

That kind of subtle distinction is sort of what this expansion is all about. There isn't a lot that's revolutionary here. A new card type is added in one of the four boxes you open... but it works quite similarly to a card type from the original game (and, in fact, must be used instead of that older card type when you do use it). Luna Lovegood is included as a new playable character, but the game still caps at four players, and Luna's new cards (while interesting) don't make a case for her character being as indispensable as most of the original four player characters of Harry, Hermione, Ron, and Neville.

On the other hand... a strong case can be made that a game expansion doesn't need to completely upend everything you know about the original game; a solid expansion can instead just deliver more of what you loved about the core experience. That might even especially be true of a deck-building game, where even something as basic as new cards for the decks can change the experience. Through that lens, The Monster Box of Monsters gives you exactly what you'd want. The new creatures, and the Encounter cards that set up particular conditions your group must overcome in sequence, provide interesting new challenges, while the new cards you can buy for your player decks are fun variations on what you've become used to.

The balance of the boxes might be a bit off? For our group, Box 1 was by far the most difficult of the four, requiring multiple attempts and some lucky shuffles to defeat. But then, it's not as though we weren't going to play all four boxes, so perhaps it's completely irrelevant which one posed the greatest challenge to us. Indeed, just as with the core game itself, we'll be playing through the entire expansion with two different (slightly overlapping) sets of players, each group looking forward to the experience.

The bottom line: "more of the same" may not be the most exciting tag line for a board game expansion. But when "the same" is as fun and enjoyable as Harry Potter: Hogwarts Battle, it's not exactly faint praise. I'd give The Monster Box of Monsters a B+. Anyone who has played Hogwarts Battle and liked it should also pick up the expansion.

Gone Again

This past weekend, a six-part documentary mini-series on HBO concluded: I'll Be Gone in the Dark, based on the true crime book of the same name by Michelle McNamara. I was quite drawn into the book, and equally interested in seeing this television adaptation of the material.

As a documentary, I'll Be Gone in the Dark is both the same and not the same as the book it ostensibly adapts. Certainly, it still revolves around the crimes of the Golden State Killer, and McNamara's own amateur investigations to attempt to solve the case. Both view the case with a sensitivity and empathy for the victims, striking a tone that feels neither exploitative nor sensational; you're meant to understand the people these things happened to, not merely the fact that they happened.

Beyond that, there's a lot of divergence between book and documentary, largely due to the developments in the case since the book was written. For one, although McNamara passed away during the writing of the book, most of the material in its pages is still her original work. The documentary, however, was created entirely after her death, and makes McNamara even more of a "character" in the story than she did originally. It tracks her fascination with true crime and with the Golden State Killer in particular, dives more into the personal connections she developed with others involved, and presents the case that her own dogged determination may have played a key role in keeping people motivated to find the killer.

Extensive interviews with McNamara's husband, Patton Oswalt, with detectives from different jurisdictions who worked the case, and with other "citizen detectives" serve to tell you as much (if not more) about the author of the book than about the crimes she was researching. Book excerpts and journal entries are read dramatically by actress Amy Ryan. Just as much time is given to McNamara's own untimely death as any of the murders committed by the GSK. Her friends and family express their loss -- a different kind of loss, but a powerful one nonetheless.

Second, the Golden State Killer has been captured since the publication of the book. The final episode of the six-part documentary provides extensive detail on the man, his history, and his criminal timeline. But, in keeping with the overall emphasis on the victims, GSK himself doesn't overwhelm the final installment. Instead, we get interviews with his family, people with mourning another kind of loss -- that of the man they thought they knew.

Third, that confluence of the book's publication and the killer's capture has compelled more survivors of the GSK's crimes to speak out publicly. Women who were named only by pseudonym in McNamara's original book are now willing to go on camera and tell their own stories about what happened to them. People who have remained silent until now have decided to go on camera here for the first time. Put simply, there is more to the overall story.

I hope that it doesn't diminish McNamara's original work to say that this documentary series may have surpassed it. But in truth, the two really work as two parts of a whole, approaching the material in very different ways to paint a whole, gripping picture. It is, of course, not an easy watch, but it is one that will stay with me for some time. I give the documentary an A-.

The Best-Laid Clans?

I play a lot of board games. But there are those out there who play "a lot a lot," and it seems like many of those players gravitate to games with more mechanics, more complexity, more difficult decisions, and more time required to play. I recently tried a game that to me seemed designed with that audience in mind: Clans of Caledonia, from designer Juma Al-JouJou.

Released in 2017 and nominated for many awards, Clans of Caledonia has gone on to secure a Top 50 slot on Board Game Geek. Its theme is very much the stuff that "crunchy" board games are made of -- you're in charge of a 19th-century Scottish clan, managing agriculture, expanding your holdings, and making and selling commodities from cotton to cheese to (of course) whiskey.

Any one piece of this game is not too hard to wrap your brain around. But there's a rather intimidating number of elements here. The game takes place on a shared map; it's a modular board with multiple configurations, depicting multiple terrain types. You must expand your clan, which means you'll be encroaching on the other players. There are many things you can produce on land hexes, each limited to different types of land. There's also a track you must advance on to let your people expand across rivers and lochs, allowing you to save money and compete for an end-game scoring bonus.

What you produce on the tiles is a game unto itself. There are two different ways to earn money from a hex, depending on whether it contains a forest or a mountain. Then there are both raw commodities, and the processed goods you can turn them into. The former is faster but less valuable; the latter requires that you manufacture one thing and possess the means to transform it. Balancing the ways you earn money with the ways you make stuff poses a pretty classic dilemma for these kinds of games: you're balancing improvement of your infrastructure against cashing in for points to win the game.

There's a commodities exchange mechanic woven into the mix too. Different goods in the game have a price that rises and falls as people buy and sell it; focusing where the other players don't can be very profitable (yet may not be where you can earn points most easily), while competing with other players can still be profitable if you just buy (or sell) when the price is at its lowest (or highest). Then there are trade discounts; when you expand your clan on the game board into a hex that's adjacent to another player, you get a chance to buy the good that that opponent makes on that hex at a discount from the bank.

Overwhelmed yet? Well, try getting started. The very first decision you have to make in the game is which one of the game's clans you'll play, each with a unique power to cheat the rules in some way. They're great for focusing your strategy on different aspects of the system. Yet it's also quite impossible to really understand how they all work the first couple times out. Some are so complex that it's easy to give up on wanting to understand them when you're drafting clans at the start of the game. So rather than shift your focus to new areas of the game, they seem to steer you right back toward the familiar that you already understand (or at least think you do).

Whenever you take a turn in the game, there are literally 8 different actions for you to choose from. And even when you choose one of those 8 as the one you want, there are often secondary choices to be made. You want to build... but where? You want to buy commodities... but what? Figuring out what you want to do in this game can be quite a challenge. And because of that, the down time between your turns can be quite extreme. Each action a player takes can upset the next player's plans, and while it's nice to know that what you do does matter -- you're definitely interacting here -- it means that planning ahead can be quite hard to do. So almost every turn sees a player starting from square one, stepping through their massive decision matrix, and taking a long time to do so. An understandably long time, but a frustratingly long time nevertheless. The pace of play feels glacial.

Perhaps if I could just download into my brain a more advanced understanding of this game (and if I could do the same for all my opponents), I'd feel rewarded with the vast array of choices it presents. But after playing a few times, I just felt that there was simply too much more going on here than it really needed to have. Other "farming games" better scratch the itch for me than Clans of Caledonia. I give it a C+.