Strange New Worlds: Memento Mori

With as many episodes as there have been of as many Star Trek television series as there have been, truly new ideas are surely few and far between. But the latest episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, "Memento Mori," demonstrates the new series' potential to make an engaging hour of science fiction even when they're essentially "remixing" episodes that earlier Treks have done.

When the Enterprise comes under attack by the Gorn, it's forced to seek cover in the clouds of gas giant being devoured by a black hole. But the Gorn don't give up the chase that easily, leading to a high stakes game of cat-and-mouse. When Number One is seriously wounded during an exchange, La'an must step in as first officer, compartmentalizing her own history with the relentless aliens.

This "submarine battle" metaphor has been done on Star Trek before -- most notably in the original series' "Balance of Terror" and Deep Space Nine's "Starship Down." Crew members being cut off from one another and forced to deal with problems outside their wheelhouse has been done too -- The Next Generation's "The Arsenal of Freedom" and "Disaster," or the aforementioned "Starship Down." But familiarity doesn't really breed contempt here, and Strange New Worlds makes the case to revisit this formula in a number of ways.

We have new characters here, and whatever circumstance we may have seen on Star Trek, we haven't seen these people in it. This is primarily a La'an episode, and her story arc leads us to the first Vulcan mindmeld on Strange New Worlds; the scene (and in particular, actors Christina Chong and Ethan Peck) do not disappoint. Even better, in my book, are some of the other character moments sprinkled throughout. Uhura and Hemmer make for a fun pairing, her cracking his crusty exterior even under some of the worst conditions possible. Pike's command style continues to be interesting in how relaxed it is; his banter with Ortegas would be near-scandalous on any other Trek show (save perhaps Lower Decks), but it works here. And throughout the episode, the dramatic device of the memorial pins works to give many characters a bit of history.

The visuals remain best ever for Star Trek -- and I do mean ever. They continue to surpass Discovery and Picard even though they're all being made at the same time, and they surpass even the J.J. Abrams-produced trilogy of films despite the vastly higher budget of the movies. The submarine battle has never looked so good on Star Trek: it has fast and slow moments, has tension and action, and always looks dangerous.

All that said... even though this episode does bring its own approach to things I've seen before, I have seen them before. This was my least favorite of the four Strange New Worlds episodes so far; the balance tipped a little too far away from the characters for my taste, the "problem" was really just an action movie setup without many big thoughts underpinning it. It was enjoyable all the same. I simply didn't like it as much as what we've seen so far.

Still, if this is a "low point" for Strange New Worlds, then it's a very good series indeed. I give "Memento Mori" a B.

Voyager Flashback: Scorpion

After dabbling with the Borg in an episode that wasn't quite a Borg episode, Star Trek: Voyager went all the way for their third season finale, "Scorpion."

Voyager has reached the edge of Borg space, with no option but to find a way through. But shockingly, the Borg aren't their biggest problem, as a new and malevolent alien race is invading the area -- and even the Borg are powerless to stop them.

The original plan for Voyager's season three finale was the "Year of Hell" story they'd teased earlier in the season. But then two ideas converged: there was the feeling they needed to do something bigger with the Borg than they had so far; and they decided to introduce a new character to the cast. They knew they wanted an "ex-Borg" character, and a Borg cliffhanger to set them up. But even knowing that much about the character, they deferred writing it into the finale. That gave them the extra months of the season hiatus to cast the role.

What they did write features a number of intriguing elements. We do sort of get a new character in this episode: the holographic Leonardo da Vinci, played by John Rhys-Davies, and added at Kate Mulgrew's suggestion (and far better than Janeway's Gothic holonovel). And at the core of it all, the idea of "Species 8472" is fun and relatively scary. They get inside you like the "Alien," but they're not a force of nature: they destroy you because they want to, and it hurts like hell while they do it (poor Harry Kim!). Plus, they can destroy the Borg in a few seconds flat (one of the shortest teasers ever on Star Trek).

Janeway and Chakotay come into true conflict with one another in this episode, in a compelling way (though I have to personally side with Chakotay on this). I like letting the characters be at odds... but I also feel this is a major turning point for the show. My memory of Voyager from when I first watched it decades ago was that I didn't like Janeway all that much. In re-watching three seasons so far, I really haven't see why. But now "Scorpion" brings a taste of how I remember the character being written. She seems weirdly obstinate, and quite unwilling to listen to any advice or experience from the crew. It's possible that I'm reacting badly here mainly because of gender... but my memory is that Archer on Enterprise was written in the exact same way (leading to what I would have thought would be impossible after 5 seasons of Quantum Leap: the Star Trek writers made me hate "Scott Bakula"). I guess we'll see as I continue in my Star Trek re-watch.

The production does a lot on a television time and budget. Yes, the Species 8472 CG looks rather primitive. But First Contact sets and props are reused to make the Borg themselves appropriately menacing, with heavy haunted house vibes. And the "tower of dead Borg" is cleverly built from actual Star Trek action figures hot glued together (really! look it up!).

Other observations:

• Why would information on the Borg be classified? I would think you'd want anyone encountering them to know what they're in for!

• B'Elanna invents a "skeletal lock" with the transporter. If it hadn't worked right, would they just beam up a pile of bones? Ew.

• Given what happened between da Vinci and the Catholic Church, it's interesting to hear the character speak of appealing to God. Personal religion and organized religion are two very different things.
  

I give "Scorpion" a B. It caps off a season of Voyager that never reached great heights (I still haven't found an "A or A-" episode of Voyager), but it was generally "consistently good" (the overall season average feels much higher than seasons one or two). My picks for the top five episodes of season three are: "Real Life," "Flashback," "Worst Case Scenario," "Distant Origin," and "Coda."

On to season four!

First Street

This post -- and two to follow in the next few days/weeks -- are for the horror fans in my readership.

I'm always far behind on my Netflix queue -- some combination of "the fire hose of content spraying out all the time" with "anything buzzworthy that they release is chewed up and spat out in a matter of weeks anyway." But I did finally get to something that's been in there a while, a trilogy of original horror movies: Fear Street.

Based on a long-running series of books by R.L. Stine, Fear Street Part One: 1994 is set in a "wrong side of the tracks" suburb where brutal murders are a disturbingly common occurrence, and attributed to the centuries-old curse of a powerful witch. In this first film, a teen unknowingly disturbs the remains of that witch, triggering a vengeful rampage from beyond the grave.

This first installment in the serialized trilogy has a lot of peaks and valleys. It's not a bad horror movie overall, but it's also constantly having to "start over again" in terms of building momentum. Several sequences really work to generate tension and jump scares, but then long and talky sections in between (with hit-and-miss acting) really sap the energy from the narrative.

That's kind of a shame, because it's not like I'd choose to cut those slower parts. They're vital for fleshing out the story, and that story is actually rather clever. Horror fans are no stranger to supernatural killers with spooky origin stories, but there's a clever twist here to up the ante and sort of Voltron the best parts of several horror sub-genres into a nifty whole.

The movie it's most paying homage to, unsurprisingly, is Scream. That was made in 1996, just two years after Fear Street Part One: 1994 is set. Fear Street isn't borrowing any particular plot points from Scream. (In fact, its key LGBT romance marks it as immediately more modern.) Still, it's in lockstep with the same gory sensibilities, hard R rating, and teenage protagonists. Basically, this is a retro 90s horror movie, and what movie most exemplifies that? Scream.

There were enough tantalizing teases here at what the rest of the trilogy could bring to persuade me to continue, even if I didn't find the first movie to be truly exceptional. I'd give Part One a B-.

(Another) Morning in America

It's morning in America -- the morning after yet another horrific mass shooting at a school. It came, of course, before the families of the victims of the last horrific mass shooting could even lay their loved ones to rest. I won't pretend to have something great to say here, either profound or pithy. But I'd rather post a few thoughts on the matter, however scattered, than just go "business as usual" with another movie review or whatever today.

Last night, I attended a graduation ceremony for my niece, who is finishing 8th grade and starting high school next year. That ceremony was held at the high school where nearly all of her class will be moving onto. And that high school is Columbine.

Columbine High School was not the first mass school shooting in the U.S., though it is arguably the beginning of the epidemic as we live with it today. And we do just seem to live with it; there was at no point in over 90 minutes of ceremony any acknowledgement of where we were, or of the day on which we were there. Sure, everyone was there for a celebration, and part of me does understand not wanting to overshadow that. Maybe even most of me.

Yet also, that we all just want to soldier on and pretend nothing is so deeply and profoundly wrong? That we all just know that no one should say anything about gathering at "the birthplace of mass school shootings" on the very day of a mass school shooting? That feels like part of why nothing has changed in 23 years later.

But of course, the real reason nothing has changed in decades is that the U.S. Senate will not even take up a vote on simple measures that have not only majority support in our country, but near unanimous support. The Second Amendment is not a suicide pact, and most Americans want to see more extensive background checks, trigger locks, training requirements, age limitations, and more. Because of the filibuster, and because a significant number of senators receive contributions from the NRA and gun lobbyists, we can't even get the vote.

You don't even have to be a "single issue voter" at this point. If you care about meaningful, sensible gun control... or the retrograde restriction of women's rights... or continuing access to contraception... or equality in marriage... and so on, and so on... all those issues align one way. Stop voting Republicans into office.

Strange New Worlds: Ghosts of Illyria

As season one of Stat Trek: Strange New Worlds continues, the writers continue to spotlight different characters with each new episode. Most recently, "Ghosts of Illyria" focused on Number One, Una Chin-Riley.

The Enterprise explores a colony seemingly abandoned by the Illyrians, aliens who explored genetic modification (forbidden within the Federation). As an ion storm traps Pike and Spock on the planet, a mysterious virus begins to tear through the crew on the ship. Not only must Number One hold everything together, she may actually be the only one who can help with the cure.

This episode was a wonderful parable of the subtle evil of being the "model minority." Number One is hiding a secret that might resonate with many different members of the audience in slightly different ways. Hers is the story of the immigrant who hides their country of origin, or the LGBT+ individual who hides in the closet, or the person whose religion is persecuted by the majority. It's hard being "one of the good ones" -- and it's important that she uses those exact real world words to sum up her story. She's expressing a fear that many know personally, and many more surely can understand: you have to be better than everyone else because others are judged by you; you can never be certain whether you're one failure away from erasing all your successes.

This message is woven quite well into the episode, sneaking up on you within the framework of other well-worn Star Trek tropes. When we see Number One positively glowing (literally) in her quarters, we think we know what this moment is. She's lying about being infected by the strange virus (or perhaps doesn't know that she is), and later she's going to be revealed to be at the center of everything happening on the ship. Instead, we learn she's not lying for the reason we thought, and she is at the center of everything in a very different and important way.

I'm fascinated how all this was created on the back of various official and not-quite-official back story about the character. In "canon" Star Trek, virtually nothing was really known about Number One, aside from her probably being an alien. Original Star Trek writer D.C. Fontana wrote a Star Trek novel all about the character; I haven't read it, but I understand that all the background about her species comes from there. The Strange New Worlds writers chose to make all of that official, fusing it with a detail introduced by Deep Space Nine, that genetic modification is banned in the Federation.

I do like how this very Number One-centric plot manages to involve other characters too. The background of genetic modification has major resonance with La'an, and the episode digs into it. We also learn that Number One isn't the only one with a secret; M'Benga is hiding something major too, revealed in the course of the episode. (I'll admit, I'm not quite sure why he's keeping his thing a secret. I suppose it's a matter of stakes: he cannot risk any chance of being told "no," so better not to ask.) Elsewhere in the plot, Pike and Spock get to have a buddy adventure on the planet; it's nothing major, though we should be getting plenty of moments like these for the pair if they're writing toward the friendship Spock would risk everything for in the original series two-parter "The Menagerie."

I enjoyed this episode a lot. If anything, I think I talked myself into liking it even more in thinking through it here. "Ghosts of Illyria" is the best episode of Strange New Worlds so far (though they've all been solid). I give it an A-.

Space Murder!

I'm a sucker for all things "space." So when I heard about a book called The Apollo Murders, with a cover featuring a lunar lander just above the moon's surface, that was basically all I needed to know to put it in my reading queue. (There was one other intriguing tidbit worth knowing, though: the author, Chris Hadfield, is a retired astronaut -- lending this decidedly fictional tale a patina of authenticity.)

For those of you who maybe need a little more info than I did, The Apollo Murders chronicles the events of (the never flown in real life) Apollo 18. A late-in-the-game crew change, a shocking encounter with Russian cosmonauts, and plenty of Cold War brinksmanship infuse this pulpy tale. This is Chris Hadfield's version of Andy Weir's formula: to infuse a science fiction story with lots and lots of true science fact detail.

Unfortunately, this book is not nearly as well written. The pulp element of this story is incredibly far-fetched, piling on wild twist after wild twist, each swinging harder than the last. You're asked to accept a lot of unrealistic turns in the plot that have little to do with actual science: from shockingly ineffective espionage agents to characters with thinly developed motives. Worst of all is a character who, as the novel unspools, becomes impossible to believe: I just couldn't accept that a raging psychopath of this magnitude would ever get to the place they get without detection.

This book made me appreciate more fully something about Andy Weir's writing that had slid under the radar for me until now. Weir's novels always feature characters using real-world science in science fiction situations. The Apollo Murders has more of an oil-and-water quality where the two elements remain separated. A fantastical tale is well-adorned with real-world details like a beautifully decorated Christmas tree, but truth rarely informs the fiction. It's as though Chris Hadfield wrote a wild "death in space!" story, then shuffled in a few pages from a memoir of his personal space travels.

The writing of the fiction isn't especially solid either. The narration seems especially omniscient, hopping around from one perspective to another whenever it pleases, often without even a new chapter or even a line break to queue you about what's happening. The characters, as I've said, are thin. The language is nothing special.

Although, I have to admit: the plot is thoroughly engaging. I knew as I was reading The Apollo Murders that I wasn't exactly "enjoying" it. But there was never a doubt in my mind that I had to know how it was going to end. And with so many wild plot twists in the mix, there was never a dull moment. This wasn't a not-great book that took me a while to finish; I breezed through it at escape velocity, my eyes pulling from the page only occasionally when I simply had to roll them.

I'd give The Apollo Murders a C. I'm certainly not here to tell all my readers to pick it up. But despite its shortcomings, I know there's a segment of my readership that almost certainly will get something out of it. If you're into the history of human-crewed space travel, and you, say, got swept up in Dan Brown mania many years ago and read The Da Vinci Code? (Mind you, this is at least better written and better plotted than The Da Vinci Code.) Then this might just be for you.

Voyager Flashback: Worst Case Scenario

Given the premise of Star Trek: Voyager -- a crew is trapped across the galaxy and is trying to get home -- you might expect that many of their episodes would arise from within the ship, from the crew forced to live with one another without a break. But 90s television wasn't really built that way, and "planet of the week" episodes were the norm for the series. Still, the writers would occasionally look to the internal dynamics of their characters, and one of their more effective examples of this was "Worst Case Scenario."

B'Elanna discovers a holonovel in which you can live out a Maquis mutiny aboard Voyager. While potentially inflammatory, it's also great fun. Soon the secret of the holonovel is out, and the hunt is on for who wrote it. But a secret lurking inside the story will soon surprise them all.

I truly enjoy the low stakes that run for the bulk of this particular episode. Voyager is not saving a planet, or even themselves. Instead, the characters have stumbled on a fluffy bit of escapism. And it's all told in a very fun way -- dropping us right into the scenario and gradually revealing that something is a little off, even before Chakotay seems to turn traitor and take over the ship. The conflict remains low stakes in the middle section, where Paris and Tuvok are clashing with one another over writing together (with everyone offering their own unsolicited opinions). But the low stakes don't come off slow paced or boring, in a nice balancing act.

Compared to The Next Generation or Deep Space Nine, I've never felt that the characters of Voyager grow or change much over the run of the series. But an episode like this shows that they are changing, because there are plenty of differences between the "first season" and "third season" versions of everyone. Also, the writers aren't afraid to poke a little fun at themselves: having Chakotay criticize the way Voyager investigates "every insignificant anomaly we come across," dramatizing some of their own internal writing conflicts, and having the characters themselves complain about some story lines being "boring."

There is eventually some actual jeopardy in the last section of the episode. And while it's tempting to dismiss it as another take on "trapped on a holodeck that can somehow kill you," the fact that it's Seska who's responsible makes this section of the episode fun too. Again, it's conflict generated internally by the show's characters. Plus, Seska is pretty much the only effective recurring character Voyager has ever had (and certainly the only decent villain), so her return is more than welcome.

The entire episode is sprinkled with good moments for characters. B'Elanna acknowledges the difficulty of betraying Harry Kim (even in a "game"). Seska writes herself a version of Chakotay who loves her the way she wished for. A brief appearance of a sadistic and evil Doctor is more effective than the whole episode recently built on that premise. Kim comes to the rescue a few seconds too late, and gives a great, wordless "why did I go to all that trouble?" reaction.

There's also a dash of catnap for Star Trek fans: we seem to love it when characters wear the wrong color uniforms (as Tom Paris does when he plays the scenario), face off against copies of themselves (as Tom Paris briefly does -- in a rather weak VFX shot), or repeat moments of "time" (as when we get to see differences in B'Elanna and Tom's plays through the scenario).

Other observations:

• Years later, on his podcast, actor Robert Duncan McNeill interpreted much of the dialogue here not as the writers poking fun at themselves, but jabbing at the actors (whose writing suggestions would rarely be heeded).

• Holographic Seska gets a far better death here than the real version did.
  

I suppose if you think about it, this episode is a bit similar in concept to "Civil Defense" from Deep Space Nine. But I think there's more than enough juice to squeeze from it for both series to get a fun episode. I give "Worst Case Scenario" a B+.

Sign Up for Severance

I think many TV viewers out there are only subscribing to Apple TV+ when there are new episodes of Ted Lasso (if even then), so I'm hauling out the decorations to throw a party for another series on the streaming service that you really should be watching: Severance.

Severance posits a world in which you can have your brain "severed" into two: your work self and your personal self. Ride the elevator up from the corporate basement where you work, and you forget absolutely everything about what it is you do there. Ride it down the next morning, and you work completely free of distractions of your forgotten life outside. It's an arrangement perfect for maintaining a separation between work and home, say its proponents -- and "Mark S" is eager to forget parts of his life. But new hire "Helly R" reveals the dark torture of signing up for severance: she wants to leave the unending hell that is her job, but there is no escape.

It's hard to categorize just what Severance is. The Office mashed up with Westworld? Being John Malkovich: The TV Series? There are a lot of touchstones informing what it is, even as it's something unique. It is, for certain, delightfully and aggressively weird. Characters definitely have desires and emotions... yet they often feel "muted" or constrained (even outside work, in the real world). The day-to-day business of Lumon, the corporation at the heart of the story, is unknowable, but this feels like part of a deliberate strategy to satirize corporate behavior and not writers presenting a "puzzle box" to which even they don't know the answers.

One thing that's crystal clear: the acting is exceptional. Adam Scott stars as Mark, and he takes to the drama here as brilliantly as he's played any comedic role in his career. The range of well known actors in the cast is positively anarchic, including Patricia Arquette, John Turturro, and Christopher Walken. Fans of sci-fi television will probably recognize Dichen Lachman (from either Dollhouse or Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.). But even the faces new to me are not at all being outshone by the rest: Britt Lower, Tramell Tillman, and Zach Cherry are all absolutely vital to the story, and there's not a weak link to be found.

The style of the show is omnipresent, probably in large part thanks to the fact that only two different directors worked on its nine episodes: Aoife McArdle and Ben Stiller. (Yes, that Ben Stiller. People best known for comedy playing it straight is an undercurrent for the series.) Office life feels lifeless, vast and stifling. Real life somehow feels just as bizarre in its own way. But no matter how odd the characters behave, everything seems to make sense in the whole.

As obtuse as Severance can be, I never doubted that the story was headed somewhere, never suspected it was all just weirdness for the sake of weirdness. And boy, was that true. The first season isn't just heading toward a thematic reckoning, it has a lot of plot revelations along the way. And the season finale (written by series creator Dan Erickson) is one of the most brilliant cliffhangers in the last decade of television -- an extremely suspenseful hour in which the tension just keeps ratcheting up and up and up. Thankfully, we are getting a second season of the show... but also I feel like I've got maybe three chapters left to read in a really good book. I'm eager to see if the writers can pull off a continuation of the story that doesn't feel like stretching the taffy.

I have no doubt that many would find the tone of Severance to be quite off-putting -- and I'm not going to tell you that "you have to stick with it." But if the first episode does grab you as thoroughly as it did me, you'll eagerly devour them all. For me, the first season of Severance gets an enthusiastic A.

Voyager Flashback: Displaced

Star Trek had already done its share of "someone takes over the ship" episodes by the end of Voyager season three. (Even Voyager itself had done a couple.) Still, the writers managed to find a novel angle on the idea in "Displaced."

Mysterious (but seemingly harmless) aliens are appearing aboard Voyager... just as the ship's crewmembers are vanishing one by one. Before our heroes can stop it, they all find themselves captive in an alien habitat, victims of a slow and subtle takeover of their ship. Now, they must find a way to escape.

The concept here certainly is clever, but it also doesn't feel entirely logical. Basically: the Voyager crew has to be pretty dumb for this kind of ship takeover to work. When Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres encounter the first alien on the ship, their first instinct should be to declare "intruder alert!" (They're even armed with a bat'leth at the time.) But they fall for the performance of a doddering old man, and from then there's no going back. You can twist yourself in knots trying to decide if the alien scheme here really makes sense. What's the right balance of abducting people by true random selection vs. taking out key threats that will make the plan work best

But there are still other moments where our heroes don't look too bright. Once they're all in captivity, they immediately trust the next stranger who shows up; yes, he does turn out to be exactly what he claims (an alien from another habitat), but there's really no reason not to expect a continuation of the con that landed them in trouble to begin with. When Tom and B'Elanna later get the drop on two of their captors, they walk away without scooping up their weapons. I guess the crew is smart enough, though; they're the first captives in 94 habitats to pull off an escape.

So yeah, I find the execution of this concept much weaker than the concept itself. But there are some decent scenes built around it. The running subplot of Tom and B'Elanna's relationship works well -- though I actually think some of its best moments come when other characters get caught in the middle. The Doctor's commentary on their interaction is quite funny (as is B'Elanna's move to silence him). The peak comes when Kim is too smart to answer the question, "you don't think I'm hostile, do you?" (What a trap!)

Other characters get nice moments too. Chakotay fighting to the last to keep control of Voyager is a nice bit of heroics. Tuvok throws some Vulcan shade on how puny Starfleet survival training is compared to what he practiced on his homeworld. And in the end, Janeway sure has fun twisting the knife (as she turns the tables) on her captors.

Other observations:

• No makeup at all on these aliens, just goofy hats.
  

• In the habitat that's -20° Celsius, you should be able to see the characters' breath. But refrigerating a sound stage is expensive, and this is many years before a TV show could plausibly add that with digital effects.
  

• At the end of the story, the plan is to return the inhabitants of all 94 habitats (150-200 in each one!) to their homeworlds. Seems like that project would take months or years. I guess Voyager delegated.
  

There's a fun gimmick at the core of this episode, but it's also one with too many plot holes to easily button up. I'd call "Displaced" a B-.

Everything -- To Everyone?

For weeks now, my social media has been abuzz with both critics and friends praising the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. It had been on my radar before all this, but the drumbeat of positivity worked my expectations up to too high a pitch. I'd literally heard critics declare it the frontrunner for "Best Movie of 2022," and at least one person I know dubbed it "their new favorite movie," period. In retrospect, as should have been obvious, that was too much pressure. So let me come in with this take: Everything Everywhere All at Once is not that good... but it is worth seeing.

First, a quick attempt to summarize the movie, since you may not have heard of it. (It is, after all, an indie film that has taken weeks to methodically build the kind of box office total that some blockbusters earn on opening day.) Chinese-American immigrant Evelyn Wang is at a crossroads in a life of missed opportunities. Her relationships with her husband, daughter, and father are all strained. Her laundromat is under audit by the IRS (with her mountain of receipts a testament to other dreams unfulfilled). Suddenly, a visitor from another reality arrives to tell her she's the key to saving all incarnations of the multiverse from a powerful evil being that seeks to destroy everything.

It's interesting that Everything Everywhere All at Once arrives as the MCU is spinning up its take on the multiverse -- in particular that it arrived just weeks before Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. One critique I had of that movie was that it didn't really live of to the promise of anarchy in its overblown title. In that respect, Everything Everywhere All at Once is the movie I thought I was getting. This is a film in which absolutely anything goes. The conceptual and tonal weirdness is fractal, allowing in everything from lowbrow comedy to the absurd, from intellectualism to action, from parody to drama.

The movie is science fiction, martial arts, existentialism, family drama, and more. Sometimes it lurches from one tone or genre to another and back, while other times it layers them together in the same scene. Yet the balance (or imbalance, as it often is) really does work. The filmmaking always meets the ambitious tonal shifts. Writer-directors "Daniels" (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert) change aspect ratios, lenses, and lighting styles. They bring in martial arts consultants and give VFX artists free reign. And it all looks great.

The cast is absolutely perfect. Michelle Yeoh stars as Evelyn, the only tether the audience has through this wild ride. She and co-stars Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong, and Jamie Lee Curtis all have to essentially play multiple characters drawn from multiple kinds of movies, and everyone rises to meet each challenge, no matter how ridiculous. If you've ever liked Michelle Yeoh in anything, you owe it to yourself to see this performance that really lets her shine as nothing has ever before.

But for me, the message and pacing of the movie aren't handled with a fraction of the skill of its "genre mashup" elements. The movie starts a bit slow, and ends really slow, when you consider the breakneck pace of the bulk of it. It all feels long (at 2 hours, 20 minutes). The positive emotional destination it reaches is fitting (and the sentiments mostly hit), but it lingers for a quite a while before that in a weirdly nihilistic place that makes me wonder if the real thrust of the creators' story was something they were forced to undercut with a more "Hollywood ending."

If it had actually registered for me who "Daniels" are before I saw this movie, I almost certainly would have set my expectations at a more realistic level. Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert are the pair behind Swiss Army Man, and while this movie doesn't instantly run out of runway like that one (there's simply too much creativity here for that to be possible), the feeling was much the same to me: this is a movie in which the creativity itself are the best part. Still, I liked Everything Everywhere All at Once considerably more.

Probably, though, I need not have let hype convince me this was a movie I had to see now, in a theater. Waiting just a bit longer to stream it at home would have been perfectly fine for me. It's very clever, and a tour de force for Michelle Yeoh, but I personally didn't love it as others have. I give Everything Everywhere All at Once a B-.

Strange New Worlds: Children of the Comet

Many fans have quickly embraced Strange New Worlds as a return to the episodic adventures of "classic" Star Trek. The second episode, "Children of the Comet," definitely gave us that.

The Enterprise tries to stop a comet from striking an inhabited world, leading to two surprising discoveries: the comet seems to be artificial in nature, and a powerful alien species regards it as a divine arbiter of life and death in the galaxy. Amid all this, Cadet Uhura goes on her first away mission, and is forced to face uncertainties about herself and her Starfleet career in the process.

Discovery and Picard have already been showing us how slick Star Trek can look with cutting edge visual effects techniques, but it's really something to see that brought to bear on a "problem of the week" story. The use of an "AR wall" to create the comet interior is simply stunning; from how the reality of the set helps the actors to the way that the real light interacts with their sleek spacesuits. Two new alien races each look great: the Deleb on the planet using a more conventional (but highly textured) makeup, and the "Shepherds" with creepy CG to distance their eyes and make their brains seem to "breathe." (Edit: It turns out the Shepherd was not CG! It was mechanically-puppeted devices incorporated into makeup worn by a live actor!) As a Star Trek fan who for decades has just learned to overlook the fact that "sometimes, it looks pretty cheesy," the fact that I no longer have to is a revelation.

But more important than the look is the content, and this episode gets a lot of that right too. Even though the population of an entire planet is at risk here, the stakes are -- as they should be -- on one of the main characters. Indeed, the first 10 minutes of the episode are pure character development, to an extent that almost made me worry whether they'd have time to fully explore whatever sci-fi problem the Enterprise might eventually stumble upon.

Of course, which character was in focus meant a lot to any longtime Star Trek fan. Part of me is sad that in one episode, Celia Rose Gooding was probably given more to do as Uhura than Nichelle Nichols had in decades of playing the character. Still, the importance of Nichols would be hard to overstate, and it's her performance that made made me care enough to appreciate this expansion now. The central role of music in this story, while unavoidably evocative of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, was also a very appropriate homage to one of the few things we already knew about Uhura: her skill as a singer.

However, I did feel as though the episode laid on elements of the new Uhura backstory a little thick. I found her conflict in this episode a bit jarring -- not so much her uncertainty about her place in Starfleet, but just how open she was in speaking about it. I wish that this had been more subtle, more polished... though if you're going to magnify a narrative conflict, I'd certainly rather it be at this kind of personal level.

Plus, it helps that Captain Pike's ship is being presented as an environment where this kind of openness is encouraged. He's on a first name basis with his crew, and vice versa. He hosts dinners, he solicits input. He sets a different tone with his command. I found myself thinking of the Next Generation episode in which Captain Jellico's replacement of Captain Picard upsets the entire crew; I couldn't help but imagine that if Captain Picard somehow took over for Captain Pike for a week, this crew would react similarly. (The change in degree of formality feels similar.)

I personally didn't enjoy "Children of the Comet" quite as much as Strange New Worlds' premiere. Still, I very much enjoyed this kind of episode, and I look forward to seeing the series refine its formula with more episodes. I give this one a B.

Voyager Flashback: Distant Origin

In the fourth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the episode "First Contact" dared to tell an entire episode from the perspective of a planet visited by the Enterprise. Star Trek: Voyager played in a similar perspective-shifting space in its third season, with "Distant Origin."

The scientist Forra Gegen has found evidence that his reptilian species, the Voth, originated from the same planet as a strange spaceship of mammalian life forms that comes from across the galaxy. He is determined to find this Voyager to prove his theories... but his government stands in staunch opposition to his challenges to doctrine.

For a long-running television show, a break with format could be a welcome thing -- especially when producing a ludicrously high 26 episodes each season as this era of Star Trek routinely did. This episode gives us an alien society conceived in impressive detail, from language to politics to physiology to cosmology to morality. Star Trek staples are funneled through a new perspective: a "captain's log" becomes a letter to home; our heroes are spied upon just as Starfleet officers have previously spied on primitive culture. Supporting the premise that this is an episode of some other show, director David Livingston films it like one too. Unusual lenses and camera angles abound throughout, techniques that appear in just this one episode.

But I think the writers weren't quite fully committed to the gimmick. Yes, we get halfway into Act 2 before we even see one of the regular Voyager characters, but then rather than staying with the alien perspective, the episode is handed off. It becomes about Voyager dealing with a potential invasion before eventually settling into sort of being a Chakotay episode -- though he's dragged along through the plot more than having any agency in it.

The one scene in which he does seize the reins is pretty solid, though. Everything culminates in Chakotay delivering a classic Star Trek captain speech, each word chosen with diplomatic precision even as it exposes hard truths. So well written is this speech that Chakotay specifically talks about the nobility of heritage and ancestry without ever clanging insensitively on his heritage (which Voyager has not always handled well). It's far more nuanced than any past Chakotay episode, and Robert Beltran really steps up to perform it well.

Of course, the speech is nicely summing up the very Star Trek allegory of this episode: this is about the clash between religious doctrine and science. You might watch and think "theory of evolution," and that fits -- but it was even more specifically inspired by Galileo's treatment by the Catholic church (a suggestion reportedly made by executive producer Rick Berman, who didn't like the "shoot-em-up with alien lizards" that this episode was first shaping up to be). Rhetoric versus provable fact is unfortunately a timeless theme, though one detail of it feels especially current in today's political discourse: the Voth leader's real objection to this scientific theory is that it would mean all of her people are immigrants.

To get to all the good stuff, though, you do have to overlook a lot about the premise that just doesn't make sense. That another intelligent life existed on Earth before humans is tough to swallow. The episode posits that maybe the Voth existed solely on a lost continent, any evidence of them now buried on an ocean floor. But any species advanced enough to leave Earth by spaceflight would by definition be a global society. (Of course, you also have to look past the fact that in the 25 years since this episode was made, scientists have determined that dinosaurs in fact weren't cold-blooded, and were more similar to avians than lizards. But that hasn't stopped the Jurassic Park franchise.)

Other observations:

• The planet on which the Voth find a human skeleton is distinctly recognizable from the beginning of the season. (And they reuse an establishing shot on the volcanic surface to drive the connection home.)

• The Voth seem too advanced for us not to have heard of them before this episode. Among their advancements is a mastery of transwarp travel. I guess for them, evolving into a lizard isn't much of a consequence for breaking Warp 10.

• Love is in the air. We get some flirtation between Tom and B'Elanna (narrated like a nature documentary by the Voth), and even a tiny romantic subplot between the alien scientist's assistant and daughter.

The clash of religion and science is well conceived here, as is the speech Chakotay gives from the moral high ground. But the episode could have pushed even harder in focusing on its aliens -- aliens who were quite thoroughly conceived (except for the gaping hole that they actually could come from Earth). I'd give this episode an A for effort, but it does lose a little for me in execution. I give "Distant Origin" a B+.

Be Still My Heart

Even as other streaming services have figured out that releasing one episode a week is the best model for generating sustained buzz (and revenue!) for a hot new television show, Netflix doggedly adheres to the "drop it all for bingeing" model that made them. A great new Netflix show can completely pass you by if you're not there and all in at exactly the right moment. So let me bang the drum in the hopes that won't happen for Heartstopper.

Based on a series of graphic novels and web comics, Heartstopper is a British series centered around openly gay teenager Charlie Spring. He's falling for Nick Nelson, the rugby player he sits next to in class -- but the entire school knows Nick is as straight as they come. Obviously. Isn't he? With support from his friends (entangled in first romances of their own), Charlie tries to come to terms with his feelings.

You may not have seen them, but a number of LGBT reviewers have been praising Heartstopper as "the show I wish had existed when I was that age." I think that keeps being repeated because it's such a succinct and accurate way to sum up what's great about it. There is more queer representation in TV and movies these days... yet when it comes to teenagers, the vast majority of stories are still "how painful it is to come out." A particularly pervasive form of these stories includes the "jerky straight guy who gradually accepts that he's actually gay"; even an excellent show like Sex Education draws from that brackish well. (I was going to link to my review of Sex Education, only to find that I've apparently never blogged about that great show?! Another time...)

Heartstopper, in sharp contrast, is uplifting. It's not that the characters don't struggle or question. It's not that there are no bullies and no heartbreak. It's that the narrative focuses more on the warm and fuzzy feelings of budding love. There is confusion, but little anguish. Over the course of eight 30-minute episodes, I believe there's only one episode that ends on a true downer; the cliffhangers are about "what wonderful thing will happen next?" and not "how will they get out of this horrible situation?"

The secondary characters are excellent. This is a brilliantly written (and acted) show where strong characters are drawn sharply with just one or two great lines -- or even, at times, no dialogue at all. (How characters interact with their phones is a huge part of this show.) To give you a sense of how many great characters there are in Heartstopper: Olivia Colman -- yes, that Oscar-winning, amazing-in-everything Olivia Colman -- is in this show, and she's maybe my eighth favorite thing about it.

While I think it's the role of entertainment to, first and foremost, be entertaining, I think it's worth noting that Heartstopper feels to me like it meets this particular moment in the U.S. in an excellent way. This one show has L, G, B, and T representation, and it does it all in a way that absolutely destroys the bullshit argument that queerness is somehow an "inappropriate topic for children." Talking about LGBT people doesn't mean explicit talk about gay sex. Heartstopper is charting a different course from Sex Education or Love, Victor -- its characters are more innocent (though not chaste). Holding hands is a big deal, worthy of on-screen cartoon animation. A kiss is everything. Any child who has ever watched a Disney princess kiss her prince could watch this show.

Right now, it seems like people aren't talking about Netflix's shows as much as the fact that it doesn't seem to know when it has good shows. Heartstopper has not yet been renewed for a second season, and I'm trying to prep for either outcome here. The eight episodes that exist are wonderful, and conclude in a satisfying way. But also, there remain more volumes of the source material to adapt, and I would love to see another season. So this is me trying to push the streaming numbers the tiniest bit by encouraging anyone who sees this to watch. Heartstopper is an absolute grade A show.

Strange New Worlds: Strange New Worlds

Last week saw the debut of yet another new Star Trek television series. (And with it, the franchise has now given us more Star Trek series than it did in its entire 80s-2000s revival.) For the first time in Star Trek, they decided to name the pilot episode for the series itself, resulting in my truly odd blog post title above.

Shaken by his recent experiences with the starship Discovery, Captain Pike has withdrawn to his home in Montana. But he is spurred back into Starfleet action when his first officer goes missing during a first contact mission. Gathering new and old crew aboard the Enterprise, he sets off for a rescue.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is unique in the current franchise in some key ways. It's a series basically willed into existence by the fans, whose enthusiastic reception during Discovery season two of Anson Mount as Pike, Rebecca Romijn as Number One, and Ethan Peck as Spock convinced the Powers That Be that there was room on their already crowded development slate for a series featuring them. Among the hour-long Trek shows, it's the one planned to be episodic in the classic Star Trek format (albeit with more explicit character arcs woven along the way).

All of that was on display in a solid premiere episode. And it was solid mainly because it gave us all exactly what we were asking for. Anson Mount dominated the screen as Pike, an authoritative but chill presence that seemed to synthesize fan-favorite elements of other beloved captains without seeming like it was filling up a plate from a buffet. He gave us the relaxed ease of Kirk, the introspective angst of Sisko, the moral staunchness of Picard, and much more -- all without overselling any of it. Mount was seemingly born to be a Star Trek captain

There were nice moments along the way for other characters as well. As demonstrated in season two of Discovery, Ethan Peck is admirably handling the challenge of evoking Leonard Nimoy without impersonating him, making Spock his while still not approaching it in the way Zachary Quinto faced the same challenge. We got moments of intriguing rapport between Dr M'Benga and Chapel, a great example of Uhura being cool under pressure, and simple lines that developed Ortegas and La'an more than some of the Discovery bridge crew has been developed in four seasons.

Not every element worked flawlessly. Some of the humor hit, but a fair amount of it clanged in the way that summer blockbuster "quips under pressure" often feel forced. The repeated glimpses of Pike's future, though important, might have been laying it on a bit thick. (I'd ask if he's even able to look in a mirror... but he's gotta fix that amazing hair somehow!)

Still, the most important moments hit the bullseye. Pike's final speech to the people of Kiley was exactly what longtime Star Trek fans want mainlined right into the core of their being: an affirmation of how great the future can be, mixed with the warning that you have to do the work to make it so. Star Trek has often mentioned the dark times of the late 20th and early 21st centuries (the timeline sliding forward as real time has passed), but this may have been the first time it was really shown to us so vividly. It was an effective montage and effective monologue. (I can't say I'm looking forward to the "second U.S. civil war," but neither can I say that feels like far-fetched fiction right now.)

I almost don't even want to address this last point, but since I've seen a fair amount of squawking about it online: the matter of the characters (Admiral Robert April and Transporter Chief Kyle) whose ethnicity has changed from previous canonical (and kinda-canonical) Star Trek. This has been done before with nary a peep -- in no reality is Benedict Cumberbatch a plausible version of Ricardo Montalban. There's far too much Star Trek now for it all to be plausibly contained without contradiction in one continuity, so trolls: don't tell on yourselves by calling out this element in particular.

I'm excited for the coming season of Strange New Worlds. Modern Star Trek has excelled at assembling a great cast of actors, and they seem to have done it again here. (Even if the newer additions don't all pan out, we already know how great the "big three" have been.) If the stories rise to meet the actors, we're all in for a treat. I give "Strange New Worlds" (the episode) a B+.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Multiverse?

The last year of movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe has certainly hit highs and lows. For me, the latest entry, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, falls somewhere in the middle.

My favorite MCU films have been the ones where the personal stakes for the characters are strong, more compelling than whatever global/galactic jeopardy the heroes are up against. This new movie does feature the right kind of personal stakes... but interestingly, for the villain far more than hero. And while those stakes are articulated within this movie, their full weight can't be felt unless you've done the "required reading" of earlier entries in the franchise. I'm not just talking the typical "see the original before you watch the sequel"; watching the first Doctor Strange is arguably not even the most important MCU precursor to this film.

Assuming you do have the right background, then the most important elements of this story do mostly work. The ultimate showdown is ultimately as much about the personal as it is "another big fight." You do get plenty of fights before that, though, of varying degrees of success. Some are clear and clever, others are noisy, chaotic, and hard to follow. In a break from expectations, the amount of CG isn't necessarily the determining factor in which category a given sequence will fall into. (In fact, CG plays a major role in my favorite conflict of the movie, a neat set piece in which music is also front and center.)

I have to say, though, that for me, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness didn't really live up to the title. I was primed for wild reality hopping at least on the order of Into the Spider-Verse. Instead, we get a quick 30-second sequence before the movie settles into one particular reality for most of its run time. Perhaps more chaos would have meant losing some of the grounded character elements that actually worked? But I couldn't help but feel the "Madness" was all hype.

Unless, that is, they were referring to the rules of how magic works. I can imagine you might be saying, "it's magic, there aren't any rules." I say, as a reader of lots of fantasy over the years, that you need good rules for magic to mean anything at all. And in this movie, the rules didn't seem clear to me at all. Magic had consequences for this person but not for that person. Things expressed early on as limitations became fuzzy "guidelines" later in the story.

Though at least through it all, I enjoyed the clear directorial hand of Sam Raimi. MCU films have a largely consistent style, and only a few directors (James Gunn and Taika Waititi) have truly been able to inject theirs with a personal touch. Edgar Wright was famously fired for not bending his personal style enough to the MCU format, so you might expect a Sam Raimi MCU movie to not be especially "Raimi-esque." Yet Raimi's signature horror-comedy runs all throughout the background of this movie -- and steps very much into the foreground for multiple moments that seem clearly inspired by Evil Dead.

Ultimately, through any ups and downs, Benedict Cumberbatch remains pretty fun to watch as Doctor Strange. He built his career on playing brilliant assholes and making you like them anyway, and he does it well here. But he's also been in better movies filling that particular niche.

I'd give Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness a B-. It's "essential" to the degree that all MCU films might now be in order to get the full context of something to come later. If not for that, I'd say it's a movie you could take or leave, depending on your love of Sam Raimi or Benedict Cumberbatch.

Picard: Farewell

Season two of Star Trek: Picard concluded this last week with the appropriately titled "Farewell."

The Europa Project and Renée Picard remain threatened by Adam Soong, and our heroes must come to the rescue. But if the warning they received is to be believed, someone may die in the process. And a final encounter with Q awaits.

Now that we have the whole of Picard season two and can contrast it with season one, here's how it stacks up for me: I thought season two hit a more consistent, but lower, bar of quality throughout its episodes. Season one reached much higher highs for the bulk of the season... though it did end on a two-part finale that was much weaker than this one.

Not that this finale didn't have its shortcomings -- mostly in the area of questions that were never sufficiently answered. What exactly was the beef between Guinan and Tallinn, and why was our favorite bartender so afraid of someone who turned out to be perfectly nice? Why exactly did Tallinn need to die to save Renée (other than "prophecy")? Was there no way to distract Adam Soong besides dying?

Then there's an entire subcategory of unanswered questions related to Q. Why was he dying now? Why did he seem to spend most of the season earnestly sabotaging the past and playing around with Adam Soong when, in the end, his real intentions were altruistic and benevolent? How is it he recovered any of his powers in the end after apparently having lost them?

But, assuming you could look past the many narrative gaps, this finale did what the season as a whole did pretty well: it brought us emotionally resonant moments that landed thanks to very good performances. Rios didn't have a lot to do this season, but what he did do certainly added up to his permanent departure from the series feeling appropriate. We probably didn't spend enough time with Seven and Raffi in a real valley of their relationship, but it was still enough for us to appreciate the peak they reached in the finale.

And the heart-to-heart conversation between Q and Picard was pretty special. Yes, after all we've seen of Q over the years, the menace and hostility, the playfulness and threats, this confession of genuine fondness was a pretty sharp left turn. Still, it wasn't inconsistent with what we've seen before, and John de Lancie and Patrick Stewart certainly sold the hell out of the scene. My only quibble: after Q tells us point blank that it doesn't always have to be about a problem with galactic stakes, the writers failed to heed their own message and returned everyone to the future to address a suddenly manufactured problem with galactic stakes. Boo.

We even got another surprise bit of emotional closure with the cameo appearance of Wil Wheaton as Traveler Wesley Crusher. Much as I was happy to see him, I was initially disappointed about how insufficient an ending I thought it was for the character of Kore. It felt like they just needed a quick way to tie up her story "once and for all," and this was the best they could do. Quickly, I shifted my perspective into thinking of it as a wrap up for Wesley Crusher. On those terms, the scene works great. Debatably, Wheaton wasn't giving us much of a performance -- he was broad and flippant and jovial, like his real world persona (at least, the one he presents to the public). But that felt like exactly what the moment needed: no longer was Wesley feeling forced by others or himself to fit into a preconceived way of being. He'd found his truest self, and was loving it. The fact that this ending for the character dovetails so well with the life of the actor made it all the more fitting for anyone who has followed Wheaton in real life.

Emotionally on the bullseye, if narratively off the target, I'd say "Farewell" adds up to about a B- in my book. Personally, I'd take the "highs and lows" of season one over this "consistently fine" season. But of course, I'll be right there for Picard's final season three when it arrives.

Word Search Jurisprudence

Longtime readers of my blog know that I follow goings-on at the U.S. Supreme Court far more closely than the average American. This is simple logic when aspects of your own life depend on the goings-on at the U.S. Supreme Court far more than the average American. (Not that my interest is solely self-interest.)

When early this week, a draft opinion by Samuel Alito overruling Roe vs. Wade was revealed, I was not surprised. You didn't have to really be that much of a "court watcher" to know how this was going to go: for years, Republicans have told us they want to stack the courts with people who would overrule Roe vs. Wade. They were telling us directly, not dog-whistling, not slyly signaling -- boldly declaring their intentions.

But being inoculated from the surprise did nothing to mitigate the rage. That's in large part because this particular draft as written by Alito seems specifically calibrated to provoke rage. It is such a work of legislation masquerading as legal thinking, so much the very thing "originalist" conservatives decry, that it boils the blood.

Alito goes on for nearly 100 pages, but the summary of what he wrote is basically: I did a word search on the Constitution and "abortion" isn't in there. This sort of disingenuous approach to law is par for the course from Republican-appointed judges these days. I'd point out that if legal analysis was really this simple, there's seemingly no need for all the education lawyers and judges get. But then, they don't necessarily get it these days, which is why more and more Republican-nomiated judges are rated as "Not Qualified" by the American Bar Association.

The truth, of course, is that Alito and other extremist members of the Supreme Court simply stop reading the law at the point that suits them -- that point being 1787. They'll endlessly dive into the background and thinking of the framers who wrote the original document... but somehow, the 17 times we've amended the Constitution since then, the intentions of those lawmakers, just don't seem to be as important.

The 14th Amendment was about abolishing slavery, yes. But it was written knowing better even than we understand today exactly what slavery meant. When those lawmakers wrote about what it meant to "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property," they knew exactly what kind of deprivations were routine for slaves. Slaves were separated from their families, not permitted to have families, forced to bear offspring, and far, far more... "indignities" is a woefully insufficient word. Can anyone be said to truly have their "liberty" in the face of that? If they don't have privacy, or self-determination? The "word search method" of Constitutional law eschews even the simplest kind of thought exercise, because if you did so, you'd get an obvious, different answer.

And what's especially galling here, a disingenuous rot at the heart of this claim to prize "the words of the Founders," is that you have to explicitly ignore some of their words to get there. Those first 10 Amendments that were there from the very beginning? You never hear conservatives talking about the 9th. (Or frankly... any other than the 1st, 2nd, and 10th.) "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." That's stating in very specific terms that you can't "word search" the Constitution -- just because it's not specifically in there doesn't mean it's not in there.

When the real ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization comes down in a few weeks, I'm sure that dissenting justices will say all of that far more articulately than I. (And with a more enlightened legal foundation. These are the things you do when you actually care about "showing your work.") Sadly, the words will be a dissent.

"Word search" jurisprudence will go on to strip more and more rights away in the years ahead. Popular opinion won't limit how far they go; leaving Roe and Casey in place is favored by around 70% of the U.S. population -- even in red states -- but they're striking it down anyway with a fervor and glee that oozes "what are you gonna do about it?"

The only way to stop these draconian judges is to stop voting for the Republican candidates who put them on the bench. Don't wait for them to come for the particular law that you think will impact you personally. For one thing, they will eventually. Moreover, this law, right now, affects you personally.

Knighty Knight

With last night's finale of Moon Knight, another MCU television series has wrapped up. And what a frustrating finale I found it to be.

A truly fun ride came before it, though. For me, Moon Knight was an utterly unique experience in the MCU: one I had absolutely no knowledge or preconceptions of beforehand. I'd never heard of the Moon Knight character before the show was announced. And it being a TV show on a streaming service, there were no trailers forced on me before another movie, no commercials I ever caught a glimpse of.

I knew only two details about Moon Knight before watching it: it starred Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke. And that knowledge really did nothing to spoil secrecy or set expectations. Isaac is a chameleon-like actor who never gives the same performance twice, while Hawke's tastes for scripts range widely from shoot-em-ups to horror movies to hard science fiction to meditative drama. Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke could star in ten more projects together, and none of them would be anything like Moon Knight.

Going in dark turned the roller coaster that is an MCU experience into Space Mountain. With each new episode, I would think I'd get a sense of what I was watching, and then be surprised when some strange new element was injected into the narrative. Right now, the MCU marketing engine (which I could escape only the one time, for Moon Knight) is out there proclaiming how this weekend's Doctor Strange sequel is going to be an unpredictable thrill ride in which anything could happen. But I know that's what they're promising, and that sets expectations. Moon Knight simply was surprising.

And, of course, the casting was as wonderful as I would have hoped for. Oscar Isaac gives an outstanding performance that remains emotionally connected even as it grows increasingly technically complicated. I'd say more, but if you've watched Moon Knight, you know what I'm talking about; and if you haven't watched Moon Knight, I'd much prefer you have the same uninformed experience I had. Meanwhile, Ethan Hawke gives us one of the more compelling and nuanced villains we've had in the MCU in years and years. (As one who was utterly unimpressed by Thanos, I'll say Hawke's character is easily the best since Killmonger.) I'll also add that I enjoyed May Calamawy -- even though it was hard for her to find good moments opposite the towering performance of Oscar Isaac.

However... the final episode was utterly unsatisfying to me. The MCU often struggles to infuse their inevitable CG-on-CG action climaxes with emotional stakes, so that element here wasn't a particular disappointment. The abruptness with which everything just suddenly ended was. The conclusion feels like everyone just ran out of time, money, interest, something -- and simply decided to stop telling the story. Yes, it's another MCU trope to tease "what comes next," except in this case, there's nothing firm coming next. There's no word of whether Moon Knight will have a season two. There's no word if the character is moving on to the movies (which I think would actually annoy me, retroactively turning this whole thing into some sort of weird "prologue"). To be clear, I'm not suddenly miffed over a cliffhanger. This felt less like a cliffhanger and more like the book I was reading was missing the last 30 pages.

Indeed, the final episode of Moon Knight soured me enough that I'd have to rate the whole series a B. Which is a shame, because from just the first 5 episodes, I would have called it a B+ or even (owing to the inexhaustible charisma and skill of Oscar Isaac) an A-. I know, I know... it's supposed to be the destination, not the journey. I should have known that no matter how "square peg" Moon Knight felt to me along the way, it was eventually going to be forced into the "round hole" of its place in the MCU formula.

Though for all that, it was still pretty damn good...

Voyager Flashback: Real Life

From Spock to Data to Odo to the Emergency Medical Hologram, one of the most successful elements of Star Trek was to use an "outsider" character to explore and comment on the human condition. Episodes focusing on those characters could often pack a surprising emotional punch. Star Trek: Voyager's "Real Life" was an episode in that tradition.

The Doctor is using the holodeck to simulate a holographic family -- wife, son, and daughter. But when B'Elanna suggests he needs more realism in his simulation, he soon finds himself in situations far beyond his emotional experience. Meanwhile, Voyager encounters a unique and dangerous astral phenomenon from which the crew hopes to harness energy.

This episode asks a lot of a handful of people: Robert Picardo as the Doctor; guest stars Wendy Schaal, Glenn Harris, and Lindsey Haun, who portray his holographic family; and director Anson Williams. They all have only their half of a 42-minute episode with two plot lines to go from saccharine parody to emotional tearjerker -- and they pull it off. You'd expect the former star of Happy Days and the voice behind the mom on American Dad to have the lighter tone locked in, and of course they do. The early scenes with the "50s sitcom" take on the Doctor's family show us a funny, cloying, even hateable trio of automatons.

It's a pleasant surprise that the material works as it grows increasingly serious. The guest stars become just as natural as they were previously artificial (even if daughter Belle's meltdown at one point feels a touch young for her age). Son Jeffrey's rebellious foray into Klingon culture feels accurate, and is a fun misdirect for where the "danger" is really going to come from. And Belle's death hits us both in the heart and the head -- I found myself afterward thinking about how a death does bring some families closer together, while driving others apart.

Obviously, it's a tremendous episode for the Doctor. Early on, it's just fun to see him be a bit of a punching bag, in over his head and called out repeatedly for his strangely patriarchal attitudes. But as his emotions begin to spill over, we see that... well, he really has emotions (other than irritation). And he's "rewarded" when he honestly shares them with others, getting tender responses from his daughter and (in the episode's real "thesis" scene) Tom Paris. Part of me wishes the Doctor's growth here continued in future episodes featuring his holo-family, even as the larger part of me recognizes that a full story is brought to its conclusion here within this episode.

But there is another half to the episode here. There's a "B plot" that actually takes up almost as much screen time as the "A plot." It's pretty straightforward stuff for Trek in general and Voyager in particular: here's a weird space phenomenon, they need to harness it for resources, and it puts them in jeopardy. There's not much to praise about this half of the episode, other than the fact that the visual effects of the "astral eddies" actually look really great (without even allowing for them being decades old). At least the specific danger to Tom Paris dovetails a little with the Doctor's story. (And for once, they actually save the shuttle too!)

It is a low-key great episode for B'Elanna Torres. She's the instigator for changing the Doctor's family -- and it's fun to wonder how many of the "realistic elements" were truly random as we're told, versus specifically chosen by her. (Jeffrey's Klingon friends can't be a coincidence, right?) B'Elanna gets a nice flirtatious scene with Tom Paris; initially, it doesn't look great for Tom when he tears her smutty novel right out of her hands, but she plays back at him in a way that begins to sell me on their romantic pairing. (She gets a new hair style too, featuring a side braid. But it turns out that's only for this one episode.)

Other observations:

• Star Trek doesn't always do the greatest job when giving us "alien music." But the Klingon music Jeffrey listens to feels pretty on point. Good work from Dennis McCarthy.
  

• We've been hearing about Parrises Squares on Star Trek for years, and this episode finally pays off basically the one thing we know about it: it's dangerous. (That said, it feels like a bit of a stretch that a physical head injury would be beyond 24th century medicine.)

I'm a little torn on rating this episode. To me, it's clearly the best Voyager episode so far. It would have been better still without the common secondary plot... and yet it did need something, as I don't think the Doctor's family alone would have sustained the entire hour. I find myself likening it to the episode "In Theory" from The Next Generation. Both episodes feature an inexperienced character running a social behavior experiment on themselves; both episodes include a "ship in jeopardy" subplot that's clearly the weaker element. Because the space anomaly from "In Theory" also gave us the creepy-as-hell visual of getting stuck inside the floor, I'm going to give that episode the edge, and grade this relative to the A- I gave that. That means "Real Life" is a B+. But it's a solid Voyager episode.

Picard: Hide and Seek

As we approach the end of the second season of Star Trek: Picard with the penultimate episode "Hide and Seek," I feel the show has been taking a turn into Discovery's wheelhouse -- for all the good and bad that entails. The acting is great. The emotional arcs and destinations in the story are well considered and well delivered. And the particulars of the plot used to get there? Not so solid.

The Borg Queen has come for La Sirena, and our heroes must defend it lest she get a four century jump start on assimilating the galaxy. A battle on the grounds of Chateau Picard will force Jean-Luc to fully face the memory he's locked away, while a struggle inside Jurati's mind may be their only hope.

If you focus on just the emotional destination, the final revelation of Picard's past was excellent. Everything locks into place with remarkable clarity. Of course Jean-Luc wanted to leave home after the death of his mother. Of course his (still unseen) brother would carry resentment there. And yes, the writers paid attention to a scene from The Next Generation that actually showed Picard's mother as an old woman, then specifically wrote "in conversation" with that scene to lend it extra poignancy.

On the other hand... how Maman Picard meets her end is quite simply horrible. I can make peace with her dying of a mental illness; Star Trek is always showing us new "future diseases" beyond the reach of advancing medicine to cure. But what's unexplainable (and rather unforgivable) is that mental illness still apparently carries such a stigma in the future that families still don't seek help for their issues, and see locking a person away in a room as the only workable solution. The Next Generation had already established Picard's family as being a little technologically regressive. But this emotionally and intellectually regressive too? (And I think all we needed is a little clarity of timeline. Tell us explicitly that all this happened in one night, and that they were going to take her to get help first thing in the morning!)

Elsewhere in the episode? Well, let's just say it's gotta be hard writing for modern, serialized television. The tightrope you have to walk is so narrow. On the one hand, you seed episodes with appropriate markers of the plot to come, and risk giving everything away too early. On the other hand, you withhold information to preserve the surprise, and risk plot developments seeming unearned when they're revealed.

The Borg Queen / Jurati story was a case of the former. The relationship between those two has been a slow simmer all season. And the specific method by which the Queen "conquered" Jurati -- using her emotions to gain control -- clearly set up a two-way street by which Jurati could fight back later. The ultimate destination of this subplot has been clear all along, and all that remains now is for us to get back to the future next week and see that the mysteriously masked Borg Queen of episode one was Jurati all along. It all makes sense, but it's somewhat less satisfying since it was always there to anticipate.

I guess you have to find the satisfaction in how the themes all tie together... because it's absolutely no coincidence that in the same season that a major plot line was about creating a new Borg collective principled on accepting "your tired, your poor, your huddled masses," a major side plot was specifically about showing us how ICE treats immigrants. There's your classic Star Trek social commentary, and in case the message was too subtle: we're worse than the Borg. Or if you don't like that read, then just enjoy the clever visuals of laser gun sights appearing as Borg lasers.

On the other hand, hiding details in the hopes of generating surprise, we have a new mystery dropped at the last minute, with just one episode to go: one Renée is fated to live, and another to die. That was clearly only put on the table now specifically so we wouldn't think about it too long. Still -- I think they gave us an awfully big clue in happening to also mention in this episode that Seven was rejected from Starfleet after Voyager returned home, and that Raffi specifically found that to be a grave injustice. I predict that's all going to tie together... even if fleshing out the relationship between Seven and Raffi even more would have been very welcome earlier in the season than this.

But then, you did get the emotional satisfaction of Raffi finally saying everything she wished she'd said to Elnor to his hologram, at least. (And as for actor Evan Evagora -- when you don't have much to do all season, that's more time you get to spend rehearsing neat fight choreography!)

I liked a lot of the emotions and themes behind the story this week. I just didn't often feel like the ends justified the means. I'd give "Hide and Seek" a B-. We'll see if the finale revises my thinking on the season as a whole.

Free Advice

Most of the world -- or, at least, the internet -- is completely charmed by actor Ryan Reynolds. You can include me in that too, as I've seen my share of subpar movies over the years just because Reynolds is always enjoyable, independent of the quality of the film. With Free Guy, I didn't really need to be coaxed into watching: the story of a video game NPC who yearns for more in his cyberlife sounded fun on paper, with the casting just icing on the cake. Still, my interest was at a modest level, a "stream this later" kind of curiosity. And now, "later" has come to Disney+.

It's probably no great surprise that the two aspects that put Free Guy on my radar in the first place -- a clever premise and Ryan Reynolds -- were easily the two best things about the movie. It is a solid movie, and entertaining, but it also illuminates the difference between "smart" and "clever." A "smart" movie would probably give you more than you expect, maybe keep you guessing, or serve up an ending that satisfied on both an emotional an intellectual level. Free Guy doesn't really do any of that.

But it sure is "clever." Every joke about massively multiplayer games that you could think of (and plenty you couldn't) are in here. The story itself is built on the delightfully "meta" premise that Ryan Reynolds' NPC character isn't actually even the main character in what should be his own story. There's a solid cast, a playful use of visual effects, and any fat is trimmed away to keep this light story under two hours.

Still, the "try anything and see what sticks" attitude doesn't always serve the movie well. Some of the "real world" characters -- chiefly Taika Waititi's broad villain -- are as exaggerated and cartoonish as anything in the "game world," which I think undermines a lot of what makes the premise fun here. A fair amount of humor is "made for freeze framing," and while I resisted the urge to go joke-hunting that way, the fact that the background so regularly draws your focus kept me at times from fully engaging in the story.

However, the movie does basically give you exactly what it promises. The jokes are pretty funny. And (though you knew this) Ryan Reynolds is charming. So while Free Guy didn't exactly blow me away, I can't claim I was actually "disappointed" by it in any way. I'd give it a B. Maybe you, like me, didn't get around to it in a movie theater. If you haven't caught it yet, but it sounded at all interesting to you, it's probably worth your time.