Upon Closer Inspection

I have a pile of "backlogged" television shows and movies I'd like to watch, longer than I'll ever get through. And yet still, somehow, I'll find myself with a couple of hours to watch something and find that nothing sounds quite good. So I'll let somebody's algorithm guide me to a suggestion. (One example: I've found that Movielens.org has me pegged rather accurately.) That was how I came to watch a movie I'd never even heard of before, An Inspector Calls.

In 1912, a wealthy British family is hosting a dinner party to celebrate the engagement of their daughter. The merriment is interrupted by police inspector Goole, who arrives to question them about the suicide of a young woman. Each member of the family, it's revealed, had some connection to the poor woman, and may have contributed to her decision to take her own life.

Since I hadn't heard of An Inspector Calls before sitting down to watch it, I was unaware of its considerable pedigree. Originally, it was a stage play written in 1945 by J. B. Priestley. The play's critique of the "haves versus the have-nots" has maintained currency for decades, with theater companies worldwide staging versions. Filmed adaptations have been fairly common too, from a 1954 film to a 1982 mini-series to versions in other languages (such as a 2015 Hong Kong film).

From the synopsis I've read of the play, this version of An Inspector Calls that I found changes little -- only opening up the flashback structure of the tale to make the story more cinematic than a one-act play set in a single room. It feels like the right choice, because while the specifics of the story may be dated (it's set now over 100 years in the past), the themes remain topical. Put simply, it probably just felt like time to tell this story again, time to assemble a new cast to tell it.

And they assembled a very good one. The version I happened upon was a BBC television adaptation mounted in 2015, starring David Thewlis as the titular inspector. In the way of so many British casts, there are faces you'll recognize from all sorts of other places. Miranda Richardson is the one you'd most likely know by name, though you've possibly seen Ken Stott as Balin in The Hobbit films, Kyle Soller in Andor (or Bodies), Sophie Rundle in Peaky Blinders or Bodyguard)... the list keeps going.

The story is quite heightened, to the point of seeming artificial at times. You might well expect this of a period piece, and certainly could expect it knowing that it's based on a stage play. Still, I mention it since the performative whims of the characters did occasionally take me out of the moment. Plus, there's a final twist in the story that I personally didn't feel added much to the well-articulated central themes: we're all connected, and you never know what other people are going through. Then again, it may well be this final twist that lifted up the original play among so many written decades ago to keep in people's minds and hearts to today. I did enjoy the message overall, and again, I found the acting to be top-notch.

I give An Inspector Calls -- this version of it, at least -- a B. If you like a proper British "upstairs/downstairs" story, or the cast seems intriguing to you (or both!), you might consider it.

Enterprise Flashback: Singularity

One of the staple story archetypes of Star Trek is the "everyone on the crew starts acting strangely" story. Enterprise took at run at this with "Singularity."

When Enterprise explores a black hole in a trinary star system, the crew begins exhibiting unusually obsessive behavior. And when everyone but T'Pol is rendered unconscious, it falls on her alone to save the ship from destruction.

Forgive me starting with a diversion, but I want to talk about writer Ronald D. Moore. After starting his career on Star Trek, he went on to create several other television series, including the revival of Battlestar Galactica. During the original run of that series, he hosted a weekly podcast about each new episode, which I always made a point of listening to it after the show. His commentary was always shockingly frank, and I will always remember a bit of behind-the-scenes info he revealed about a particularly disliked episode. ("Black Market," if you're a BSG fan.) He admitted that it was a bad episode with little suspense, and he copped to trying to help it in the edit by stealing a scene from the climax to place in the opening teaser, followed by a "48 hours earlier" on-screen cut. It was a cheap trick, he admitted, but they had to do something to improve the slow pace of the first half of the episode.

Since then, I've been especially aware of television episodes that use that trick. Perhaps they're written that way, or perhaps they're edited that way after the fact (like "Black Market"). But I always find myself asking: is the opening section of this story legitimately interesting? Or have they tried to trick me into overlooking a few dull acts?

That question nagged at me as this episode of Enterprise opened with T'Pol alone on Enterprise, recording a desperate log entry... before then flashing back for a truly slow Act One. Hoshi Sato is taking over in the kitchen for the oft-talked-about-but-never-seen Chef. Archer is writing a foreword for a biography about his father. Travis Mayweather has a headache. Trip is tasked with fixing the captain's chair. Reed is going to do his job for once, looking into improved protocols for ship emergencies. None of this seems particularly engaging.

By Act Two, it's becoming clear that everyone is obsessed with these trivial activities. And they kind of have to be trivial activities for the audience to begin to suspect anything is wrong; the characters have so often been depicted as being bad at their jobs that the behavior has to be extreme for anything to seem amiss! 

I find the origin and spread of this contagion to be quite murky. When Chef fell ill, was he patient zero for it all, or was that an unrelated plot contrivance to give Hoshi something to do? Is T'Pol actually immune to the obsession contagion? She says she is -- but frankly, I don't believe her. She seems more irritable than usual with her human shipmates, and withdraws to her quarters to analyze stellar scans, an apparent manifestation of her own obsession. And her own logic seems quite compromised, when she chooses to awaken Archer to help her escape the black hole -- rather than Travis, or any other ship's pilot.

Whatever all these shortcomings total up to, though, I have to admit that the episode is pretty fun. It's the rare episode where everyone in the cast gets something to do, and that "something" involves them all getting to behave out of the ordinary. Reed's story line may exist only to justify an admittedly funny joke about inventing a "Reed Alert," but blessedly, at long last, we get to see him succeed at something. Archer's obsession is bad for poor Porthos, who skips a meal and sulks cutely for the camera. And you can always count on John Billingsley to deliver; Phlox's mad scientist obsession with curing Mayweather's headache makes an effective turn from goofy to harrowing.

There may be a few muddy plot points, but the dialogue is notably sharp. Trip gets most of the best lines, from his characterization of Reed's alert noises as "a bag full of cats" to his wicked retort when Archer accuses him of not knowing anything about writing. ("I'm not the only one!")

Other observations:

• When Archer mentions that you have to perch on the edge of the captain's chair rather than properly sit in it, I thought to myself: "yeah, I see T'Pol sitting in it that way all the time!" And then I thought: "I'll bet this is the show making a story point out of a real world production complaint." I was expecting that they'd use all this as an excuse to actually remodel the captain's chair. But no, in the end, nothing changes; we're told Trip lowers the chair one centimeter, but obviously that's not a real thing. (The change, not the concept of a centimeter.)

• Back in season one, one of the maybe two things we learned about Malcolm Reed is that he'll eat pretty much anything. So it's inconsistent here to have him be the character complaining to Hoshi Sato that her meal is too salty.

I feel like this episode lacks clarity on several important plot points. But it is fun to see the entire cast cut loose with strange behavior. It reminds me a bit of an early Deep Space Nine episode, "Dramatis Personae" -- though in a rare occurrence (perhaps even a unique one), I actually think the Enterprise episode is a touch better. I give "Singularity" a B-.

Here There Be Dragons

I was getting ready to write a review of the new board game Finspan -- a fish-themed spin-off of the popular Wingspan -- when I realized that I'm actually one spin-off behind! I never posted my thoughts on Wyrmspan.

Wyrmspan tweaks the core gameplay of Wingspan, the engine-building game about birds. It adds a fantasy theme (ever a popular choice), making the game about dragons instead of birds. Mechanically, it brings in the concept of "guilds," a track where players advance to earn rewards and compete to score points at the end of the game. It does away with Wingspan's dice, giving players more control over the food they gather, and thus more ability to engineer card combos. Add in a handful of other minor changes -- some merely cosmetic, others subtly nudging the nature of the gameplay -- and you have something clearly meant to be a slightly more advanced take on Wingspan.

I've got no problem with board game spin-offs. Maybe that's motivated thinking, given the board game company I work for. Still, the most subtle changes in a game can cause real ripple effects throughout its ecosystem. So when a designer or publisher actually changes things up with a spin-off, rather than just re-themes them, I'm open to treating it as a new experience. (To those who claim this sort of thing is just a "cash grab," my answer is simple: you can just not let your cash be grabbed.)

To me, Wyrmspan retains enough of the core of Wingspan that I don't find it massively better or worse than the original game. The fun still comes from the hundreds of cards (bird or dragon) that combine in new ways every time you play. Building an engine, then exploiting it, is still the core loop -- and I find that fun in either form.

But Wyrmspan has highlighted at least two things about my own gaming tastes. The first, I already knew: with each passing year, my tastes are drifting toward less complex experiences. I was never the kind of gamer eager to dive into a 4-hour game preceded by a 1-hour rules teach. I've always been the sort of gamer that would rather experience two different 2-hour games in that time. Except... it seems more and more like I'd actually rather fit three 90-or-so minute games in that time. (Or four 1-hours!)

The original Wingspan, it's important to note, doesn't actually feel like a "crossover" game. The super-accessible bird theme helped it rocket to the top of the hobby, helping it land in Target stores and on plenty of tables that otherwise host only the occasional Monopoly game. But it's easy to forget all that when experienced gamers pick up Wingspan so quickly: it's already a gamers' game. Try teaching it to non-gamers, and this is what you'll get.

All that is to say that, for me at least, I didn't necessary need a "more complex Wingspan" -- even an only incrementally more complex one. I don't mind Wyrmspan, because it is only incrementally harder to wrap your head around if you've experienced Wingspan. But Wingspan was scratching a particular itch just fine. The reason it had become less frequently played in my group has nothing to do with its complexity (or a perceived lack thereof).

The second thing Wyrmspan taught me is something I've recently begun to notice about my gaming habits, and something that's definitely changed over the years: theme matters. It used to be that when a game was being explained to me, I'd gloss right by the flavor of it. We're spreading civilization in ancient Greece? Trading artifacts at high-class auctions? Building castles in the European countryside? Whatever, what are we -- the players -- actually doing when we play this game? But increasingly, I've come across games where I feel that the theme does vastly improve the experience for me.

Without checking the rulebook for Wingspan, I'm not sure exactly what it's supposed to represent. Simple birdwatching? Some sort of conservation effort? I'm not sure, but I do know that I find playing birds (and reading little factoids about them on each card) to be inherently more interesting than playing made-up dragons with goofy, made-up names. If all the gameplay about Wingspan and Wyrmspan were exactly the same, I'd still prefer the birds of Wingspan to the dragons of Wyrmspan.

But ultimately, I think the two games feel something like 80-90% similar when you play them. They're different enough to each "justify their existence," and different enough that I think most gamers would have a preference between them. But they're both enjoyable. Suggest either on game night, and I'm likely to say yes. If Wingspan has settled around a B+ or A- in my view, Wyrmspan slots in at a B or B+.

Enterprise Flashback: The Communicator

The classic Star Trek episode "A Piece of the Action" ended a comedic story with one last goofy slide whistle of a joke: Dr. McCoy accidentally left his communicator behind on a mission to an alien planet. The prequel series Enterprise took up this exact baton, with a more dramatic approach, in the episode "The Communicator."

Returning from an undercover mission to observe a pre-warp society, Malcolm Reed realizes he accidentally left his communicator behind. When a new mission to retrieve it goes wrong, cultural contamination is just one problem in the mix; Archer and Reed's lives are endangered when they're taken prisoner by one local government who suspects them of being spies for another.

To get this story going, someone needed to leave a communicator behind on an alien planet. But did it really have to be Malcolm Reed? Screwing up again?! I can only conclude that not only did the writers of Enterprise know that Malcolm Reed was their most unlikable and incapable character, but they actually delighted in pushing the boundaries of just how insufferable they could make him.

Even setting aside season one, the first third of season two has already shown Reed being bad at shooting, unable to circumvent alien security, pessimistic to the degree where you'd think maybe he has a death wish, and not someone you'd think to bring along in pursuit of a fugitive. And all this failure without us even getting what I'd call a "Reed episode." Now, with "The Communicator," he sucks even at basic "opsec." (Like, not "invite a reporter to the group chat" bad... but this is fiction and thus has to maintain some degree of plausibility.)

When Archer and Reed go back for the communicator, the time for innocent accidents is over, and the bad decision making begins. They go back to search the tavern where they think the communicator went missing without any advance discussion of a cover story. They explore a clearly "employees only" back hall without even trying so much as a "just looking for the bathroom" excuse. They go in with a bunch more advanced technology that is promptly confiscated.

Fearing the consequences of cultural contamination, Reed and Archer decide that revealing themselves as aliens would somehow be worse than escalating a cold war into a hot one. They claim to be genetically modified super soldiers working for the other side, an unthinkably threatening technological leap for the local population. Only the prospect of becoming an alien autopsy pushes either of the two anywhere close to thinking rationally. (Not that they actually change their minds.)

It would be one thing if Archer and Reed were standing up for some ideal they've strongly identified with before now. But if anything, this is a total reversal of Archer's ideals as we've come to know them. The closest thing to his north star has been "if the Vulcans are for it, I'm against it." So this steadfast commitment to non-interference with alien cultures feels quite out of character for him. Am I glad to see Archer open to actual learning and growth? You bet! But nothing about this situation feels like it's been a "teachable moment" for him -- nothing that would suggest a conversion to the point where he's willing to lay down his life. (Reed, on the other hand, has demonstrated a willingness to die for pretty much any reason, at any time.)

We do at least get an action-packed rescue sequence. Trip, Mayweather, and T'Pol swoop in on a cloaked Suliban ship (even more cultural contamination). We get fun cloaking effects (including a running gag about Trip basically spilling cloaking juice on his arm). There's a huge shootout. Running, dodging, going back to scoop up any traces that might leave behind. The ride was ridiculous getting to this point, but it delivers on all the roller coaster thrills you could ask for.

Other observations:

• Fans of Shameless may clock actor Dennis Cockrum, Mickey Milkovich's dad, as the barkeep at the alien tavern.

• For my money, the antics surrounding Trip's disappearing -- and slowly reappearing -- arm provide the best moments of the episode. But they certainly undermine trying to treat an idea from "A Piece of the Action" seriously.

• ...though not as much as the silly moment near the end where Archer thinks he's now left something behind, only for Reed to find it dropped inside the shuttlepod.

Enterprise can do action better than any Star Trek series that came before, and does so again here. Still, the continued incompetence of the Enterprise crew -- and Malcolm Reed in particular -- is really starting to wear me down. I give "The Communicator" a C+.