Paradise Found

For six seasons, This Is Us wowed me with its unique blend of family drama and genre-style time-hopping. I enjoyed it so much that I mentally signed up in advance for whatever the series' creator, Dan Fogelman, did next. That turned out to be the Hulu drama-thriller Paradise.

Paradise centers on Secret Service agent Xavier Collins. As the story begins, it's clear he's had some kind of falling out with President of the United States Cal Bradford. But when Bradford is murdered, it's up to Collins to solve the case. The investigation involves all sorts of narrative hopping back and forth in time, as we slowly learn about the history of the two men... and, oh, big spoiler for the end of episode one: that this entire story is taking place in some hidden underground bunker, in the aftermath of a global apocalypse.

With this show, Dan Fogelman brought with him many of the people who worked behind the scenes on This Is Us. The transition totally works; they already had experience with twisty mysteries and dramatic tension, and now are bringing their skills to bear on an actual thriller. And like This Is Us, Paradise gives the impression that its storytellers know where it's all going, and aren't making things up as they go along.

But it isn't just the plot that drew me in; the cast also had a lot to do with it. Sterling K. Brown is a dynamic anchor for the show as Agent Collins; he's just as compelling when bottling his emotions up as he is when they show through. James Marsden is great as President Bradford, whose facade as a spoiled rich man-child is steadily eroded as we learn more about the character with each flashback. Julianne Nicholson perfectly takes the reverse journey as Sinatra, whose early impression of stern determination grows increasingly dark as the season unfolds. And I'm thrilled to see Krys Marshall as Agent Robinson; here's a role for her in a genre show that doesn't require her to endure hours of old-age makeup.

It's difficult to get into why I enjoyed Paradise so much without mentioning any of the big reveals that take place over the 9-episode first season. But fortunately, this is not one of those shows you have to try for a few episodes before you know you like it. Either episode one will hook you immediately, or Paradise isn't for you. It was for me, an A- overall, and a clear contender for my Top 10 shows of the year when it comes time for me to make that list.

Enterprise Flashback: Stigma

In early 2003, Paramount's parent company Viacom enacted an HIV awareness campaign. Though purportedly they did not directly ask their various TV series to produce "very special episodes" on the subject, Enterprise decided to do so. The result was the episode "Stigma."

T'Pol has contracted a disease from her recent mindmelding experience. When Phlox attempts to surreptitiously seek a cure from Vulcan doctors, two things happen. First, Phlox learns that Vulcans have no interest in curing the condition, as it is only transmitted by fringe, undesirable "melders" in the society. Second, when an influential Vulcan doctor learns that T'Pol has been infected, he takes steps to recall her from her post on Enterprise. Meanwhile, one of Phlox's wives visits him aboard Enterprise... and displays clear attraction to Trip.

I had a lot to say about Star Trek: The Next Generation's run at a "gay episode" -- but in short, I felt that producer Rick Berman really didn't seem to understand the topic being explored. Yet people can learn and change, and I will concede that in the 11 years between "The Outcast" and this Enterprise episode, it appears that Berman evolved a little in this area. At least, this episode he wrote with series co-creator Brannon Braga does seem like its heart is mostly in the right place.

The conception of "Pa'nar syndrome" as a Vulcan analog for HIV works, as does the President-Reagan-style contempt that Vulcan authorities have not for the condition, but for the people most likely to have it. T'Pol's role in the episode is inspirational and noble. She refuses to curry favor by revealing that she contracted the disease by being melded with against her will; she'd rather stand up to power, not condone prejudice, and not perpetuate a double standard. She also will not "out" a mindmelder she meets just to help her own cause. To all of this, I say: Good. For. Her. And her integrity spreads; for once, Archer doesn't seem whiny when he mounts his high horse to yell at some Vulcan.

Still, I'd say the episode could have pushed even farther. The villanous Vulcans of this story are straw men, and the episode doesn't engage at all with the question of how they could be this bigoted to begin with. Prejudice is motivated by emotion, not logic -- but there isn't even a veneer of logic offered. A Vulcan rationale is sitting right there, unvoiced in this episode: that "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the view." How powerful would it have been to have Spock's famous words co-opted to justify prejudice? And how much more strong does a hero look when they overcome a more vile villain? Still... it's not like I'm really too down on the episode for failing to present "both sides" of a one-sided issue.

The bigger shortcoming of the episode is in its ridiculous "B plot" about Phlox's wife pursuing Trip. Sometimes, a story needs light and comedic moments to relieve dramatic tension before ratcheting things up again. Sometimes, humor feels like an unwelcome distraction from serious matters. To me, this feels like a case of the latter.

It starts with the fact that the issue getting comedic treatment is polyamory. Enterprise simply can't avoid trying to be "sexy." They're not quite "making fun" of the idea of polyamory, since Phlox and his wife Feezal aren't looked down on by the script. And yet there's something a bit uncomfortable in the implication that the show can be serious about being gay, while polyamory is a big joke -- playing out in preposterously suggestive dialogue, Trip's attempt to use Hoshi as a shield against Feezal's advances, and seeing Phlox's trademark enthusiasm applied here to encouraging a hookup.

Trip's reaction isn't great, either. Of course, it's fine for the character to not personally want to engage in polyamory, but he's portrayed as incapable of conceiving how it would work for anyone. It clangs to pair such close-mindedness with the gay-coded A plot. And it's unfortunate that Trip has the Southern drawl of a "good ol' boy" you'd expect to have exactly this attitude. I'd rather they'd ditched the subplot entirely to spend more time on T'Pol's story... but if they were going to do this, I'd wager it would feel a bit less icky with literally any other character. (And I was just saying how the show has been overusing the character of Trip.)

Other observations:

• In a fun bit of Denobulan world building, Phlox and Feezal greet one another by wafting each other's scent into their face.

• CG of this era really falls short in rendering people, at any scale. A sweeping shot of a medical conference is undermined by the fake-looking, unnatural movement of the "people" attending it.

• Enterprise continues to objectify its cast members to titillate its audience. In his visit to Sickbay, Travis Mayweather flashes his abs. (Feezal totally could have been into him rather than Trip.)

The episode means well, and in the A plot at least is mostly well done. But I think it could have been a lot better if it had ditched the silly subplot. I give "Stigma" a B.

Shore Thing

My blog has been silent for a week due to a family emergency. I might write about that in detail some day, when the troubles have truly passed. (Or I might not.) But I've decided that I need some normalcy where I can find it, and this is one place. So I'm going to try to go back to business as usual here. Maybe even lighter than usual to kick things off, as I say a few words about a real confection of a television show: Shoresy.

Shoresy is a spin-off centered on the chirping hockey player from Letterkenny, as he relocates to lead a struggling triple-A team. In equal measure, his trash-talking antics and dedication to his team begin to turn things around.

I always enjoyed Letterkenny, even as I thought that its schtick (and the quality of the jokes) declined gradually in later seasons. But one aspect I never liked about that show was the character of Shoresy. When they wrote him out to set up this spin-off, I really thought "good riddance," and was pretty sure I'd never check out the second show.

And yet... I had a little kernel of curiosity about Shoresy that I just couldn't deny. How would a show all about that guy even work? Even setting aside the fact that his face was never shown on Letterkenny, but would be on Shoresy -- he was just such a one-note character that I kind of had to see how big a mess the spin-off would be. Well, it turns out that series creator, writer, and star Jared Keeso seems to have known that he couldn't just stick Shoresy in a new show without some changes -- and the changes really work. 

First, Shoresy is much more of a story-driven show. Letterkenny was something between a stand-up comedy act and a live-action cartoon... a show that used the bare minimum of story necessary to facilitate jokes and riffs. Shoresy actually employs season-long story arcs, has a message in most episodes, and actually wants you to care for the characters beyond their ability to make you laugh. It's not as consistently funny a show as a result... but with the jokes thinned out a bit, there's room to be more invested in what's going on.

You probably have to care at least a little about hockey for that, though. Where Letterkenny sometimes used the ice rink or the locker room as a setting for comedy, Shoresy has way more hockey action than you'd probably expect for something branded as a sitcom. It has even more "hockey culture," so it's likely you'll know within just an episode or two if the show is for you.

But one thing that might grab you in that episode or two is another good strength of the spin-off: the other characters. Jared Keeso may be writing the show for himself to star in, but it doesn't really come off like a "vanity project." In particular, I feel like the team's managerial staff (all women, in a much-appreciated subversion of expectations) and coach bring a lot of heart to a show -- more heart than I ever would have expected.

Shoresy is four six-episode seasons in and counting, and is in the midst of a reinvention of sorts. (It's also a show willing to mess with its formula more than Letterkenny ever was.) Shoresy isn't exactly "can't miss" television... but somehow it won me over, and I plan to be there when the next season arrives. I give it a B+.

Monkeying Around With the Biopic Genre?

Better Man was an unusual movie released late last year, with a quirky patchwork of reasons why it might appeal to me -- and not appeal to me.

On the cons list: it's yet another musician biopic, and could be expected to observe all the tired cliches of that genre. It's about a musician of no particular importance to me: Robbie Williams. Though Williams was part of Take That, a mega-successful boy band of early 1990s, that band's global domination weirdly skipped the United States -- where their single modest hit ("Back for Good") was an atypical ballad that did nothing to draw attention to the rest of their music.

On the pros side: Better Man is a musical, immediately lifting it from the morass of biopics into at least the Rocket Man kind of sub-category, a movie trying to do something a little different. It's directed by Michael Gracey, the director of The Greatest Showman, one of the more entertaining film musicals in recent memory, making it more likely this movie would be a fun and boisterous affair.

Then there's the "I don't know what to make of this" element of the movie: the lead character is a walking-talking-singing-dancing chimpanzee. A CG-rendered, anthropomorphic, "Planet of the Apes" style monkey man. And the only way that this will be acknowledged by any character at any point in the movie is when the narrator (actual Robbie Williams) cheekily notes that he's often felt "less evolved" than the other people around him.

Having now watched Better Man, I must admit: they fooled me. They added enough quirky elements to this movie to make me believe it would be something different. But they tricked me into watching something pretty much the same as everything else.

They really didn't make anything out of the CG-ape-ness of it all. I suppose it added spectacle, since the degree of difficulty here for believably adding a CG character to a real-world setting is as high as it could be. But you could argue it detracts from the movie more than it brings. To fully appreciate it, you have to let yourself be taken out of the narrative to simply watch the technical achievement. Even then, you can still take the technical achievement for granted; after all, this was just one of three movies featuring anthropomorphic apes that was nominated for the most recent Best Visual Effects Oscar. (The other two being the newest Planet of the Apes movie, and the flying monkeys of Wicked.)

With the story not actually altered by its main character's simian nature, the next fallback position to find something different here is the musical elements. Here, at least, Better Man serves up flashes of brilliance. A handful of sequences fully embrace the artifice of musical theater, and director Michael Gracey makes the most of it being a film musical. The pinnacle is the "Rock DJ" sequence, a preposterously elaborate dance number presented as a single camera take, whizzing through multiple settings and costume changes as it builds to feature a literal cast of thousands. It's the kind of thing I was hoping for out of the whole movie. (And on its own, was good enough to make me decide to blog about this movie in the first place.)

Unfortunately, too many of the movie's songs are actual performances, where characters are singing diegetically on stage. All these moments lack the ambition and scope of the fantasy sequences. If you were to strip this "musical" down to just the non-realistic numbers, you can count the songs on one hand. And so you're left with a movie that has two wild baked-in premises -- it's a musical, and it stars an ape -- that only half engages with one of those premises. Otherwise, it trucks in all the tropes about struggle and success, rising and falling and rising again, that makes every biopic look like every other biopic.

And yet... I found a collective, say, 20 minutes of this movie to be kind of fantastic: huge, escapist, exciting, and bubbly. So much so that even though the remaining almost-two-hours of the movie left me cold, I'd pencil it out to a C overall. And I could imagine the ways in which other people might love the movie without reservation. Maybe you love the biopic genre in a way I don't. Maybe the visual amazement of the effects is enough for you, regardless of the story. Maybe you're a huge Take That or Robbie Williams fan, or at least know more than one of their songs (that isn't even in the movie). If any of those describes you, you might really enjoy Better Man.

And if it doesn't, maybe take three-and-a-half minutes and go enjoy the best sequence in the entire movie.

Enterprise Flashback: Dawn

I haven't seen the movie Enemy Mine in decades. I have the impression that while it may be unknown by the broader population, the average sci-fi fan absolutely knows this story about a human and alien marooned on a planet together, learning to set aside their differences as they struggle to survive. Or maybe I'm just a "child of the 80s" who thinks my pop culture is everyone's pop culture. Either way, I know I immediately clock when I see some other sci-fi franchise "doing Enemy Mine." Which exactly what Enterprise did with the episode "Dawn."

An alien craft shoots down Trip's shuttlepod, crash-landing with him on a barren moon. As Enterprise struggles to locate their missing officer amid the dozens of moons in a gas giant system, Trip must convince the alien pilot to work with him so that both can be rescued before the sun rises and the intense heat kills them both.

"Dawn" isn't the first time Star Trek has "done Enemy Mine." Arguably, they did it twice on The Next Generation, and expertly both times; the more pure version paired Geordi with a Romulan in "The Enemy," while the twist on the formula was one of the series' (hell, franchise's) best episodes ever, "Darmok." Unfortunately, I don't think the third time was the charm when Enterprise took a run at it.

Part of the problem is that the "journey to acceptance between rivals" is more compelling if that journey is longer and harder. "The Enemy" was a struggle because Romulans have long been hostile adversaries on Star Trek. "Darmok" was a struggle because of the extremity of the communications barrier between Captain Picard and the alien captain. "Dawn" features new aliens we've never met, who fairly quickly tell Archer that shooting down their shuttle was probably a regrettable overreaction. And while Trip indeed cannot understand the alien's language, pantomime and threats seem to facilitate communications between them easily enough.

I think another reason this episode feels weaker is because it's centered on Trip. I don't have anything against Connor Trinneer, but not only has his character featured in a lot more episodes than the other characters, many of them have been episodes like this -- Trip in life-threatening jeopardy. This episode even has to bend over backwards at the beginning to explain why Trip is piloting a shuttle alone and not Travis; why not just let another character have a turn centering an episode? Choosing Trip as the main character makes this premise, which already feels like a bit of a rerun, feel even more like one.

What does help distinguish the episode, though, is the performance of guest star Gregg Henry as the alien pilot Zho'Kaan. Henry is one of those working actors you've almost certainly seen somewhere else, though he's unrecognizable here under reptilian makeup. He really works well with it. We probably can't know how many of the character's ticks and behaviors were scripted, Henry's idea, or suggestions from director Roxann Dawson, but they effectively convey an alien: an odd twitch of the head taking the place of a nod, strange hissing sounds in place of laughter, and more.

The production values of the episode are quite good, as usual for Enterprise. One thing that's hard to make look top-notch on a TV budget, though, is the mountain climbing sequences near the end. (Both the CG and the set fall a little short of believable.)

The writing is also usual for Enterprise, littered with various plot holes that collectively bring down the whole. After it's established that the alien's water is toxic to the humans, it's quite fortuitous that his ability to spit on a wound to heal it is not similarly incompatible with another species. Later, Zho'Kaan spits in Trip's eyes to stun him; is that a different kind of secretion, or should Trip's eyes "heal over?" If it's hot enough on this moon for Trip's communications device to stop working, surely it's hot enough to also kill him outright. If using the transporter on the weakened alien would be fatal, why not at least beam down supplies to help him and Trip survive? And why does Archer for one moment entertain Trip's request to just stay on the planet to die with the alien? Why does Zho'Kaan end up in Phlox's care, when it's the alien shuttle that picks up him and Trip, and they clearly would be better able to tend to one of their own than Phlox?

Other observations:

• Trip gets awfully lucky with Zho'Kaan's "tripwire." Twice. Once, Trip slips and kicks up dust, revealing the sensor right before he crosses it. Later, the alien is in such a rush to return to his camp that he sets off his own tripwire accidentally.

• Finally, our heroes are "learning how to Star Trek" a bit more effectively. I like T'Pol's acknowledgement that humans did better relating to this alien race in one day than Vulcans did in a century.

"Dawn" isn't a bad episode, but it suffers from some weak spots in the storytelling, and from that storytelling overall being rather derivative to begin with. I give it a B-.

Let's Have a Ward

I enjoy reading fantasy -- but right at the moment, the various authors I've been reading are played out. I'm looking for a break from their work, or I'm waiting (along with everyone else) for the next book in their unfinished series. So I recently decided to try something and someone different: book one of the Demon Cycle, by Peter V. Brett.

The Warded Man is set in a world where each night, demonic creatures arise from some other plane of existence to menace humanity. While they can be held at bay using a complex language of written characters called "wards," very few have the knowledge to draw them effectively. This book tracks three separate stories of young children growing into adulthood in this world. Arlen, disgusted when his father's weakness costs his mother's life, sets out to learn all he can about warding. Leesha, an outcast among her village, finds purpose when she becomes apprentice to the wise local healer. Rojer, who loses both his parents at a very young age, falls in with a traveling entertainer and learns the trade. Years later, all three find that their fates are intertwined.

I really went on a journey with this book. At first, I was very much into it. Brett's writing is much less dense than most high fantasy, in an appealing way. Every night that I read The Warded Man, I could see myself making progress through a book of uncommonly reasonable length. And yet it didn't feel like any world-building had been sacrificed to reach a lower word count. I found this realm of wards and demons to be interesting.

I also appreciated that even though the three characters were all young -- two start early in their teens, and one is younger still -- these children weren't written conventionally as children. They weren't always making impulsive decisions just to speed the plot, and they were credibly aged by the weight of their difficult experiences. They weren't behaving childishly. I was into each of their story lines, even if I was wishing that the inevitable uniting of the three would come sooner. (But it's a five book series, I knew. So I figured that the three characters meeting up wasn't even something destined to happen in this first book.)

But somewhere around the two-thirds point of the book, Brett made what I found to be a massively distasteful choice with the narrative. Both a spoiler and trigger warning -- Leesha is raped. A book club could debate whether this was a necessary turning point for the character, sufficiently earned by the setup that had come before. But I just found myself gut-punched, confused about why Brett felt we had to go there.

And suddenly, I was looking in retrospect at the book so far and realizing this wasn't a one-off decision: it was just the most impossible-to-miss sign of a story not just male-centric (as fantasy often is), but to a great extent anti-women. How had the stories for the other two main characters gotten started? Why, with the deaths of their mothers! (Sure, okay, one also lost his father, but still....) And what of the other female characters in the story? We'd met a loving wife, lovingly devoted to an often-absent husband, who takes one of the main characters under her wing as a "project." There was a fleeting love interest who only stood in the way of what one of the main characters really wanted. I suppose there was one stronger female character in Leesha's mentor, the village healer -- but it seemed as though others respected her only because she was useful, and her power came at a cost of withdrawing totally from society.

I was having a real eye-opening, glass-shattering moment with this book. I'd quite liked it so far, and had already been making plans to continue with the series. (Maybe even without reading something else in between books! Quite unlike me.) I had been enjoying it so much that I confess I didn't even seriously consider just stopping at that point. Still, what followed just wasn't the same for me. The three characters did unite, had their heroic adventure bonding them together, and things were put in place for their story to continue.

Yet the damage had been done. Here was an author who could imagine demons emerging from the ground every night... but who could seemingly imagine only misery and misogyny for any of his female characters.

And now I have a choice to make. Well -- two, I suppose; the first being, what do I rate this book? It was on its way to earning an enthusiastic A in my eyes until I suddenly reevaluated it and saw all the flaws. Does that average out to a B? Or does it drag the whole thing down to something much, much lower?

The other choice is whether to continue the series. I was really enjoying the book. Do I take the chance that this was just an unfortunate series of choices made in setting up the larger story? That if I continue, the assembled team of three will have adventures together that won't feel so... icky? I decided to blog about The Warded Man in large part to see if any of my readers have read the series, and have any thoughts on what follows.

But then, there are so many fantasy books out there to read. Maybe it's best to just cut my losses here and try one of those.

Enterprise Flashback: The Catwalk

Usually, when a Star Trek episode takes place almost entirely aboard the ship, it's a "bottle episode" designed to save money by using existing sets. That's decidedly not the case with Enterprise's episode 'The Catwalk."

Aliens bring news of an approaching interstellar storm with deadly radiation. They and the Enterprise crew take shelter inside the ship's shielded engine nacelle. But sharing the cramped space is the least of their problems; soon, aliens who are immune to the radiation board Enterprise and seek to commandeer it.

This episode starts with a novel premise, a clever sci-fi take on huddling together to ride out a storm. And the production team spends the money to really do the concept justice. There are great CG shots of the ship drifting through the chaotic storm. There are dozens of background actors brought in to really sell the idea that the entire crew is cooped up in a tight space. (Including one person who plays the oft-talked-about "Chef" -- though we only see them from the neck down.) And then there's the brand new set where most of the action takes place, the titular catwalk inside the nacelle. It's a large and quite thorough space. (It even has a ceiling!)

There are several nice little character moments, from poker games to crossword puzzles, claustrophobia to motion sickness, stories of camping and similar space hazards. But the show doesn't have the courage to tell a story just about struggling to live for a week in a cramped space -- perhaps because that might be a bit to close to the first season's survival tale, "Shuttlepod One." So we get the invasion twist late in the episode, and from there things start to feel a little bit like "Die Hard on a spaceship." To differentiate it from The Next Generation's version of that very thing, people take turns as the John McClane character (since humans can only survive a few minutes of the radiation).

My issue with the episode isn't so much the late shift to a new story, though -- it's the many, many plot holes along the way. Any one of them taken alone could probably be overlooked, but taken in totality, they really bring the episode down:

• At the beginning of the episode, they're about to explore a planet. Can they not hide there for shelter from the storm? Even the aliens who board Enterprise make that assumption, that the crew abandoned ship for some other refuge.

• We're told that Sickbay would be shielded from radiation; the problem is that it isn't big enough for the whole crew. So why is Phlox relocating his entire menagerie to the nacelle? Couldn't he stay in Sickbay and tend to his critters?

• The interstellar storm looks decidedly flat when we see it approaching. Could the Enterprise not fly over it?

• T'Pol specifically estimates they'll be inside the storm for eight days, then Archer turns around and tells his crew they might be inside it for a week, maybe more. Why withhold details telling them exactly what to prepare for?

• When the alien boarding party reaches the bridge, they can tell that navigation has been rerouted somewhere else... yet apparently have no interest in investigating to where.

• Archer deliberately lets the aliens know he's on board, for seemingly no other reason that to tell them he's putting the ship on auto-destruct. Surely automated announcements from the ship's computer could have delivered that information.

And after that bonus helping of bullet points, let me proceed with my usual "other observations":

• Talk about setting up a latrine in the nacelle gives us one of the rare references to a bathroom on Star Trek.

• This episode is littered with actors who have appeared before on one Star Trek or another. But to me, the biggest "that guy" in the cast is Zach Grenier, who later went on to play a parade of weaselly characters on all sorts of TV shows (including Devs and The Good Fight).

• The abundance of cute shots of Porthos in this episode confirms it for me -- he's my favorite character on this series.

• I know that wireless headphones and ear buds and the like are an invention more modern than this episode of Star Trek. Still, headphones as a concept did exist at the time, obviously. Which makes Archer's decision to watch his water polo matches with the sound turned up, bothering T'Pol and anyone else in earshot, especially rude.

• It's like a rule that any poker game depicted in TV and film will feature illegal string raising. I'm just saying, if you're ever at a table in a casino, you'll try "I see your bet... and raise you..." exactly one time before you learn: that shit don't fly.

• One of the non-speaking security officers in this episode looks like he's maybe 17 years old.

It might be that the demands of this story -- a new set and tons of background actors -- meant that the script somehow needed to be locked down faster than usual? That's the only explanation I've got for how such an interesting story was so riddled with plot holes. I give "The Catwalk" a B-.

Yacht To Go

There's a certain brand of soft rock from the late 70s and early 80s that's become infamous. It kinda rocks... but certainly not too hard. It's music cool enough that other artists came around decades later to sample its grooves... even as many modern music listeners won't even admit to liking it. Today, it's called "Yacht Rock" -- though it wasn't known that way at the time.

The birth, growth, and decline of this subgenre, along with how its moniker came to stick, is the subject of Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary, now streaming on Max. Whether you like the music ironically or genuinely, have laughed at the term or have never heard of it, were alive when the music was new or not even born until after the name "Yacht Rock" was coined -- I think you'd enjoy this short film. I watched it on a bit of a lark, and found it deeply fascinating.

The documentary begins with the creation of the 2005 web series Yacht Rock. Before the creation of YouTube, a bunch of comedians got together to dramatize (melodramatically) a fever dream soap opera explaining how so much "smooth music" of the 70s and 80s came to share the same sound: jazzy chords pushed through a pop Play-Doh Fun Factory.

As this new film interviews people involved with the making of the web series, what quickly becomes clear is that however pejorative the term Yacht Rock might sound, they actually had only reverence for the music. They explain in great detail how Steely Dan was the wellspring from which this type of music swallowed the entire L.A. music scene. As is often the case with influential pop music, superior musicians were mining traditionally black music history to bring something more sophisticated to the scene. In this case, they did it with such affection, authenticity, and success that soon black artists like George Benson and The Pointer Sisters were closing the loop.

As the documentary goes in deeper, from how "Yacht Rock" as a name was coined to a detailed analysis of the music itself, it begins interviewing the real titans of the genre. Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross, and members of Toto all appear -- and their interviews are actually fantastic. No doubt 40 years of distance from the peak of their fame has helped them find perspective, but they're all quite sanguine about their place in music history. Generally, the message is "we were making music we loved, we think it's still good music, and that's enough." Though it's also entertaining when, for example, Kenny Loggins admits that the song he expected to crap out for his sophomore slump also became a Grammy-winning mega-hit.

This truly engaging music history class covers a variety of topics, including a fun look at what isn't Yacht Rock. (Hall and Oates and Fleetwood Mac, for example.) But it's the end of the story that I found most compelling. It's no surprise that "Video Killed the Radio Star" -- the arrival of New Wave and Synth Pop, coupled with the rise of MTV, ended the dominance of what is now known as Yacht Rock. But the fatal blow from Michael Jackson's Thriller is an especially ironic conclusion to it all. As the documentary notes, most of the members of Toto actually sat in as session musicians on that mega-hit album. And one of its (many) hit singles, Human Nature, was actually written by a founding member of Toto. (And it sure sounds like Yacht Rock!) One of the biggest bands of the genre was pivotal in the genre's demise!

I was surprised at how thoroughly I enjoyed this random documentary I watched on a bit of a lark. I give Yacht Rock: A DOCKumentary a B+. It's a fun little retro escape set to fun, retro music.

The White Stuff

The White Lotus made a huge pop culture splash when it first arrived in 2021. One year later, the second season was even more talked-about. I wasn't watching it at the time; however, when word arrived that the strike-delayed third season was going to be arriving in early 2025, it seemed like it was time to catch up. If I liked the show at all, I'd best be there in real time as the internet gossiped about and memed a new season.

In the unlikely event you don't know: The White Lotus began as a one-off mini-series. Set at a fancy resort in Hawaii, six episodes tracked a much-put-upon resort staff catering to the whims of a variety of ill-behaved rich guests. While an "upstairs, downstairs" examination of class permeated every episode, the lines weren't always clearly drawn: some characters in the orbit of the rich guests deserved audience sympathy, and some of the hotel employees were as messed up and self-centered as the guests.

The show was such a hit that it grew from a one-off into more of an anthology series. Some tendrils of connection persist between the seasons, but essentially each new season moves to a new resort somewhere else in the world, with a new cast of characters and new morals and themes. This has allowed the show to attract a wide variety of actors who might otherwise not have the time or desire to tie themselves to a television series (or, in some cases, another one) -- but they're all in for a few months away in some paradise destination, filming something that's part scathing critique, part sugary confection.

The White Lotus is the brainchild of Mike White, who writes and directs every episode, exerting a degree of creative control rarely seen in television. This can have its advantages, particularly if you're into the vibe he's putting out. But the lack of other creative voices in the mix does occasionally poke through. In the writing, its clear White is more interested in some of his siloed storylines than others, and there are always a couple of characters whose stories get short shrift. And very recently, series composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer had a very public falling out with White, saying he would not be back for future seasons; yet his exceedingly odd score -- full of warbling vocals, weird gasping for breath, and other strange noises -- is absolutely integral to the show being what it is.

No matter what goes on behind the scenes, though, the most integral element of The White Lotus will always be the cast. Every season has featured at least one powerhouse performance. Jennifer Coolidge has deserved the two Emmys she's won for the show, and if there's any justice, Parker Posey will get one for the just-completed season. We've seen indelible characters -- some likeable, many detestable -- from the likes of Murray Bartlett, Molly Shannon, F. Murray Abraham, Aubrey Plaza, Walton Goggins, and Jason Isaacs. And that's just my short list; someone else could easily have another that might include Connie Britton, Michael Imperioli, Carrie Coon, Patrick Schwarzenegger, and others.

Hitting the reset button each season on story and setting means that characters and storylines don't play out past their prime. That in turn means there isn't really a "good" or "bad" season of The White Lotus. If pressed to rank them, I suppose I'd say season 2 was my favorite, followed by season 3, and finally season 1 -- this on the basis of how many of the numerous characters in each season have their storylines resolved most completely. But I'd also say that I'm probably just ranking seasons that are all a B+ in my mind, as ]I'd rate the show as a whole. (Obviously. Math.)

The hype may be a little over the top, but it is real. Watching a group of people mostly behaving badly might not be for everyone. But if the fact that many get a come-uppance means it might be for you, consider checking out The White Lotus.

Enterprise Flashback: Precious Cargo

There have been moments throughout the first two seasons of Enterprise that have made me question the taste of series creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. But it does seem that Braga at least was capable of knowing "bad" when he saw it. Because in an interview a decade after the episode "Precious Cargo" first aired, he called it one of the worst episodes of Star Trek ever.

Trip boards an alien freighter to assist in repairs, and there discovers a woman being held in stasis. When he revives her, the aliens react by running from Enterprise, leaving Trip and the woman, a monarch named Kaitaama, to fend for themselves. They flee in an escape pod, but bicker constantly as they struggle to survive and signal for rescue.

"Spoiled princess" butting heads with "crass rogue" is such an old trope of film and television that I don't think there's an unexplored way left to tell the story. All you can do is hope to catch lightning in a bottle with casting. But even that feels like a long shot when you're competing against the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher, Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, etc. etc.

Needless to say, it's unsurprising that Connor Trinneer would little chance of finding such chemistry with a random guest star in a one-off episode of Enterprise. But that little chance was destroyed with the casting of model-turned-actress Padma Lakshmi, whose performance here is so wooden that it doesn't even rise to the level of parody. Though it's not entirely her fault; the script isn't doing her any favors. "Precious Cargo" plays like Spaceballs, without the jokes.

Actually, it plays a lot like Spaceballs, with Kaitaama complaining constantly like Princess Vespa about the conditions of her rescue. Instead of losing her "matched luggage," Kaitaama must sacrifice her fancy dress when Trip tears it into a mini-skirt. (Of course he does.) Instead of complaining about escaping in a Winnebago, she and Trip share one cramped escape pod, crawling all over each other. Nothing is as fun as it should be. Once they crash on a planet together, it's every bit as stupid as it sounds when Kaitaama orders Trip out of his clothes, accidentally tumbles into a bog with him, and the two just decide "we might as well have sexy times while we're here."

As terrible as all this is, the episode manages not to be a complete loss thanks to a few fun scenes involving Archer and T'Pol. When the alien freighter escapes early on, one of the aliens is left behind as a prisoner aboard Enterprise. The efforts to coerce this guy into revealing information are the kind of fun the rest of the episode should be. They decide to position T'Pol up as a merciless judge, jury, and executioner in an invented Vulcan tribunal -- and if you overlook that T'Pol probably shouldn't go along so easily with such subterfuge, her cool menace (and Archer's staged fear of her) do generate the smiles this episode desperately needed -- in a few too-brief moments.

Other observations:

• When the alien freighter somehow escapes, even after allegedly being hit by a phase cannon shot, it's just the latest in a long string of incompetence by Malcolm Reed.

• The alien provisions found in the escape pod are obviously just a CamelBak and some beef jerky.

This episode is painfully dumb. I found it worse than the worst episodes of Deep Space Nine and Voyager. But since I'd have to admit that The Next Generation occasionally had even worse episodes than this, I suppose I'll give "Precious Cargo" a D+.

Spirits! Speak to Us!

One of the more crowded genres in board gaming is the "large group word game." Or perhaps it just seems like a crowded genre to me because there are a lot of great games in it -- games like Codenames, Decrypto, Just One, So Clover, and more. Now I've discovered another game to add to that list, Phantom Ink.

Players split into two teams, each team designating one person as their "Spirit." The other players on each team are the "Mediums." The two Spirits are given the same secret word, some object that each is trying to communicate "from the spirit world" to their Mediums before the other team can guess.

The Mediums on each team work with a hand of question cards -- each card an unusual way of getting information about the secret object. "What fictional character would be most likely to use it?" "What would happen to it if you buried it for a year?" "What is another object of similar size?" "In what room of the house would you most likely encounter it?" Each round, the Mediums of one team select two questions to pass to their Spirit. The Spirit discard one and then answers the other.

How the questions are answered is to me the most fun part of the game. The Spirit thinks of their answer -- a single word, or even a phrase -- and then begins writing out that answer one letter at a time. All players see the answer as the Spirit writes it out letter by letter... but only the Mediums on the one team knows exactly what the question was. To avoid giving away too much information to the other team, the Mediums can call "Silencio!" at any time to make the Spirit stop writing the rest of their answer. Perhaps they can stop the clue at a point where they know the rest of what will be written, but think the other team can't guess. Or perhaps they only think they know what the Spirit was trying to write.

When it's one team's turn to get an answer from their Spirit, they can instead try to guess the secret word. The Mediums seize the pencil and they begin writing out their guess one letter at a time. With each correct letter, the Spirit knocks the table in confirmation. If the Spirit falls silent, the guess is wrong, and the Mediums have forfeited their turn. Back and forth the teams alternate (with a few other small rules quirks I've omitted) until one team guesses the word.

I kicked off this post with a list of great word guessing games. I've played them all -- and thoroughly enjoyed them -- many times. But what Phantom Ink has that those other games don't is a wonderfully appropriate theme. Codenames is nominally about spies arranging covert meetings and passing messages to each other. Decrypto is nominally about slipping hidden spyware past rival programmers. So Clover has four-leaf-clover-shaped player boards, but nothing else thematic. And Just One doesn't bother with theme at all. To me, the experience of playing any of those games is essentially a "flavorless" one. You and your friends are just playing with words -- though you are having enough fun, in my experience, that no greater theme is necessary.

With Phantom Ink, designers Mary Flanagan and Max Seidman have demonstrated that flavor can matter in one of these games -- being inextricably linked to the gameplay, and adding to the fun of playing it. When I've explained the "seance" premise of the game to new players, I've more than once been met with knowing nods as players realize how "spirit writing" will play a role in the game -- and wide grins when they learn that the Spirits will knock in reply to their guesses. Phantom Ink simply cannot be a game where the theme was added after the fact; the idea of spirit communication clearly inspired the whole thing. And it led to gameplay that's distinct from those many other word games.

Is this a "killer" for any of those other games? Probably not. They all have their niche, after all. So Clover does a good job letting everyone give clues without any one person feeling "on the spot." Just One offers simultaneous play for every player. Decrypto is considerably more complicated than the rest -- a plus for some groups, and a minus for others. And Codenames is, simply, the granddaddy of them all that you'll find in more stores than any other.

Yet at the same time, I've played a ton of all those those other games -- so much that they've all lost their luster (just a little bit) over time. I'm still happy to play any of them. But I'm perhaps even happier to have something shiny and new in the mix too. I've enjoyed Phantom Ink, am interested in its standalone expansion (Phantom Ink: Arcana), and I look forward to overplaying it just like all those others. I give it a B+.

Enterprise Flashback: Vanishing Point

By the time Enterprise began, more than 600 episodes of Star Trek had already been made. So by that point, you could reasonably expect that some new episodes wouldn't feel wholly original; some would revisit ideas from earlier Star Treks, hopefully with a distinct twist. I don't mind this in theory... but it's harder to take in practice when an all-time great episode is being repackaged. That's what I felt was going on with Enterprise's "Vanishing Point."

Hoshi Sato and Trip Tucker are on an an away mission when a violent storm rolls in so suddenly that beaming back to Enterprise is the only escape. But once back aboard the ship, Hoshi is increasingly convinced that the transporter didn't put her back together correctly. What at first appears to be her own doubts suddenly becomes all too serious when Hoshi becomes incorporeal. She wanders the ship, desperate to find help -- but no one is able to see her.

It seems likely that when Rick Berman and Brannon Braga wrote this script, the past Star Trek episode they were thinking about was The Next Generation's "Realm of Fear." (In fact, Brannon Braga was the credited writer on that episode about Barclay's transporter phobia.) I do wish that for this new episode, phobia of some other technology might have been explored, just for variety's sake. Yet it's not like "Realm of Fear" invented transporter anxiety. (McCoy was complaining about it decades earlier.) Nor did "Realm of Fear" seem like a definitive take on the subject. (For one thing, plenty of people hated Barclay as a character.)

For a time, "Vanishing Point" does seem like it's doing something reasonably different. "I saw something in the transporter" isn't the same as "the transporter messed me up." Hoshi's fears are far more personal, and the episode does a decent job conveying them. And in the beginning, when it seems more like it might really all be in her head, it seems to me like enough for an interesting story. She just can't shake it. Her nerves are met with a cheeky ghost story and weird exchanges with people that seem to underscore her doubts. Even little things are unnerving -- has her birthmark moved?

But then it turns out that something really is happening to Hoshi. And that thing was already covered in "The Next Phase." That episode is one of The Next Generation's best, and already did everything that "Vanishing Point" tries to do. Someone has been rendered invisible by a transporter accident. They're presumed dead by a crew that's oblivious to a serious danger that only the transporter victim is aware of. "The Next Phase" covered all that, and even did a better job examining the existential crisis of it all, by involving two people in the accident, and having one of them -- Ensign Ro -- believe she's reached the afterlife.

The twist here that seems meant to differentiate this story from "The Next Phase" isn't exactly a good one: it turns out that "it's all a dream" in Hoshi's head. And sure, even that trope can be used with amazing results. But "Vanishing Point" shows its cards far too early, completely undermining the stakes. Something already seems off when Hoshi Sato misses her shift and T'Pol waits three hours to call and wake her up.  Travis and Trip's alleged capture by aliens would surely have been depicted on screen if it were real. Even as lurid as Enterprise can be, there's no way the show would cut away from an actual crisis to instead show Hoshi taking a shower.

And even by Enterprise standards, which often shows its characters fumbling because they're in a prequel and "learning how to do Star Trek," Archer seems especially awkward here. When he tries to inform Hoshi's dad of his daughter's "death," he doesn't even manage to actually get out the words to say what happened. In the same scene, he recognizes Morse code for SOS, but then decides to just dismiss it! I suppose this is Hoshi's hallucination; so maybe this is just what she thinks about her captain?

Although that doesn't explain why Malcolm Reed -- the tactical officer -- is actually operating the transporter when this whole thing happens to Hoshi in the first place. Given his track record, I think he'd be about the last person I'd want beaming me up.

Other observations:

• As always, John Billingsley nails his few moments on screen. When he tells Hoshi her secret is safe as though "he never saw her," he puts just the right spin on the joke.

• I'm not quite sure I believe in "giant gyroscope" as a piece of workout equipment, but Connor Trinneer tries his best to sell it.

• Of course, when you start to pick apart the "Next Phase" premise, you wind up asking how the phased-out characters don't fall through the floor. This episode really puts that in your face, though, when non-corporeal Hoshi sits on a table in Sickbay.

• Because it's Enterprise, right before Hoshi vanishes completely, she strips down to a tank top, so she can spend the rest of the episode showing her midriff.

"Vanishing Point" is trying to remix some Star Trek ingredients in a new recipe. But it's up against the signature dish from a three-star Michelin restaurant. I give it a B-.

Passing the Savings on to You

These days, when a movie is released in the theaters, you might have 2 weeks to get to it before it's unceremoniously yanked. Even blockbusters can get steamrolled when the next blockbuster comes out.

Movies released directly to a streaming service can have even less fanfare; you may not even hear about them, and they vanish from the service's splash screen in a matter of days. But I do try to make note of things that sound interesting, to circle back to at some later date. One such movie was the 2023 sci-fi horror No One Will Save You.

Brynn is the shunned outcast in a small town, keeping mostly to herself in her home. But one night, that home is invaded by gray aliens. She stands up for herself and survives the night... but soon finds that the aliens haven't just attacked her. And the attack was only the first.

It's not that I heard "alien horror movie" and was instantly sold. Interested, sure, but that alone wasn't enough to put No One Will Save You on my "to-watch list." My attention was hooked by one other thing I heard about the movie (at the time it was dropped on Hulu, back in late 2023): the movie has virtually no dialogue at all. The way that so many horror movies come down to a monster vs. a "final girl" in an all-action, no dialogue showdown? Someone had made that for an entire 93-minute movie. A Quiet Place, to the nth degree. Would it even work?

Sort of. It's a fascinating formal exercise to write a movie without dialogue. How do you convey backstory to the audience? How do you flesh out the characters? Or, for that matter, even provide the characters' names? In these aspects of the exercise, writer/director Brian Duffield has done an excellent job with this movie. "Show, don't tell" is the mantra of good storytelling, and Duffield does a masterful job of this with the main character of Brynn. Over the course of the film, we're filled in bit by bit about who she is, that the town hates her, and ultimately why the town hates her -- all without a single word of dialogue.

It's in the horror movie elements that I found No One Will Save You lacking. The various action sequences are just a grab bag of horror tropes -- in particular, the ones that would work in a movie without dialogue. You know how some action blockbusters feel like four or five preconceived set pieces with lazy spackle connecting them? I found this movie to be the opposite: a character story carefully doled out in four or five major moments, with horror scenes smeared in the cracks between.

The behavior of the aliens in this movie makes no sense. And while that's a critique easy to explain away ("they're aliens, so what they do won't necessarily make sense to humans"), it doesn't leave the narrative any less rocky. From one scene to the next, the capabilities of the aliens seem to shift: they're always exactly capable enough to seem menacing, while never doing everything they could. If they did, Brynn couldn't get away and keep the movie going. And if their capabilities confuse, don't even try to guess at their motives.

So overall, I found No One Will Save You to be a disappointment. I'd grade it a C- overall. Yet I wanted to blog about it anyway, because I was impressed with the way it told a complete story for one character -- with history, stakes, and growth -- without using dialogue. I feel like there are lessons in there for other writers... not even to try as a similar formal constraint, but as applicable to more conventional storytelling.

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+.