The Wheel of Time Finishes Its First Season

 I've never read The Wheel of Time books. While I consider myself a fantasy fan, to be honest, I've not really read most of the classics of the genre. I read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings in high school, and fell in love with the beautiful mess that is Stephen King's Dark Tower series my senior year (the final book, not counting The Wind through the Keyhole, came out when I was a freshman in college). I've read the two existing volumes of Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles, and I read The Magicians (and didn't really like it.)

I've engaged with the fantasy genre more through games, I think, than literature, to be honest - indeed, I think fantasy probably makes up the majority of the video games I play.

Anyway, I don't know much of the Wheel of Time, despite the series being around about since I was born. So the Amazon Prime show is my main connection to it.

Today saw the conclusion of the first season. A battle was fought, destinies revealed. It's all well and good.

I think these days, Game of Thrones is remembered more for its profoundly disappointing final season, but it's worth noting that it was only disappointing because it had been quite good before that point (well, maybe the last two seasons were where things went off the rails). One thing that I think is quite remarkable is that the showrunners were able to make battles feel epic despite being on the small screen. The battle of the Blackwater at the end of season two and the battle at Castle Black at the end of season four both felt exciting, dangerous, and huge in scope.

The battle in this episode doesn't really hit that. There's a mass of trollocs charging toward a big wall known as The Gap, and we get basically one scene in which the ruler of the city (whose name I don't even remember) is shooting crossbow bolts at the trollocs climbing the walls until he's overrun and one of them thrusts a javelin through his chest. Then, once the trollocs are past the wall, the ruler's sister uses the life energy of a few other women to call down lightning and obliterate the trollocs - the energy-drain killing all of them by Egwene, who is nevertheless able to bring back Nynaeve.

Establishing stakes in fantasy is a tricky business - the very things that make the genre exciting, such as massive, diverse worlds and mysterious and enormous powers, require a lot of exposition, but also a lot of effort to make the significance of a place come across.

I'm honestly all the more impressed with what Peter Jackson pulled off in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In a three (or four, if you have the extended editions) hour movie, he makes the battle of Helm's Deep feel like the absolute most crucially important fight in the world. This fortress, which we don't even really see until right before the battle, feels important.

Budget issues are obviously part of this - even with the massive amount of cash that Amazon is throwing at a project like this, it might be less an issue of financial budget than one of time management.

The Wheel of Time casts a wide net. There are five "main characters," which doesn't include other important characters like Moiraine and Lan. Rand's story is clearly meant to be the centerpiece, but he suffers from what I like to call "protagonist syndrome." This often has him going off on his own special journey that doesn't involve the other characters, which means he's got way more to carry on his own. The problem is that, by teasing out this question of who the dragon reborn was, the time given to all the other characters meant that we didn't really even get to know him much this season.

Indeed, I think one of the traps that these stories get into is that, when a main character is some kind of chosen one, that winds up being their primary personality trait. Fate has something in store for them, so they wind up being kind of this blank figure for the audience to just write themselves into, while the other characters get more detail because, well, they have to. The result, though, is that protagonists in this kind of story wind up feeling bland. You could almost just guess at who the Dragon Reborn is simply by the fact that if he weren't, Rand wouldn't really serve much of a purpose in the story.

It's funny - watching through Carnival Row the past few days, I found myself wishing that there was more careful worldbuilding for that setting. That show is not an adaptation, though it feels like it could be, if not for the fact that there's some clumsy worldbuilding (like how a maid tells Vignette that they aren't to use the "finest china," in a world where there is no China to be famous for its fine porcelain). I am, actually, interested in the world of Wheel of Time, but it feels very thinly sketched.

Naturally, another comparison comes up, which is The Witcher (the second season of which I blew through in a single day). Not only does that series improve greatly over its first season, but that's a world where I think I actually have enough to feel situated - I understand the vibe of Nilfgaard versus the Northern Kingdoms, and the place that elves have in the society. Ironically, the Witcher is a story with more personal stakes - though it does involve a "chosen one," it concerns itself largely with living a human life despite being so magically different.

There were parts of the show that I liked, including this episode. I love the fact that the previous Dragon Reborn lived in a futuristic era with flying cars and such - I love when fantasy acknowledges that magic doesn't only work in a medieval world. I just think the show needs to be better about prioritizing certain story elements to make sure they land. Adapting novels into television seasons rather than movies does free up more space to keep more of the story, but you still need to do some judicious editing to distill it into something that fits in the hours you have on the screen.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll watch the second season when it comes out. But I'm hoping the show steps up.

An Experiment in Fantasy Writing

 During the summer, I started writing a story. It's a fantasy story, but I've avoided doing something that I usually get into pretty early in the process - worldbuilding. I've chosen instead to stick to the character and really focus on his perspective.

Right now I don't really know where the story is going exactly, and I've written quite a lot in a segment that is ultimately going to be just a prologue - at this point in the story, the main character is just sixteen, and I expect the story is going to primarily focus on his adult life, though with a large emphasis on the events that shaped his upbringing.

I hesitate to put many details in here - sometimes the best way to kill your momentum is to start telling people about a project.

But I have a tendency to get deep into mythology and background in the worlds where my stories are set. Here, I sort of want the character to discover that world as the reader does, and I'm doing that by discovering it as I write the story.

I do wonder if I'm dragging my feet a bit on letting the story get where it needs to go - and nearly 20,000 words in, I still haven't made an actual chapter break, which could make readability suffer.

I'm not sure if this means I'm looking forward to an exercise in savage editing, or if the story I'm writing is a doorstopper.

I've always had the ambition to write some multi-volume fantasy epic, though with this I started from a less ambitious position. Yet, at this rate, the story seems like it's got an enormous length to go.

Still, I'm trying not to let my insecurities as a writer get in the way of actually putting words on the page. I've struggled to get works I'm passionate about completed because of second-guessing and fatigue brought on by perfectionism. My credo for this project has been to just let the characters act and let the story happen, and while I've got vague ideas of where it ultimately goes, I'm allowing the plot to unfold on its own time.

We'll see how it looks. I hope one day I can announce here a finished draft.

Hawkeye

 I've just finished Hawkeye, the latest Marvel show on Disney Plus, and with it, the last of the original Avengers has gotten to headline a story.

That being said: there's an open question as to whether Clint Barton or Kate Bishop, his hero-worshipping new partner, is the main character of this series. The name of the series is Hawkeye, which I believe Kate takes as her title when Clint retires, so it works for both of them.

Despite going to the small screen, Marvel's Disney Plus shows have so far been big - either big in concept or broad in scope. I think in particular The Falcon and the Winter Soldier suffered from trying to do too many things (Bucky's story felt like it got short shrift). Hawkeye clearly takes a page out of Shane Black's playbook and sets things around Christmas (which of course coincides with the holiday fast approaching) and tells a story with more personal stakes than global.

The story is mostly a success, due primarily to the fact that Hailee Steinfeld and Jeremy Renner are both great in their roles and develop a fun chemistry. Steinfeld's Bishop, we learn in the opening flashback to 2012 (which was 9 years ago dear god - and actually longer given that the MCU is actually a couple years ahead thanks to Endgame's 5-year-jump,) was a kid during the Battle of New York, and when she looked out her window as destruction rained down, the hero she saw fighting the aliens was a guy with no superpowers except an unparalleled skill with the bow and arrow - and she spent her life from that point with Hawkeye as her role model.

In present day, Clint is taking his kids on a trip to New York before Christmas, and trying to make up for lost time after getting them back following Endgame - lost time that, of course, his family wasn't even conscious of. While Clint always had the enviable privilege to be "the normal Avenger," with an ordinary home life, we also know that he spent those five years during "The Blip" as the murderous vigilante, Ronin.

Ronin's activities become the unfinished business that drags him and Kate together, as she starts to uncover some odd things regarding her mother's new fiancé.

At the same time, Clint is in mourning - his best friend, Natasha, sacrificed herself to let the quest for the Infinity Stones succeed.

If there's one central issue with the show, it's that this latter emotional conflict is way more interesting, and it seems that the writers realized that about halfway through the season. I'll put more stuff after the spoiler cut talking about that.

While there are some beats that fall flat, and weird red herrings that seem way more important than they turn out to be, what the show excels with is charm - Steinfeld walks into the MCU like she was made for it, and the friendship that develops between her and the man she's idolized since she was a child is very fun. She also has amazing chemistry with a character whose appearance is a bit of a spoiler, so... see below.

Despite the fact that I'm pretty sure a bunch of gangster minions get killed - the MCU has never been one in which the superheroes don't kill - the tone is, for the most part, pretty light. The gang that the two of them spend most of the season fighting are called the Tracksuit Mafia, who wear their eponymous leisurewear as a kind of uniform, and mostly seem scuzzy but too small a threat to pose to an Avenger, or even that Avenger's un-asked-for protégé). The leader of the Tracksuits is one of two characters within it that we are asked to take seriously, and it's her rather devastating story that actually makes the morality of the show feel a bit confused.

Ok, let's take it into spoiler territory.

Carnival Row

 I'm alone in the apartment for the holidays, so I've been looking for various things to watch that I hadn't seen previously and decided to check out Carnival Row.

I've now seen the first episode, which seems to hold some promise (though I've seen reviews that are not so hot on the series).

It's a fantasy show, but one set in a 19th Century-style world (though a character refers to it as the 7th Century, clearly a cheeky way to remind people that this is not the real world). The premise is that this world has humans and it has Faefolk - various classic fairy-folk including, well, fairies (who look like humans but have dragonfly-like wings) as well as satyrs, centaurs, etc. Humans, as they industrialized, invaded the homeland of the Fae and colonized it, but then started fighting over the colonies.

The Pact is some kind of empire that seems to be engaging in a genocidal campaign on the Fae homeland, while The Burgue, a Republic, forfeited their holdings and abandoned the continent, causing a huge immigration crisis as Faefolk come to The Burgue. The Fae are given second-class citizen status, most forced into indentured servitude to afford passage out of their home country, and a vocal political movement (that does not quite have the political majority, but only by a little) wants to kick the Faefolk out or at least crack down on their rights, fearing that these immigrants are going to take over the country. You know, not like that's familiar rhetoric.

In the midst of this, we're introduced to Philo, a police inspector and veteran of the war with the Pact (Orlando Bloom,) who is introduced on the tail of someone who has been assaulting Faefolk on a regular basis - it seems he hasn't killed anyone yet, but he's picking targets at random other than the fact that they're Fae.

Meanwhile, Vignette (Cara Delevigne) is a fairy we're introduced to trying to help a group of fairy women escape a Pact death squad (there are a lot of people getting shot in the head from a, frankly, impressive distance in the first scene of the show). She only barely escapes with her own life, and as if things weren't traumatic enough, the ship she's on sinks as they're nearing The Burgue, leaving her the only survivor.

Vignette gets employment from the man who had invested in the scheme (basically importing refugees as indentured servants) but primarily she wants to meet up with people she knew from the old country - like a friend named Tourmaline who works in a brothel on Carnival Row, the Fae ghetto where they're forced to live.

The thing is, Vignette has come there knowing it's where someone she loved, but who died in the war, is from. Only, as it turns out, the man she loved is none other than Rycroft "Philo" Philostrate, who, as we're well aware, is not quite so dead.

It came to my attention after watching this first episode that the show was in development for a fews years before it was produced, and that one of the people attached to it was Guillermo Del Toro. While I don't think he was the initial creator, you can see how this premise would work well for his sensibilities. The first episode is also called "Some Dark God Wakes," which clearly implies that we're also introducing some cosmic horror elements.

I'm eager to see more. I do have a soft spot for any kind of fantasy that goes beyond a Medieval aesthetic (I believe the term for Carnival Row's fantasy subgenre is Gaslamp Fantasy - though I imagine most people would just call it Steampunk, which, if you want to split hairs, is the sci-fi counterpart).

Wheel of Time Racing To The End

 After bingeing through the entire second season of the Witcher yesterday (something I don't think I've ever quite done) I finished things off for the evening with the penultimate episode of The Wheel of Time.

The episode was a subdued one - very much a calm before the storm. The exception being its cold-open, in which we see a super-badass pregnant woman fighting off numerous armored soldiers as she's going into labor.

The last of these soldiers (well, the last she fights) manages to jab a dagger into her side, missing the soon-to-be-born baby, but leaving a fatal wound. Then, as she collapses by a boulder, needing to finally push the little tyke out of her, another soldier from this enemy army arrives - but this one plants his sword (with a familiar Heron symbol in it) into the snow and help deliver the baby. Once the kid is out there and crying, his mother lets go and dies, and the soldier takes off his helmet to reveal that he is Tam al'Thor - Rand's (apparently adoptive) father.

It's a curious scene - our sympathies are obviously with the pregnant woman, though the soldiers don't have obvious "bad guy" colors, their armor being green and gold. And, of course, Tam has appeared to be a pretty nice guy in our earlier scenes with him.

I guess I've been trying to place the tone of the Wheel of Time for a while. It certainly does not seem to be on the gritty, cynical level of the Witcher or Game of Thrones, leaning more into classic good versus evil fantasy of the Tolkienesque variety. Still, the show has shown a penchant for brutal violence, even as its story tends toward a more YA focus (to be fair, I think the YA genre has gotten gorier since I was the target demographic. Harry Potter was the real dominant franchise of such things when I was growing up, while I think Hunger Games, which came later, seemed to really amp up the deadly and gruesome violence).

The episode itself gives us a bit of classic YA drama by introducing the notion that Perrin is also in love with Egwene, though the choice to have had Perrin be married at the beginning of the story (which is apparently not in the books) remains a really intense choice - somehow, the story of a blacksmith who accidentally killed his wife in the heat of battle feels like it should be the story of a character who's pushing 40, not in his early 20s.

Meanwhile we learn more about Lan - that he actually should practically be a king, if not for the fact that his kingdom was swallowed up by "The Blight." We actually see the Blight by the end of the episode - a kind of twisted, semi-tree-like growth that seems inert but for the fact that there are also skeletons of people who must have been trapped within it.

The episode also sort of stumbles into a reveal - mainly by just having Rand think about things - that he, in fact, is the Dragon Reborn (something I'd gleaned from just reading anything about the book series). We got a little hint of this earlier, when he smashed the door that had trapped him and Mat back several episodes earlier, and we find out that earlier in this episode, when Egwene seemingly channels magic to knock a stray trolloc into the void while they're crossing The Ways, it's actual Rand who does this.

So, I've got to be honest - I like this show, and enjoy watching it, but the fantasy elements are tossed around kind of haphazardly. I still don't know how, precisely, Moiraine figured out that the Dragon Reborn was going to be in Two Rivers, and why it had to be one of these five people. I don't know if the books do it much better, but there is a bit of a magnetic poetry feel to the fantasy tropes involved here. There's so much that is so very vague - like what the Dragon Reborn is meant to do at the Eye of the World to defeat the Dark One. Maybe the speed with which they are going through the story here is part of the issue.

Also, there's Mat: apparently the show re-cast the character for the second season, and they must have fired the original Mat while filming, because that kind of "huh" look as a reaction while Mat decides not to go into the portal to the Ways is not... precisely seamless. I mean, logistical issues come up, and maybe they had a very good reason to fire him, or he had a very good reason to quit. But it does come off as kind of botched.

Of course, a similar thing happened in The Expanse (another Amazon show) when a longrunning central cast member turned out to be a toxic creep, and his character's removal from the show was also abrupt and clearly accomplished with preexisting footage. These things happen.

Inevitably, I find myself comparing this show with the one that I binged all 8 episodes of earlier yesterday. It's not really a fair comparison, but I do think if we're talking fantasy TV, I find that The Witcher manages to feel a bit more like a lived-in world. There is something about the production design in The Wheel of Time that kind of calls attention to its artifice (I remember thinking Shadar Logoth looked really cool until it became very clear to me that they just used the same sets for Tar Valon but without any of the merchant stalls or hanging plants or extras to make it look like a living city). The show also suffers a bit from having a primary cast of young characters who haven't yet developed enough personality to make them interesting. I don't want to blame the actors for this - it's an issue with the writing (and possibly the source material.) As with many reviewers, I think that Rosamund Pike is doing some profoundly heavy lifting to imbue the show with gravitas, but if she is meant to be the mentor figure that supports the protagonists, she outshines them so much that I kind of just want her to be the main character.

Still, this is all nitpicking. You know, before Game of Thrones, the idea of getting epic fantasy on television was unthinkable. While it took a while for other studios to catch up to the idea, I'm really enjoying the efforts put into production design and sweeping scope that we're getting with shows these days. I'm hoping that, if the Wheel of Time is a hit, we'll see a stronger effort in a second season. The Witcher, as I said in my write-up yesterday, improved tremendously by shaking off its first-season nerves (and also being able to get into the meat of the story). There's a lot to buy into with the fantasy genre, and in fact, a lot of these series start to get better only after the author and the audience has had the chance to steep in the world for a bit. It could be the same with TV adaptations.

The Witcher Season Two

 Well, I meant to just watch one episode. And now, at 6:18 PM as I write this... I've watched the entire season.

So I guess there's my endorsement: The Witcher's second season has been a page-turner of a show. Netflix, of course, pioneered the full-season release, which other streaming services have walked back on, using a weekly schedule, even if streaming shows are normally half or a third or a quarter the length of a network show (that was one of the shocking things about Twin Peaks: The Return, actually, that it had a full 24 or so episodes).

In a lot of ways, season one of this show was very odd - its nesting timeline element (oddly similar to Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk, when you think about it) left some viewers and reviewers confused. The intention behind it, I think, was to allow us to meet all the key characters at the start of the season instead of waiting until episode 4 or so to actually get to Geralt, and to the finale to introduce Ciri. (Actually, the one thing I find funny in all the timeframe shenanigans is that Jaskier ought to be way older than Joey Batey is by now - being neither Witcher nor Mage, there's no reason he should still look 32 given that he looked like that when Ciri was still in utero.)

The second season, then, having allowed the timeline to sync up at the Battle of Sodden Hill, has a number of advantages over the first. For one, time seems to be flowing equally for all characters, so we can trust a sense of synchronicity. The other is that, now that Ciri and Geralt have found one another, we can actually see how the two characters feel together. Ciri's story in the first season was... it was a little underwhelming. The premiere was a real gut-punch (I think one of my real "too dark" triggers is when people commit suicide to avoid being captured, especially when it's whole families,) but there was more interesting fantasy stuff going on with Yennifer and Geralt's backstories.

Actually, that might be what made the first season feel odd - it was essentially a really elaborate prologue. We got to see how Geralt first gained infamy as the Butcher of Blaviken and then earned renown as the one who cured the Striga, etc.

So, season two has the benefit of really feeling like the main plot taking off in earnest:

Ciri is on a path to discover what her powers actually mean, and Geralt has dedicated himself to protecting her - but not only that, also helping her become strong enough to fend for herself. Ciri's determination to learn to fight as well as a Witcher is a lot of fun, and I think Freya Allan seems to be having more fun in the role as someone determined to be able to fend for herself.

Yennifer, meanwhile, finds herself alive, but de-powered after the Battle of Sodden Hill. Taken prisoner by the retreating Nilfgaardians with Fringilla, the two are ultimately captured by the elves, now led less by Filavandrel and more by his wife Francesca.

Here is where the politics of the show (or in the show) start to get a little more nuanced and interesting.

Nilfgaard is introduced in the first episode as a horror-show of brutal militaristic force. Cintra, which appears to be a rather nice kingdom, is steamrolled and we're told that the empire takes no prisoners, simply killing anyone they come across.

But just as we found earlier in season one that maybe Calanthe was not really the benevolent monarch she used to be, we also see seriously reinforced the racial oppression that the northern kingdoms treat the elves with. Nilfgaard, it would seem, does not have the same sort of racial oppression built in to their otherwise authoritarian-theocratic regime. Fringilla opens Cintra (now using the old elvish name Xin'trea) to Francesca and Filavandrel's people, offering them food and shelter in exchange for an alliance.

Based on novels written in Poland, it's not hard to see some parallels here. Central (and, well, all of) Europe has a nasty history of racism. Nilfgaard, with its proclaimed goals of feeding and housing all of its citizens, looks a lot like the Soviet bloc - sweeping through other countries, setting up client states, all an admirable stated purpose of guaranteeing shared prosperity, but using brutal methods and kind of just setting up an empire in the process. But the racism of the North makes the opposition not look like wonderful liberal democracies - just the old shitty nationalism. My dad was born in Hungary, the son of Jewish Holocaust survivors, and his uncle claimed that there were only two types of people in the world - Nazis and Communists, and obviously the latter was the better of the two.

Thus, we get to see a somewhat more sympathetic side of both Cahir and Fringilla - they aren't just doing all this evil for the sake of it, but because they truly think that the world will be better off once Nilfgaard conquers it.

They're not... like... good guys. But you can see why they do what they do.

There is less monster-of-the-week stuff in this season - really only the first episode feels that way (with some really well-done prosthetics and make-up on an old acquaintance of Geralt's who seems to be some kind of Witcher-style take on Beauty and the Beast - I particularly love the way that the boar-man uses magic to summon things for his guests, making them fall out of the air like they were dropped from just above the camera's frame, which is undoubtedly what they did).

It is always kind of funny to me that the Witcher is a heroic fantasy story that is being told in an epic fantasy setting - but where the protagonist is really trying to avoid getting involved in the epic side of things. But Ciri's power is too great to be ignored, and ultimately, by the end of the season, Ciri has more than just Nilfgaard trying to find and take her, but numerous factions (including one tantalizingly unseen figure who secures the assistance of a previously-imprisoned pyromancer).

I will also say: this season has the Witcher universe's equivalent of Baba Yaga in it, including the hut on chicken legs. So, that automatically gets it some points.

I really think this season will be better-received than the first, which I think a lot of critics were skeptical of. There's much more narrative momentum here, and Ciri really benefits hugely from being able to actually spend time with the other main characters, particularly Geralt.

I'm not hugely familiar with the source material - my previous experience was playing the first half of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, which is of course also an adaptation. But I do think that we've seen the introduction of some more key characters - particularly Geralt's own ersatz father/mentor Vesemir and spymaster Dijkstra (who certainly feels like an antagonist but seems like a fun one - he's one of those chessmaster types, which made a scene where we see his "process," where he basically drinks a bunch and brainstorms madly, really interesting) - that I know make for major figures within the rest of the story.

I had already known about the final cliffhanger reveal regarding Emhyr, the Nilfgaardian Emperor, but it's a nice bit of re-contextualization that alters the stakes in exciting ways.

Anyway, the downside of binging a show like this is that I have no idea when the third season will be out - and surely it won't be for another year or more. But I definitely think that if you liked the first season at all, you should definitely check this one out.

As The Expanse Begins Its Final Season, Everyone's Exhausted

 My sister and I watched season 4 of the Expanse at our childhood home back during the holidays in 2019 (if I'm remembering when it came out correctly). My dad, despite being the one that got us both into sci-fi in the first place, seemed turned off by the darkness of the narrative, calling it "that depressing Mars show," which I find kind of funny given how, of the three major factions in the solar system, Mars is the one that spends the least time in the spotlight.

The show has never had a hugely optimistic view of humanity's future - things are functional but we've managed to export tribalism and exploitation to the rest of the solar system, and lofty ambitions are always set back by greed, hatred, and a failure of empathy.

Things got particularly dark in the last season, when Marco Inaros, a renegade faction leader within the Belt's OPA, launched a sudden surprise attack on Earth, coating asteroids in a stealth composite so that they could slip past the planet's defenses and unleash terrible devastation on humanity's cradle. Meanwhile, he'd secured allies within the swiftly-deteriorating Martian government - after the discovery of inhabitable worlds through the ring gates, the central animating ambition of the Martian people became totally moot - turning a single, somewhat unpopular factional leader into the most powerful man in the solar system.

When we catch up at the beginning of this season, Marco has been consolidating his power - we saw Fred Johnson assassinated in the previous season, but we're told off-hand that Anderson Dawes was killed as well (I guess Jared Harris has a new science fiction show to be on). And a lot of Belters have suffered enough under colonial exploitation and have had the "inners" so dehumanized that they see the devastation on Earth as a reckoning to be celebrated.

But one person within Marco's circle is not feeling so righteous - and that's Fillip, his son with Naomi. Though she was forced to abandon him when it became clear she couldn't talk him into leaving his father's side, and Marco has encouraged Fillip to write his mother off as a liar and abandoner, Fillip's role in killing so many civilians has been eating away at him - and everyone's celebratory attitude on Ceres just makes it worse.

Thing is, lest we decide to sympathize with Fillip too much, the way he deals with these conflicted emotions is not exactly endearing. He tries to screw every woman he meets (and doesn't seem to be willing to take a no for an answer) and, when his friend tries to get him to sober up and calm down, a fight breaks out and he shoots the guy.

I think it's worth noting that Marco isn't really doing much in the way of providing for the Belters - his administrators scoff at the idea of dedicating any of their resources to helping the citizens on Ceres, content to merely rally support through their war efforts and ride the wave of Belter grievances.

Meanwhile, all our heroes are exhausted.

Drummer has been going around rescuing Belter dissidents who have been under attack by Marco's "Free Navy," while evading bounty hunters. The realities of their one-ship war against the bad guys has been wearing them thin, and Drummer sees the poly family she built on this ship falling apart.

Meanwhile, the folks on the Rocinante aren't doing so great either. Losing Alex has them all grieving, not to mention that Naomi is still getting over the trauma of being rejected by her son, not to mention a suitless space walk. Recon missions are becoming combat missions. With Clarissa Mao on board thanks to Amos, there's new tension between him and Naomi, even while his relationship with Clarissa grows closer (or maybe because it's growing closer would be more accurate).

The Roci crew discover that the rocks that keep getting hurled at Earth (and taken out by railguns, reducing casualties to mere hundreds, as opposed to the millions the stealth rocks had killed) seem to be set up with actual ship engines built onto them, and Holden nearly gets himself killed after he accidentally starts up one of these engines. However, the misadventure gives them a lead - they discover the likely orbit of a spotter-ship that the Free Navy is likely using to trigger these rocks, which have forced the UNN to remain near Earth to shoot them down.

The hope is that if the spotter ship is destroyed, Marco won't be able to operate freely across the system anymore.

On Earth, Avasarala, now UNSG once again, watches as Earth undergoes similar climate effects to a nuclear winter - she visits a farm on the Mediterranean that is now covered in snow. While fears of a climate death-spiral plague her, she also has a war to win.

But amidst all of that, we haven't actually touched on what is the first scene of the season. And it is one with huge implications.

We see a girl in a strange forest - recognizably, it has trees with green leaves, but the girl encounters animals that are alien in nature - little bird-like reptile things, vines that have coiled spring-like tendrils that occasionally pop back up, and an odd, mammalian creature with a head that kind of resembles a snake's. The girl is totally at east amongst these alien creatures, even deciding to name the little flying creatures. But then, one of the bird/dinosaur things seems to be distressed, and the girl looks up into the sky and sees something odd. When the camera follows her gaze, we see some kind of vessel up there with a spiraling coil wrapping around it, or maybe growing out of it. And then, a caption tells us that this is the planet Laconia - the one that the Martians were heading to at the end of the last season when that strange red energy seemed to erase them from existence.

The Expanse is not Game of Thrones, but there is a common theme here in which human conflicts distract from larger crises - and just as the wars over the Iron Throne left Westeros ill-prepared to face down the army of the undead (something I imagine/hope will be better-handled if and when the actual books come out,) I think that the the hate-fueled war Marco has launched will (and already has) weakened humanity's ability to face down an alien threat.

What I find really interesting about the opening scene is that, up until this point, any alien life we've seen has been utterly, truly alien. To be fair, the protomolecule wasn't so much a life form as a piece of technology. I've always interpreted that the crazy body horror behind it was all a misunderstanding - that there was no malice behind the protomolecule, but that it didn't have the context to identify our biochemistry as intelligent life that maybe wouldn't like to be fused into some kind of portal-machine.

The point is, the life forms that made the protomolecule and the ring gate seem like they could be totally unrecognizable as life. But the beings the girl sees on Laconia, while alien, seem very analogous to existing Earth life - to a staggering degree, in fact. This could imply that there was some alien hand guiding life's development on Earth, and that there was a similar gameplan on other planets.

But the red aliens - the ones who likely killed the Builders - seem to be purely hostile. The scene felt like a very bright red pin to stick into the board to remind us all that some weird stuff is happening on the periphery.

Regarding Drummer's story - it's frustrating, because Drummer is one of my favorite characters on the show. But her arc for last season and maybe this one has fallen flat, in large part because her poly pirate crew don't really feel like individual characters. There's a sense that there's this group of people she cares a lot about, and that this war has been forcing her to sacrifice the happy relationships she had developed, but those relationships developed off-screen in the first place, and I want to see her with the characters that the audience actually cares about.

Fillip is in this odd space - on one hand, he does seem to feel remorse for taking part in what might be humanity's single greatest war crime, but the fact that he rejected Naomi's offer to take him away from that and the fact that he's dealing with this by sexually harassing a bartender and then shooting (likely fatally) his friend makes me think that this kid is beyond a point of no return. I just wonder if his "redemption" involves patricide - which would, honestly, solve a lot of problems.

Marco as a villain has been a bit of an issue with the show. On paper, he's a charismatic, manipulative heel. But I guess I don't really buy him as the brilliant puppet-master. The notion that he had Anderson Dawes killed feels a bit like the old trope of having your new villain kill off an old villain to show how much the stakes have been raised, but I think Jared Harris always sold Dawes' ruthlessness and masterful control of the situation in a way that I don't buy with Marco. I don't know if it's the writing or the performance. He is the sort of character the audience easily feels a visceral hatred toward, but he's struggling to fill the shoes of some more compelling villains from earlier in the show's run.

I am very curious to see what happens with Alex in the books. His character was pretty transparently killed off due to the allegations of inappropriate behavior by actor Cas Anvar - a delicate situation for any ongoing production, of course. I find it interesting that the show actually dedicates a couple of scenes, or at least parts of scenes, to addressing his loss - making something out of that loss rather than avoiding the topic. My sister pointed out that there was a sense of real danger for the characters in the first season, especially after the very sudden death of Shed in the second episode, and that, even if this was clearly not planned, it did reinforce that notion that these characters are always putting their lives at risk just being in space.

Sadly, this is the last season of the show, and the season is a mere six episodes. There are, I believe, three more books in the series, so there have been a lot of questions about how they plan to wrap up the story so quickly. I am given to understand that there's a significant time-jump after the current plot wraps up, which might make this a reasonable stopping point.

I guess I'm just sad to see this gem of a show depart, even if six seasons is a very decent run. It always seemed to me that The Expanse deserved to be a much more popular show, with the kind of public discussion and debate that other shows of its epic scale have garnered.

I think, also, that after seeing the rushed conclusion of Game of Thrones, there's a part of me that's still really sore. I want this show to have the time to breathe and finish out its story in a satisfying way, and six episodes for a final season seems very tight.

I did hear one rumor (though my source is "some comment on the AV Club review of the season," so take it with a massive grain of salt,) that they might have worked out a deal to do a few feature-length movies for Amazon Prime to cover the events of the last books. While I'd prefer full seasons, of course, I can appreciate that that might be a more viable way to make this happen. Hope it does.

Anyway, glad to hop back into the Roci one more time.

A Keening in The Wheel of Time

 The night that my mother died, I was at home, back in Massachusetts. She had been dying of cancer, taken off of chemo about three weeks prior. I flew out on her last birthday to be with her. My sister was there, along with her boyfriend, and naturally my dad. My mother was from a big family - the oldest of eight children (technically nine, she might remind me, as she had a brother who only lived about an hour after he was born,) and two of her sisters had also come to be with her, though one had to go home the morning before my mom died (I've repeatedly made a conscious effort to reassure her that she had been a wonderfully supportive presence - I think she might have felt guilty that she wasn't there to the very end).

There were two moments that really felt the worst, on either end of the moment that my mom stopped breathing. She had gone unconscious in the afternoon, and had been breathing with a death-rattle up until about fifteen minutes before midnight. The moment she actually stopped, I was in the room, and I think we were all too dumbfounded to really process it as a trauma. The earlier moment is a bit too personal for me to share here, but the latter was when, an hour or so later, I hugged my dad, crying into his shoulder, and then I let out the loudest scream I think I've done since I was a small child.

What shocked me about it was that I recognized the feeling. My voice had grown far deeper - not only had I recently turned 31, so my voice had changed about twenty years prior, but I've also got a fairly deep baritone voice anyway. But I realized that, if you just pitched it up, you would hear an infant screaming for his mother. One of the things we learn to do as adults is to contain our emotions - we hold back, at least a little. A baby doesn't have the context to understand that being a little hungry isn't the most horrible pain they've ever experienced, and so they hold absolutely nothing back.

And for the first time since I was very little, in that moment, I didn't hold anything back. It was cathartic, to be sure, but it also felt like I had concentrated all my grief into that moment - it was the worst I felt about my mother's passing, the most furious, raw, devastated.

There's a nagging snob in the back of my mind that hesitates to find something so profound in a show like the Wheel of Time. The show is entertaining, but as many have pointed out, the source material is pretty derivative.

But I am finding myself growing to like it more as I watch it - starting to feel a bit of affection for the characters.

A favorite that is emerging is Lan, the Warder for Moraine, our central Aes Sedai character. As we've learned, the magic-wielding and all-female Aes Sedai (very curious to see if they touch on the notion of a transgender Aes Sedai, something I suspect is not addressed in the source material, but would be an interesting thing to explore in a modern adaptation) are divided into several color-coded orders, and most of those orders pair up an Aes Sedai with a male Warder - who is trained as a fighter to protect the Aes Sedai. A magical bond is created between the two, allowing them to feel one another's pain (and presumably just know how the other is doing at all times.)

Like most wizards in fantasy, the Aes Sedai are usually jockeying for power within the organization (though in particular, Liandrin, who is of the red-themed magic police wing, seems to be a villain in waiting) but the Warders seem to mostly get along. And so, in the previous episode, we met Stefan, who is a charming and gregarious Warder. But, also in that episode, his charge is killed, and so this episode has him looking a lot like a man who has lost his wife - the most important person in his life.

I half-expected there to be some tradition in which a Warder whose Aes Sedai dies is expected to throw himself on her funeral pyre or otherwise off himself. But that doesn't actually seem to be the case - Lan suggests that he can bond with another Aes Sedai, or even join a group (apparently the green Aes Sedai take multiple Warders, though the reds don't take any because, at least in Liandrin's case, they've got a deep case of misandry).

It doesn't come as much of a shock, though, when Stefan's body is found kneeling, a dagger in his gut, in what appears to have essentially been an act of seppuku. He does this after drugging Lan's tea so that his friend will be too deep in sleep to prevent him from doing this.

At the funeral ritual, the watching Warders and Aes Sedai beat their chests with their fists, and Lan, the closest person Stefan had left, kneels by his body and tears his clothes and lets out a powerful scream. And boy, did I have a strong reaction to that.

I will say that one thing I find really interesting about the world building of the Wheel of Time is the introduction of a lot of Eastern philosophical conceits to a world that otherwise has a Tolkienesque western-Europe feel. For instance, the funerary garb everyone wears is white. The very idea of the Wheel of Time itself is, I think, inspired by Buddhism and other cyclical models of the universe. People talk regularly of reincarnation as the assumed future of their souls, which is, of course, where the whole notion of the Dragon Reborn comes from.

At this point, most of the characters have gotten to the initial goalpost - the White Tower and the city of Tar Valon. If we are to look at Lord of the Rings as a model, though, I imagine this is basically just Rivendell - the journey is only getting started.

But hey, I'm a sucker for this stuff, so I'm looking forward to the next episode.

Shang-Chi: The Legend of the Ten Rings

 I finally got around to seeing Shang-Chi, the... I guess not latest, because of Eternals, but the recent Marvel movie.

A somewhat more obscure comic books character, Shang-Chi is a master martial artist, but when we meet him, he is living a very mundane life - he's a valet driver in San Francisco (I don't know how a valet driver affords to live in San Francisco, but hey, fantasy!) who has very little ambition, just hanging out with his best friend Katy, whom he works with. (That their relationship is fully platonic is refreshing.)

Living as "Shaun," Shang-Chi is assaulted on the bus by members of the Ten Rings - which, as it turns out, is the secret underworld army that his father founded a thousand years ago.

The movie's real ringer is Tony Leung, the legend of Hong Kong cinema who has been a giant movie star since the 1980s. I first became aware of him I believe when I saw In the Mood for Love when I was in college, and then came to realize he was in basically every Chinese movie that I ever seemed to watch (he's the buddy-cop to Chow Yun Fat's Tequila in Hardboiled, which, if you haven't seen it, is maybe the greatest over-the-top action movie ever made). We'll get to the fantastic contribution he makes to the movie in a bit.

In the comics, Shang Chi's father is actually Fu Manchu, a character originating in a novel from 1913 and is... well, basically an amalgamation of racist stereotypes. There was another character, The Mandarin, who served as sort of the archnemesis of Iron Man in the comics, who also had a somewhat problematic characterization. When Iron Man 3 came out, it very controversially portrayed the Mandarin as actually a fiction created by Aldrich Killian (who I believe was a rather minor character in the comics).

I think this was probably one of those Tilda Swinton moments, when Marvel made a call to try not to be offensive but landed on the option that cost an Asian actor a job. After Iron Man 3 came out, they released a short film that showed Ben Kingsley's Trevor Slattery (the Liverpudlian actor who had been hired to play "The Mandarin") get taken out of prison by the real Mandarin.

Here, we see that the real Ten Rings has been around for a thousand years, and Killian just stole the concept and came up with a name for its leader. In fact, the leader is a man named Xu Wenwu, who discovered ten magical (or maybe alien technology) rings (more like bracelets, to be honest) that made him invincible on the battlefield, and he used this as the basis to build a hidden empire.

It all changes when, seeking a source of magical power, he meets a woman and falls in love, and then fathers two children, the elder of whom is Shang-Chi. But after tragedy strikes, Wenwu returns to his brutal ways, and Shang-Chi is turned into a living weapon to be used against Wenwu's enemies - until he decides to escape.

That's where we meet "Shaun," living the normal, peaceful life he craved. But when Wenwu returns to his children's lives, Shang-Chi and his sister Xialing (who has had somewhat more of a grimy life, owning an illegal fighting ring in Macau) are brought back into the Ten Rings, where Wenwu's obsession with his lost wife threatens the very world.

Marvel's movies certainly have mined the "complicated paternal relationship" trope before, even making the protagonist's dad the big bad in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. II. While Kurt Russel did an excellent job as the deadbeat dad who only shows up when he needs a new kidney, Tony Leung hits a really interesting note in his performance as Wenwu. We can see that he genuinely thought that his family represented his chance to be a better person, and the evil that he commits in this is mostly based on the false impression that he might be able to have that again.

I don't know that I would say this really deviates much from the Marvel formula, but I also think that complaints about said formula are about as tired as their claims that the formula is. The movie introduces a charming and fun protagonist, has a good villain (remember when we all used to complain about Marvel's villains, and then we got Killmonger, Hela, Thanos, Ego, Agatha Harkness, The Vulture, Mysterio, and now Wenwu?)

Shang-Chi has definitely been set up to join the Avengers or whatever Avengers-like team-up we'll be getting next, and I think he's a fun addition to the team. And he comes with a Katy, which is a lot of fun!

The Wheel of Time

 Despite being an avowed fantasy fan, I think I'm actually far more exposed to the genre through games than I am through books. I've read the Lord of the Rings (and the Hobbit - actually first) and of course Stephen King's Dark Tower series. But there are a few staples of the genre that have eluded me. I've never read the Narnia books (somehow as a kid I was bored by The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe but not Lord of the Rings) or the Earthsea books. And I've never read The Wheel of Time.

So, poser than I am (I say that mostly ironically) I've now watched the first three episodes of Amazon's adaptation of the series.

As a review in the AV Club noted, the Wheel of Time is a sort of pre-deconstruction fantasy story. Today, we're awash in darker, subversive takes on the genre like Game of Thrones or the Witcher. So, my impression of the Wheel of Time is that it's obviously a post-Tolkien fantasy story (I believe the first book came out in 1984 - the 80s actually being quite the era for fantasy films and thus the genre as a whole) but from an era in which no one would roll their eyes at the big bad being called The Dark One.

Which is to say that there's some unabashed nerdery going on in this show, which I count as a point in its favor.

Not knowing the books, I cannot say how accurate the show is in plot and in tone, but I have heard that many viewers familiar with the books think it's highly faithful.

A quick summary:

There's an idyllic town in the mountain called The Two Rivers, and it's here that a group of young adults live in a little rustic utopia - well, perhaps not quite utopia, as there are still issues with alcoholism and adultery, and a religious order that seems to demand celibacy among its female Wisdoms.

Things get turned upside down when Moraine, an "Aes Sedai," which is some kind of wizard-like spellcaster, shows up in town. She, and her Warder Al'lan (yes, this is old-school fantasy, so get ready for a lot of apostrophes) show up looking for the reincarnation of The Dragon, a figure of monumental importance, who could be the savior of the world.

The title of the series refers to the notion that this world exists in an endless cycle. And in each of these cycles, the Dragon arises and, I believe, fights the Dark One, but also the Dragon is potentially really scary, so... I'm waiting on more clarification. Souls return to the world, reincarnated, and civilizations rise and fall. There's a shot early on that I think (unless I was misinterpreting what I saw) even implies that this massive valley full of karsts is actually filled with ruined skyscrapers - I'm not sure if this is meant to be our distant future (or distant past) but it's an interesting note.

In town, we are introduced to our adventuring party. Rand is an upstanding kid who lives with his widowed father (played by the guy who played Roose Bolton - it's nice to see him playing a way more sympathetic character) and is in love with Egwene. Egwene has just been initiated to train as a Wisdom - and it's here that we learn that it seems only women have the potential to use magic (or at least, only women are allowed to). Egwene is torn between this path - to become the kind of mystical healer of the town, or at least apprentice under the current one (who is only like 6 years older than she is, so it'll likely be a long apprenticeship). Mat, then, is the somewhat desperate... shall we say "rogue" of the group, who, it turns out, is the one who has to take care of his little sisters given that his dad spends his time sleeping around while his mother (or maybe step mother) is perpetually inebriated. Finally, Perrin is the town blacksmith, who works alongside his wife Laila, and we'll see how his angst develops in the next paragraph.

Each of these four, Moraine has identified as possibly being the Dragon reborn, and so she wants to take them to the White Tower, where her order are headquartered. But, with zero warning whatsoever, The Two Rivers is suddenly attacked by trollocs. Trollocs are, it seems, the rough equivalent of orcs. They're big horned humanoid monsters with goat-like legs and follow the orders of a "Fade," which is an insanely creepy shrouded figure with a lamprey-like mouth and no eyes. The trollocs massacre townsfolk while a panic sets in. Amidst the carnage, a couple of them break into the blacksmith shop, and Perrin and Laila fight them off. But after he has just killed one trolloc in a blind panic, Perrin accidentally swings the axe around and hits his wife in the abdomen, killing her.

Moraine and Al'lan show up and fend off the trollocs, with one spell eventually pulling the stones from the town's tavern to hurl at the beasts - which does drive them off, but also sees what was clearly a centerpiece of the town destroyed.

Moraine reveals that the trollocs came for the four potential Dragons, and so she convinces them that they need to come with her in order to keep the town from being attacked again. Thus, we strike out on a grand adventure!

There have already been some cool set-pieces. Though we don't stay there very long, the utterly uninhabited "ruin" (except all the buildings are intact - just empty) of Shadar Logoth is super cool-looking (and honestly looks a lot like a location in a Dark Souls game).

Pretty early on, the group gets split up, which I think is an opportunity for us to get a little more time to get to know our various characters. Of the main four, I think Mat has the clearest personality and motivations, though he's also the token "hey, this adventure is stupid and we should go home" member at this point. Perrin also has some stuff going on involving a wound on his leg and some kind of strange connection to wolves, but I find myself shocked that there hasn't been more time spent on people comforting him over the loss of his wife - he clearly feels insanely guilty for killing her, and I can understand why he hasn't told anyone - allowing everyone to think it was just one of the trollocs that got her, but unless the mystical awakening that may or may not be happening with him is tied to that, I sort of want to... you know, at least acknowledge and deal with the fact.

It's funny, there's a moment when we see (and I guess this is a spoiler, so beware) that Nynaeve (the town's Wisdom) was dragged off by one of the trollocs during the attack and he takes her to what appears to be another wounded trolloc. There was a moment where I thought that it wanted her to use her healing abilities to help the other trolloc, which was going to add a really interesting wrinkle to this situation, but then the one that had taken her started eating the wounded one's intestines, so... not so much. I think these are the kind of "no-guilt kill-on-sight" monster bad guys.

Anyway, I'm enjoying it, and will be continuing to watch it. After kind of getting burned out on Foundation (I wonder if I'd enjoy the show more had I not actually read the books) I'm happy to have another epic genre show to get into.

With Foundation Nearing its Season Finale, What Does it All Mean?

 Taking liberties with the story was necessary to adapt Foundation. The original stories nailed one aspect of science fiction - namely coming up with a really cool hypothetical concept - but in terms of human drama, they were just decent enough to convey the former. I guess I ought to re-read the thing.

The series on Apple TV is... well, here's the thing:

Adaptation is not translation. In order to convert a story from one medium to another, you need to make changes. One thing I've been very happy to see is the diversification of the cast - turning male characters like Salvor, Gaal, and Demerzel into women has worked perfectly for the show. And pure inventions, like the "genetic dynasty" that, among other things, allows us to have Lee Pace continue playing different iterations of "Brother Day" over the course of the series, have been pretty interesting.

But at some point, the deviations start to make you question if the writers are actually all that interested in the original story.

This first season has had a couple characters emerge as "chosen one" type entities. But Asimov's thesis for the story was a rejection of the "Great Men of History" theory - he believed, as many historians do, that our methodology for analyzing history tends to place too much focus on individuals, and thus buries the underlying social forces and pressures that lead to such people gaining and exercising power.

Thus, it was sort of radical to pull the rug out from under the protagonists of each era and show that, as much as they fought hard to change the nature of the Foundation and ensure its survival, the whole process was inevitable.

Now, perhaps we're just awaiting a similar reveal. But the way that Hari Seldon has been characterized, he seems to have a much more impossibly fine control over the development of the Foundation - it's less the result of this new form of study than a massively complex Rube Goldberg device.

Let's move on to Demerzel.

Demerzel is not revealed until past the original Foundation trilogy. It was a later decision by Asimov to link his Foundation series with his Robot stories, but Demerzel is eventually revealed to be R. Daneel Olivaw, a character introduced as the very first robot with a positronic brain - essentially the first sentient robot. Olivaw is shown to have orchestrated the creation of the Empire and also subtly pushes Seldon into developing psychohistory. He's the ultimate puppet master, but a benevolent one.

One of Asimov's most enduring concepts is the Three Laws of Robotics.

Asimov had grown tired of every story involving artificial intelligence ultimately just becoming a rehash of Frankenstein - in which the act of creating an artificial mind was invariably hubristic and would be punished by the robot going homicidal. In an effort to do away with that trope, he came up with the Three Laws - rules that, in his fictional universe, were hardwired into the programming of every AI. The rules are (and I paraphrase here):

1. A robot must never harm a human being, or through inaction, allow a human to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the instructions of humans, except when doing so would violate the first law.

3. A robot must not do itself any harm, except when doing so would violate the first or second laws.

Obviously, the biggest challenge from a modern perspective would be to create an AI smart enough to understand its own behavior well enough to ensure that it was following those laws. But the nuances of those laws actually proved to be very fertile ground for dramatic conflict. For example: suppose a robot witnesses one human holding a gun to another human's head. They cannot harm the one with the gun, as that would be a 1st law violation, but they also can't just let the hostage be shot, as that would also violate the first law.

What grows out of this, then, in discussions between R. Daneel Olivaw and another robot, is an implied corollary: the "through inaction" clause to the first law becomes extremely tricky when you consider what, ultimately, the greatest harm would be. Is a robot in violation of the law, for example, if they don't put all their efforts to finding a way to reverse aging? After all, on a long enough timeline, humans ultimately die when they get too old.

But even beyond that: if robots must protect humans as their absolute, core, fundamental reason for being, what does that mean for humanity as a whole?

And thus, the so-called "Zeroth Law" arises: a higher priority than the protection and preservation of individual humans becomes the preservation of humanity as a whole. The Greater Good, essentially, becomes the robots' top priority. And that supersedes even the first law - meaning, in theory, if a human needed to die in order to save humanity as a whole, the robot would be capable of violating that law.

So far, the characterization of Demerzel in the Foundation series has been one of subservience. There's a strong emphasis on that second law - Demerzel is the undying, ageless servant of the emperor(s).

And indeed, there are times when Demerzel's age and wisdom does seem to suggest she is the true power of the throne. The Emperor's life is so scripted and sheltered that in many ways, the show demonstrates that he barely has any power over his own life - what power, then, could he have over the galactic empire?

Demerzel functions, thus, first as a mother, and then as a kind of trusted confidante, and finally as the daughter that ushers the emperors into their twilight (and disintegration).

And yet, in the last few episodes, Demerzel has seemed to truly be subservient to the emperor. Most glaringly, after Brother Dawn treks through the Spiral to the Mother's Womb in an effort to placate the Luminist religion, he orders Demerzel to murder Halima, the high-level cleric who had been undermining his legitimacy as emperor by suggesting that clones don't have souls. Demerzel performs this deed, though it seems to cause her much stress.

But here, it's not just a conflict of emotion, but a conflict with the foundational (pun unintended) concepts behind Asimov's fictional universe. Unless we find that this is actually some long game based on the Zeroth Law, it seems like she is just unable to disobey an order from the emperor. Sure, she's fulfilling the second law, but this is a blatant violation of the first.

We have one episode to go, and I would love to discover that the show is actually respecting the Laws of Robotics - I mean, why even introduce Demerzel if you didn't want to engage with those? But the show hasn't done a lot to generate good will in those viewers who actually think there are some really interesting philosophical concepts in those books.

And look, I hate to be the nerd pushing his metaphorical glasses back onto his nose while saying "um, actually" (though the College Humor gameshow of the same name and tone is very entertaining) but for a show that clearly has experts of their craft pouring a ton of love into it, I don't want this to be using Asimov's work as just a vague inspiration for what is ultimately a different story.

The show is done no favors by the recent release of Denis Villeneuve's Dune - while that film obviously leaves some parts out (and only covers the first half of the book,) it feels very much like an attempt to adapt that story, and not just some vaguely related story, to the big screen.

Dune

 What did I think?

I think I went in with very high expectations, and the film met them. Exceed them? I don't know about that. But again, those expectations were high.

Frank Herbert's novel is a doorstopper, and in two and a half hours, Denis Villeneuve's Dune Part One only covers the first half of the book - which is not to say that anything is even remotely spread thin here.

The movie is huge, grand, epic in scope. So it might come as a surprise to hear that I think the biggest success of the film is its restraint. Herbert's novel is one of extensive inner monologue. As I had just read through the extant books of A Song of Ice and Fire when I picked up Dune (about ten years ago) I likened the story to an epic of actually grander scale (though fewer central characters and locations), in which every character was operating on a Varys/Littlefinger level of political intrigue.

I started watching David Lynch's early 80s adaptation, but could not bear to even get past its prologue because of a pernicious instinct: to try to explain everything. Villeneuve thankfully understands that some things just aren't going to fit. But for those of us who enjoy those details, nothing in the film contradicts the existing backstory and inner thoughts - we just don't need to get all that stuff in there for the story to make sense.

As an example, at no point in the film is the term Mentat uttered, nor any backstory of the Butlerian Jihad. But both Thufir Hawat and Piter de Vries have small tattoos on their lower lips to signify the role they play. A viewer unfamiliar with the story will get that they're some sort of special advisor to the great Houses, which is ultimately what a Mentat is.

Lynch's film also gives voice over to most characters to allow the audience to hear their thoughts, but this film allows us to watch their actions and infer.

Naturally, it will be hard to avoid comparisons with the previous film adaptation. But what can we say uniquely about the movie itself?

First off, I don't think there's a weak link in the cast. Timothée Chalamet is believable as a teenaged Paul, carrying with him a quiet intelligence and wisdom beyond his years without losing an overall sense of youthful innocence. In the famous Gom Jabbar scene, his transition from pain and fear into resolve and, one imagines, plans for future wrath, is played note perfect - one senses that Mohiam suspects she's made a deadly enemy, even if she thinks the situation is still salvageable.

Jessica, of course, rivals Paul as the most important figure in the novel, and her characterization feels to me the most deviant from the novel - but out of necessity. Through her training as a Bene Gesserit, in the books Jessica rarely displays the powerful emotions that surge through her, but here she is much more visibly distraught, for example, when she has to stand guard outside the library where her superior might be about to kill her son. She and Paul are total teammates through most of the movie, even when he feels manipulated by the Bene Gesserit agenda. She will, of course, according to the book, remain his stalwart supporter, but the end of the movie, when Paul chooses to commit to his father's original plan of making the Fremen into their allies, is a moment where she realizes that she's not as in control of the situation as she perhaps previously thought.

Again, it's been a decade since I read the book, so this might be from it, but I like how Paul's visions mislead by being more metaphorical than literal. He sees visions of Jamis well before the two meet, and in the visions, Jamis is the friend who will teach him the ways of the desert. In practice, of course, Jamis "teaches" Paul by fighting him to the death, and showing that the Fremen people don't have the same concepts of mercy and conflict de-escalation - a duel is always one to the death, and a human body has to prove itself more useful than the water it contains.

Periodically, Paul sees a little desert mouse with giant ears (which it uses a bit like a stillsuit to collect moisture). Never named, readers will of course recognize this as the Muad'dib, which will come to be Paul's Fremen name and a symbol of his messianic role.

Now, about that:

Paul's role as a white guy (or at least one who reads as white, and certainly is of a privileged class within the setting) coming to a land of an oppressed minority and receiving worship from the masses is 100% part of the book, and more or less the central part of the book. I think it's important not to confuse portrayal with endorsement, though I also recognize that other viewers/readers might be put off by it.

Honestly, we don't really see much of the Fremen in this chapter until the end. I think part two, which will start filming around the end of next year, is where we'll need to see how well the film navigates those treacherous waters. After all, you can read Dune (at least the first book) as alternatively a hero's journey in which a young man embraces his destiny to lead a people out of oppression and win ultimate power as a result, or of a privileged noble who, in order to best his rivals, exploits the spiritual needs of an indigenous people to win him that power - which was his goal all along. (I don't recall it happening that early in the story, but when things are looking desperate, Paul brings up the idea of his marrying the Emperor's daughter, which Liet-Kynes laughs off given the poor position Paul is in to negotiate such a deal. Ultimately, that's exactly what he does, but I think this plants the suggestion that Paul may, indeed, have some ambitions after all).

I've also seen mention of the fact that none of the prominent Fremen characters are portrayed by actors from traditionally Muslim ethnicities. The Fremen, and indeed the whole story, is inspired by the rise of Islam, with the Fremen having an Arabic/Bedouin basis for their characterization.

On one hand, I think that a distant future like that of Dune (the movie introduces the year as 10,191 - though it doesn't specify that that's "A.G." rather than "C.E.", meaning it's even farther in the future than that number would suggest) would probably see any recognizable ethnicities mixed together, and then new ones arising from the separation of populations on other planets. On the other hand, however, Arab actors don't get, you know, a ton of roles in big Hollywood blockbusters, and it would have been nice to see them get these.

Also of note is that I've seen people suggesting that putting Stellan Skarsgard in a fat suit denies a potentially meaty role to a fat actor. Personally, I have a ton of internalized fat phobia (I'm a heavy person myself) and so I find myself a bit more ambivalent about this critique.

The Harkonnens here are visually striking, if a bit of a departure from their portrayal in the books. First of all, it's weird to me that it's pronounced "HAR-ko-nin" instead of "har-KO-nin" in the movie, the latter being how I always thought it would be pronounced. But setting that aside - this movie portrays them as being industrial and lavishly gothic - all people on Giedi Prime are hairless and pale white, and everyone wears only black, with a kind of industrial minimalism. I think in Herbert's book, they're actually fancy - though kind of "playing at" being cultured, with a strong sense of kitsch. It's like they enjoy the trappings of wealth but have no taste (like a certain would-be dictator who was living in the White House last year).

I kind of get changing this. Villeneuve's futuristic vision is one of grand scale and minimalistic decor, and he basically makes the Harkonnens all look like Vader did after Luke takes off his helmet at the end of Return of the Jedi. Star Wars' evil empire was partially inspired by Dune, so it's a fitting cinematic connection.

I'm curious to see how Chani is dealt with in the second movie. Here, Zendaya only actually appears as a real person in the last few scenes. Prior to that, she is a metaphor - an embodiment of the Fremen people. There is something kind of dark and creepy about the way that Paul lusts for Chani in his dreams while lusting after the power the Fremen will provide for him.

I am very curious to know how this movie would play to someone who had not read the book. I've been hearing that people like it, which is reassuring - as I said earlier, the movie doesn't worry about holding peoples' hands, letting those of who know the story fill in all the details about the CHOAM corporation and sappho juice and why the Fremen all nick their wrists with their crysknives when Paul and Jessica negotiate a truce.

It's a little sad we'll have to wait two years for the second part of this. I imagine that we'll probably only see the first book adapted, but we'll see.

Foundation, Seven Episodes In

 There's a balance to be struck with adapting Foundation.

There are a lot of ways in which Foundation, particularly its first few "books" or "chapters" or "segments" or whatever you want to call them, is deeply unconventional in terms of story structure.

We get a protagonist who usually represents some change to the status quo within the Foundation, which is often doubted by the establishment, but their alteration of the Foundation's course turns out not only to be what's necessary to preserve it and its mission, but also precisely what Hari Seldon predicted.

Dramatically, it self-sabotages, but in the interest of pursuing a really interesting intellectual concept.

At the heart of the story is the notion that human society is shaped by immense forces, rather than great individuals. It's a refutation of the "Great Man of History" theory.

But there's a great irony to that - after all, what is the Foundation if not the product of a Great Man like Hari Seldon?

I don't know if Asmiov intended this irony or if he would suggest that the development of Psychohistory was going to happen regardless.

Still, taken as a whole, those first few chapters serve less as a chance for drama itself (though there are space-battles and such) as it is to set up an expectation. With each chapter ending with one of Seldon's prerecorded messages showing that, yes, while things looked dicey there, he knew it was going to happen and it's all going according to plan.

And then the Mule shows up. A nobody who happens to have a genetic mutation that allows him to instantly alter the emotional reaction people have to him through some sort of psionic ability, the Mule rapidly gains power as he simply turns the powerful military leaders he encounters into loyal subjects who are fiercely devoted to him without losing any cognitive ability. And, as someone who suffered before he developed this ability, he has a vindictive grudge to go along with his imperial ambitions.

Probably the best scene in the "Foundation Trilogy" (the stories continued past them, and the stories were not originally published this way, but Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation are the books I've read) is when, in the midst of what the Foundation assumes is the latest Seldon Crisis, they go to the vault where his holographic recordings are viewed, expecting the message to describe their current situation and how it will be resolved - only for Seldon's premise to be utterly wrong, with his expecting them to be on the tail end of some civil war (one that was averted in the name of standing united against the Mule) and how this will bring about some crucial reforms and changes to the working of the Foundation that will guide them forward.

Suddenly, Seldon, who has been dead for centuries at this point, is no longer the omniscient, paternal reassurance, but just a video tape. And panic erupts.

The Mule takes up two of the "chapters" of the Foundation series, (if I recall correctly, the back half of Foundation and Empire and the first half of Second Foundation) but that reversal almost makes the somewhat stuffy narrative of the first book and a half worth it.

So, the needs of a TV show are different.

But I do wonder if Apple TV's Foundation is taking too many liberties - not just with plot, but through its plot, theme.

Supposedly, one of Frank Herbert's inspirations for Dune was a rejection of Asimov's core premise for Foundation - in Foundation, the Mule is an aberration meant to be corrected for, and by the end of the first half of Second Foundation, the eponymous organization basically succeeds. Herbert, however, thought that it was far more interesting to have a protagonist who upsets the status quo.

In fact, you could argue that it's Jessica, not Paul, who is the real protagonist of Dune. She is the one who chooses to have a son rather than a daughter, and thus upset millennia of careful planning by the Bene Gesserit.

In a lot of ways, the Bene Gesserit share a lot with the Foundation - they guide humanity, and likely think they are safeguarding humanity in doing so. Jessica's decision might not have been intended to upset that balance, but it does awaken a certain ability in Paul that he was not supposed to have. And then, it's her decision to have Paul play the part of the Fremen messianic figure.

Paul is an aberration as well - not only in his special abilities (which were intended for the son he was supposed to mother - though given Leto II's role in the narrative, I sort of feel like it might have actually worked out that way anyway?) but also because he upends the plans of the major factions.

Anyway, Dune has, I'd say, a more compelling narrative (I think Herbert was also just a better writer of characters and prose). And so I'm given to understand that by sticking more or less with the plot as shown in the book with the new movie, said movie has been a big success (I'm probably going to see it tomorrow).

Anyway, the point is:

The Apple TV show has vastly expanded the plot of the first "chapter" of the story. Honestly, the stuff with the invading Anacreons and the stuff with the Emperor has been pretty decent. Where I find myself growing frustrated is the stuff with Gaal.

It's pretty clear to me that this is meant to set up the backstory for the Second Foundation - especially with the reveal that Gaal has some kind of psychic ability. But there are a few things that feel like they're really flying in the face of the story:

For one, we have Hari Seldon masterminding not just broad movements of history, but micromanaging individuals - claiming that Raych had to be the one to found the Second Foundation and Gaal had to be running the first one. But Psychohistory as a sci-fi concept only seems believable because of the modesty of its claims - it only works when the anomalies of individuals are smoothed down by the enormous sample size. I could even imagine Seldon suggesting that it wouldn't work for a single planet (like our modern Earth) because the sample size is too small and individuals have too much of an outsized influence. The Galactic Empire imagined by Asmiov is one in which entire worlds are just a tiny fraction of the population.

I also think that it's important that the Second Foundation isn't born out of people who have spontaneously developed psionic abilities - instead, it's that while the first Foundation is preserving and developing physical sciences and technology, the Second Foundation is dedicated to developing, effectively, psychological technology.

What the show is doing, effectively, is making Gaal into a Mule way before the story is ready for a Mule.

Indeed, I think that the show has done a decent enough job of selling the stakes of the invading Anacreons that it could pull off the "yep, everything's going according to plan" thing without feeling too dramatically undercut. But I think that the showrunners have mistaken the central figures of each chapter as being "chosen ones" rather than simply "the person who happens to fill the role that history was going to give someone". While yes, I get that that's more conventional storytelling, I think you're totally missing the point of Foundation.

And if you wanted to subvert the point (or maybe interpreted Asimov's stories as being a refutation of their own initial premise, which is an argument I'd be willing to hear,) you could do it in a less hackneyed way.

As great as Jared Harris is, I don't want to have a sentient hologram of his Hari Seldon effectively keeping his character alive indefinitely.

Am I going to keep watching? Yes, probably. I've really liked the stuff with the three emperors (basically one huge invention of the show, but a successful one) and the ways in which seemingly benign things (like the current Dawn's attempts to hide his deficiencies and live his life) will, presumably, play a major role in the downfall of the Empire.

But I don't really have any faith that the show is going to commit to the heady concepts that are at the core of Asimov's works.

(The early introduction of Demerzel is interesting. I've been watching her with an understanding of what she really represents - I'd love to see the show actually go into the three laws of robotics (and the zeroth law) though I also understand that, given her position, she can't really talk about anything but the 2nd when interacting with the Emperor. In the books, of course, it's eventually revealed that she - or rather he, in the books - has actually been playing the Bene Gesserit role since the very beginning of the empire and before, and that he's actually R. Daneel Olivaw, the very first sentient robot and one who figured out that it was robots' responsibility to preserve humanity. Among the things he does is subtly nudge Hari Seldon into developing psychohistory. Not sure what to make of the idea in the show that she at least claims to follow Luminism.)

Foundation

 Interesting that this year marks adaptations of two of the great space epics of the mid-20th century. Later this month, Denis Villeneuve's Dune comes out (something I've been very excited for) while Apple TV has released four of the ten episodes in its adaptation of Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories.

Both of these stories are enormously epic in scale, both set in distant futures in which the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, even after we've spread to countless worlds. And both concern the fate of empires.

Asmiov's Foundation stories jump from time period to time period, following new protagonists and new eras, which is one of the reasons that an adaptation would be very difficult to pull off. The other is that the first few chapters of the stories are, well, hardly even stories. They're intellectually very interesting, and there are some space battles and a lot of thoughts about how an organization whose initial purpose is basically to build a high-stakes Wikipedia transforms into the dominant power within the galaxy.

Let's rewind:

In the distant future, the Galactic Empire, whose capitol is on the massive ecumenopolis of Trantor, is shaken by the conclusions of the mathematician Hari Seldon. Seldon has devised a radical new branch of mathematics that essentially combines sociology with statistics and probability theory (and is far more advanced than anything our modern scientists would devise, of course,) which purports to predict the course of the future on a galactic scale. And, most troublingly, he discovers that the Empire, which has kept trillions of people in relative safety and stability for over ten thousand years, is going to collapse in a matter of centuries.

Seldon claims that the aftermath of this collapse will be a horrifying 30,000-year dark age - over twice the lifespan of the empire - filled with death and barbarism. However, he believes that if steps are taken, that dark age could be reduced to a mere thousand years. To do so, he wishes to create a Foundation, which will preserve the knowledge of humanity and accelerate the rebuilding of civilization.

Rather than having him killed, the Emperor sends Seldon and his followers to a remote world known as Terminus, and it's there that the Foundation is established.

Over the course of the books, the Foundation encounters a number of crises, which often forces them to transform their mission - becoming a trading empire, and then a religious church that has control over technology. With each crisis, however, Hari Seldon's holographic records kept in a vault are unlocked and basically show that he predicted these events, and that this is all part of the plan.

Which, again, lets some of the air out of the dramatic tires, as it were, until the narrative is forced to change.

Apple's adaptation of Foundation naturally takes some creative license, which was probably necessary to make the thing work.

In its first four episodes, we begin with Gaal, a mathematician from a remote world that is dominated by an anti-intellectual religious order, who leaves home to work for Hari Seldon after winning a galaxy-wide mathematics competition. Through her, we're introduced to Trantor and the precarious situation that Seldon is in.

In the books, the Emperor is a fairly uninteresting character. The show invents a convention that I was initially skeptical about, but winds up being very interesting - every emperor is a clone of Cleon I, who ruled 400 years ago (not at the beginning of the empire, but the beginning of the current era.) At any given time, there are three clones of Cleon - one young, one middle-aged, and one old, referred to as Brothers Dawn, Day, and Dusk. This allows the show, as it jumps generations, to have the same actors portray the Emperor, but different version of him. Lee Pace, who plays Day, transitions from the Emperor who banishes Seldon to the boy who stood and watched as he did, and it's a cool acting challenge that Pace does a great job with (as does Terrence Mann, who plays Brother Dusk).

My ultimate opinion on the show is certainly still forming. The jury is out on some of the characters, especially given that the ones that the first couple episodes really focus on seem to have been phased out by around episode 3 - though that is of course the nature of the story (it does look like some shenanigans will allow us to see figures return, though.)

The show approaches this challenge in part with conventions like the Emperor's rotating clones (though I imagine that we're eventually going to see that cycle break down, unless the show is going to seriously deviate from the books even more by keeping the Emperor an element throughout.)

Actually, the Emperor is probably the most noteworthy element of the show at this point. We know that his arrogance and dismissal of Seldon's predictions marks him as a doomed villain, but there's also something a little tragic about him - each emperor is forced to walk the same path has his predecessor, his only family is reflections of himself, and frankly, his closest companion, the ageless majordomo Demerzel (whose nature is not revealed until far later in the books) seems to be the one who actually wields true power.

Naturally, the show looks very different than how I imagined the series it when I read it, though that's to its benefit. For whatever reason, Asimov's prose conjured a future that was strangely mundane, and so I mostly pictured a fairly ordinary-looking mid-century aesthetic with a bit of 70s used-future. Apple has a shit ton of money, and it sure looks like they spared no expense - the series has a big-budget movie feel to it. A catastrophic terror attack that occurs in the first episode and marks the beginning of the Empire's visible downfall is rendered in breathtaking detail (and is also deeply disturbing in its focus on the innocent people realizing their doom as the massive structure they are on collapses.)

Representation here is also significantly better. While its later entries develop some compelling characters who are also women, the first few stories in Asmiov's opus have practically no women (there's like one who is a misogynistic caricature without a real name). The series reimagines both Gaal and Salvor Hardin as women of color, and also makes Demerzel a woman, which does serve to make the story a little less cringeworthy.

Jared Harris, who plays Seldon, is appropriate casting, though as with the books, his role is to be the catalyst for the story, and not its protagonist. Harris is a versatile performer and one that I'm generally happy to see - I wish we could get more of his character on The Expanse, but I think it likely that his plot is basically done and has been for a few seasons now.

I think that purists will probably balk at all the invention the show does, though I think that a totally faithful adaptation would be unwatchable. The AV Club's reviews have pointed out that Salvor Hardin is being set up as a kind of chosen-one figure, and there are certainly elements to her character that are a bit off the themes of the original stories. I suspect that this is an attempt to keep the story easier to follow - ideally, we'd get a dynamic ensemble cast that collectively work together to fulfill their stage of Seldon's plan, but I think the producers and writers might have worried that getting to know an entire cast of characters only to move on from them in the next era might be too much to handle. By keeping things focused on the individual, we can see a baton passed from generation to generation.

I do wonder if this show would be getting more attention if it weren't on Apple TV. While Apple has been throwing a ton of money into their streaming service, I think that the momentum that brands like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime have are a bit tough to compete with. Obviously, Ted Lasso has been doing a lot for Apple's entertainment brand, but while I think Apple has been hoping for this to be their Game of Thrones (albeit one that doesn't end so catastrophically) I don't think we're seeing the same level of buzz for it. Admittedly, it wasn't until the end of the first season that Game of Thrones really took off as a cultural phenomenon, but I think the reaction to Foundation has been somewhat less enthusiastic.

Indeed, it might just be a victim of the fact that epic television is no longer the novelty it was when GoT came out. The notion of a massive genre epic coming to the small screen was fairly unthinkable at the time. Now, though, there's precedence, and everyone is trying to capture the zeitgeist the way that GoT did.

Foundation also has the age-old problem: some might view it as cliche, when in fact, it's the story that established many of the tropes now seen as cliches. The city-planet was a novel idea when Asimov wrote about Trantor. A galactic empire was novel as well. Even the notion of specialized faster-than-light ships was, if not original to Asmiov, at least a pretty recent idea (I know that the Alcubierre drive, which is more or less the warp engine from Star Trek, appeared in Ursula K. LeGuin's books, along with the Ansible).

Still, I'm compelled to watch more, and I'm eager to see how the story evolves. There are changes, of course, but I'm going to try to take the show on its own terms. Yes, the Asimov books don't get really awesome until the Mule shows up, but I think the showrunners are trying hard to make the build-up to his appearance equally compelling.

Only Murders in the Building

 I've just watched the first two episodes of the new Hulu show: Only Murders in the Building. True Crime as a podcast genre has become extremely popular, with shows like Serial encouraging listeners to try to piece together clues about real-life cases (usually murders) that are at least presented by the shows as more complex than perhaps the initial investigators had considered.

We're introduced to our three main characters as they walk about New York, each doing a voice-over monologue that could possibly be the opening of a podcast (and indeed, one of them winds up being just that) while we get a sense of who they are.

Steve Martin plays Charles, an actor who once had a lead on a detective show in the early 90s called Brazzos, and it seems he has been living off of residuals for that role since then. Martin Short is Oliver, a theater director who lives big and theatrically, but hasn't worked in years. Finally, Selena Gomez is Mabel, a closed off and bitter young woman who seems to have a whole lot of anger within her.

The three of them live in a giant old Manhattan apartment building called the Arconia. And each of them follows the same True Crime podcast, Not OK in Oklahoma. When a fire alarm goes off and sends exiles all the residents of the building to a nearby cafe late at night, the three meet and bond over this podcast, but when they return to the Arconia, they find out that a man they'd just shared an elevator ride with has apparently just killed himself.

The police are convinced it was a suicide, but the three of them are sure that there's more going on (even when the detective berates them as a bunch of true-crime-obsessed dipshits). Defying the police, the three of them team up to make their own true crime podcast investigating the death of Tim Kono.

The tone here is actually not quite as silly as one might expect. It's interesting to see Martin Short in particular playing a more grounded character, even though the characters' narcissism and cluelessness is a great source of humor.

The show instead plays a fun game where the mystery does, in fact, grow significantly deeper as more details are revealed, and we find that our own protagonists are hiding secrets from one another even as they play the amateur sleuths. To go into further detail would be a spoiler even for the first two episodes.

Thus, this winds up being one of those "have your cake and eat it too" styles of parody, where we can laugh at the impulse to get caught up in these sorts of mysteries while also getting caught up in the mysteries of the show itself.

Spider-Man: No Way Home Teaser Released

 After an early leak, Sony and Marvel have released the teaser (though this is a pretty detail-filled trailer to call it a teaser) for the third MCU Spider-Man movie: No Way Home.

The premise, it seems, is a classic case of Peter Parker trying to fix one of his problems by introducing a whole new problem.

In the post-credits scene of Spider-Man: Far From Home, Peter and MJ take a romantic web-swing around New York, only to see JK Simmons' J. Jonah Jameson, reimagined in the MCU as an Alex Jones-style far-right conspiracy slinger, releasing footage doctored by Mysterio's effects team to not only unmask Peter, but also implicate him in Mysterio's death.

Here, we catch up with Peter dealing with the repercussions of his identity being revealed - though he seems to beat the charges in Mysterio's death, he's hounded by people who no longer trust him and now threaten his family.

But Peter Parker knows a freaking wizard, so he goes to Doctor Strange and has the Sorcerer Supreme cast a spell to undo his doxxing, but when he realizes that this would also mean that those close to him would forget his secret identity as well. The spell, naturally, goes wrong, and it seems that he and Doctor Strange are sent on a universe-hopping adventure.

While it was discovered many months ago, the most exciting and mind-bending reveal here is that this movie looks like it will be melding the canon of the earlier, pre-MCU movies. The trailer reveals both the return of Willem Dafoe's Green Goblin and Alfred Molina's Doctor Octopus (the latter somewhat more explicitly, as he actually shows up on screen.) Supposedly Jaime Foxx's Electro will also appear, meaning that the earlier Spider-Man movies are, in fact, canonical, but from other universes.

The MCU Spider-Man movies have been delightful, with a great young cast and the requisite ties to the greater Marvel universe. But it definitely seems that Marvel is committed to this multiversal theme, and gets to do some fan service along the way.

Black Widow

 For years, there was a question everyone had about the MCU: why the hell isn't there a Black Widow movie? Black Widow and Hawkeye were introduced in Iron Man 2 and Thor, respectively, giving us a first look at the two Avengers who would not get their own solo movies before the big team-up in 2012 (you could be forgiven for forgetting the the Edward Norton-starring Incredible Hulk movie is still MCU canon, even if they switched to the much better-cast Mark Ruffalo with the Avengers - Norton's a fine actor, don't get me wrong, but Ruffalo is perfect for Bruce Banner.)

While Hawkeye is very few people's favorite Avenger (though one of the better parts of the sub-par Age of Ultron is making Clint a more interesting character,) Johansson brings top-tier A-list movie stardom to her role. So we were all left wondering why the hell she didn't get a solo movie.

As it turns out, it's because the former head of Marvel Studios, Isaac Perlmutter, is kind of a racist, misogynistic piece of shit, who put the kibosh on superhero movies that didn't star white dudes. When Perlmutter was kicked upstairs and Kevin Feige was put in charge of the studio (Feige being a rarity in that he's sort of a producer-as-auteur) we started seeing things like Captain Marvel and Black Panther, which proved (Black Panther especially) that audiences will be very excited to see these big-budget movies that take other perspectives.

But it is a little weird that it took so long to get a Black Widow movie. And now, of course, there's also the controversy over how Disney screwed Johansson out of her cut by releasing the movie on Disney Plus along with theaters. While it's a perfectly natural and responsible decision to do the Disney Plus release (which, in fact, is how I saw the movie) in the midst of a pandemic that is sadly roaring back thanks to the Delta Variant (seriously, if you haven't gotten vaccinated yet, please just fucking do it,) but they should have given her an equivalent cut of the sales. (And if you want to argue that a movie star like Scarlett Johansson doesn't need the many millions of dollars this deal should be giving her, I'll point out that Disney needs it even less, and she's pretty clearly wronged party in this case - I hope they settle with her. And if Kevin Feige was willing to weigh in on her side of the argument, I think that probably means Disney knows it'll have to settle.)

But jeez, we haven't even gotten to the movie.

Spoilers ahead: