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.