Andor's Finale: An Antifascist Rallying Cry

 The current era is a fraught one. There are things that we took for granted that now seem to be cast in doubt. As the grandson of Holocaust survivors and a World War II Veteran who fought for America against the fascists in Italy, it always seemed obvious to me that fascism, as a system, a worldview, and a political philosophy, were anathema to all things right-headed and good. I still believe that. What shocked me, is that over the better part of a decade, I've seen people embrace it, happy to reject the kind of freedom that liberal democracy strives to provide in exchange for brutality.

In part, I think it's because the fascists were so profoundly evil that they became a shorthand for any system you didn't like. As an example, in the 1990s, critics of feminism accused people who spoke out against sexism as "feminazis," which not only painted feminists as the "bad guys" by ironically associating them with an oppressive political movement steeped in traditionalist nostalgia, but also diluted the meaning of fascism and naziism to ignore the actual far-right ideologies that form their basis, which include a fetishization of violence and the belief in the total dominance of a patriarchal order, among other traditionalist values.

George Lucas chose to code the Galactic Empire as Nazis. Their obsession with greyscale uniforms, the use of "stormtroopers" as their elite troops, and the implication that the upper echelons of its power base were all jockeying for position in a deadly game all contributed to a clear parallel with Naziism.

Spoilers for the season finale of Andor, season one, as well as Mad Max Fury Road.

Andor and the True Cost of Rebellion

 I think it's prudent to be cautious in praising a show too much simply because it is connected to a nostalgic franchise. Andor is not the best show ever made. But it is good. It's good enough not to be graded on the curve of "well, it's not great, but I like being in this world again" - something I'd confess colors my reaction to Rings of Power, which is fine but not superlative.

SPOILER WARNING: There will be spoilers for Rogue One here, as well as spoilers for everything before the season finale of the first season of Andor.

Star Wars has always used fascist imagery to depict the Empire, and its variants like the First Order in the sequel series. But this reading is usually relatively thin - the Nazis were the biggest villains of the 20th Century, and are so synonymous with evil that people who espouse many of the same philosophical conceits behind it will use the term to accuse people they disagree with as being the "real" bad guys.

The Empire as we see in Andor shows its true awfulness by giving us insight into the lives of its supporters. Syril Karn, the corporate rent-a-cop detective, desperately wants to catch Andor for killing two police officers (that he does not seem to know or remotely care that Andor did so in self-defense is something we'll get to,) but when his attempt to take the man in fails spectacularly, getting some of his men killed, along with the added humiliation of being caught and disarmed, he still clings to this case as the only way for him to redeem himself. And he starts basically stalking a member of the ISB (essentially the Empire's Gestapo) in the hopes that he can contribute to the capture of this one man who represents something so crucial to him.

And what is that?

Karn wants the brutality to amount to something. He seems perfectly content for the Empire to bulldoze over him - even when Dedra Meero, the ISB agent, threatens to basically have him disappeared for continuing to butt into her business, he doesn't really relent. He wants the Empire to be the perfect image of efficiency and order that he imagines it to be.

There's a cliche where people will defend fascism and other totalitarian systems by saying "well, it's awful, but at least the trains run on time." The irony here is that, in fact, totalitarian systems are almost always deeply inefficient. The trains did not run on time in Italy under Mussolini. Instead, these regimes simply outlaw the ability to speak up about the trains being late, or any other words that are critical of the state's way of running things.

Of course, what this means is that in a free society, you're hearing the citizenry complain all the time, while in authoritarian societies, they can't, so it makes democracy and liberalism look inefficient, when in fact it's far more efficient (in part, because when you allow people to complain, you know where the problems need fixing).

Star Wars has always had a "Used Future" aesthetic, which gives the world a feeling of realism that many love. But Andor really emphasizes how old and, well, crappy things look. While I hate to say anything praising the prequels, Lucas clearly wanted to show that the Old Republic was something of a golden age - clearly with problems that were allowing a rot to seep in, but you see the slick spaceships and luxurious locales, and you get the sense that, yeah, life is definitely a lot better under that system than the Empire.

When Andor is arrested in some kind of beach resort, even this place looks run down - like, maybe it was really nice 30 years ago, but it's just kind of ugly now.

Mon Mothma, we learn, lives in a government-owned apartment, which is stark and kind of soulless while ostensibly luxurious. It's like a uniform of elitism and style that the regime has forced her to wear. At a fancy dinner party, she has the most inane conversation about how wonderful it is that they have a window, and you can see why she wants this system to die.

The prison on Narkina 5, where Andor spends several episodes in an Orwellian nightmare, is kind of the perfect encapsulation of the totalitarian style. The prisoners are promised freedom if they comply and simply act as good, productive workers, even though that's a lie and every sentence is a life sentence. The workers are also pitted against one another, punishing whoever is in last place on productivity (my theory is that they're making wing struts for TIE Fighters) so that the prisoners will learn animosity for their fellow inmates. But then, it's all kind of a facade - the ominous voice is just some dweeb behinds a desk with a voice modulator, and the Empire is saving money on guards by understaffing. Ultimately, it's not really that hard for the prisoners to revolt and take over the facility, even if it does cost them several lives.

And here, we turn to the rebellion.

When Luke Skywalker is introduced, the Rebellion is in full force. The Rebels are not really something the original movies goes into great detail about - just as the Empire is evil, the Rebels are good, and it's the right team for Luke to join.

But rebelling against a despotic regime is an extremely difficult thing to do, and one that often requires doing some very dirty work. We're introduced to a number of characters who are or will be rebels, and the throughline is that these are people who fight for a future that they will never see.

Let's start with Luthen, a character whose archetype is one I love - the heroically sinister. Luthen is basically the spymaster who is in the proto-Rebellion that has yet to take form. I'm a real sucker for cloak-and-dagger stuff, and Luthen is kind of the perfect example of the kind of hero that such stories require. His goals are noble and heroic - he wants to take down the Empire and allow a free and democratic society to reemerge. But he is also extremely practical. When his agent in the ISB tells him they know about a rebel faction's upcoming raid on an Imperial facility, he decides to let the Empire trap and almost certainly kill the guy and his 30 people in order to protect the source. He is not ready to play that card, and thus he elects to allow these heroic people to go to there certain deaths.

When speaking with his ISB mole, we see what he is willing to sacrifice to see the Empire fall - and that is his own future in whatever better society is to come. There is no happily ever after for Luthen - one way or another, he knows he'll die eventually, or at best live on in obscurity. While the more conventional fighters who win the day will be able to bask in the dawn of a new era, Luthen will always be stuck in the shadows, his only consolation knowing that he allowed others to live free.

We get this same dynamic in microcosm with Kino, the fellow prisoner and floor boss at Narkina 5. Kino believes, when Andor gets there, the lies that they've been told - that if they keep their head down and just keep working, they'll eventually be free. And his gruff demeanor, we learn, is there to protect his fellow prisoners from doing something that could get them killed. But once he finds out the truth, he becomes a leader to his men, inciting them to riot and revolt, and ultimately, he leads the prisoners to victory as they overthrow the guards and make it out of the prison.

But as they reach the final escape - the plunge into the sea below - he reveals that he cannot swim. He had to know that they would need to jump into the water to escape, and that he would never be able to do so. But that's the point: he's fighting a rebellion not for himself, but for others. He won't taste freedom, but because of the efforts he makes and the risks he takes, others will.

Finally, we should reflect on the fact that we know what Andor's eventual fate will be. In Rogue One, he and Jyn Erso lead the assault to capture the blueprints for the Death Star, and while the plans just barely get to Princess Leia and then, via R2-D2, to the Rebel forces on Yavin IV, Andor is killed when the Death Star obliterates the surface of Scarif. His own fight will lead to his death. Cassian Andor never gets to see the New Republic take shape (or fall apart 30 years later thanks to the First Order, but let's just set that aside for the time being).

Andor, the show, is about the high price of rebelling against an oppressive power structure. But it's also about the intolerable cost of leaving it unopposed. The Empire wants people afraid so that it can grind them down. It grinds down those who oppose it, but it even grinds down its supporters. Syril is reduced to a pathetic remnant of the minuscule dignity he once possessed, and still wants to give his very soul to the Empire, like some kind of human sunk-loss fallacy. And even in the elite level of society that Mon Mothma inhabits, there's a sense that it's just empty at the top. There's nothing to really aspire to in this system.

As it stands, I'm most curious to see what becomes of Dedra Meero. She is a true believer in the ISB, and in a position of power. She is the Empire. I want to see what becomes of her.

Andor and a New(ish) Take on Star Wars

 Not to bum everyone out from the get-go, but I didn't know it at the time, but the last movie my mom ever went to see in the theaters was Star Wars: Rogue One. I might assign that greater significance that she would have, as while she was the more artistically-oriented of my parents, I'm probably the biggest cinephile in the family.

Rogue One is an odd movie, but one that I had a great deal of respect for. While canonical within the Star Wars universe, its tone was bleaker - all these movies (7 before it had come out) about wars in the stars, and this was the first that actually felt like a war movie.

I tend to refer to Star Wars as fantasy because, structurally, it's more fantasy than science fiction. It concerns itself with grand notions like the moral battle between good and evil, and tends to focus on the actions of essentially magically-empowered heroes with a grand destiny to fulfill.

The presence of space ships, aliens, and robots of course put it in a science fiction setting, and one should also remember that science fiction has a long tradition of incorporating fantastical elements.

Rogue One only involved Darth Vader tangentially - his actions at the end of the movie show what a profound horror he is, and how he individually makes up about half the Empire's menace. But the movie set its focus on people who had no magic powers, and who still fought despite being mere mortals. And it showed that, when you aren't protected by a heroic destiny, people in wars often die.

Andor is technically a prequel to a prequel (or a prequel to an interquel, if you prefer, or a spinoff to a spinoff.) It takes one of the key characters from Rogue One, the sort of secondary protagonist Cassian Andor, and tells us his story of becoming a spy for the Rebellion.

Much as the film that introduced us to its title character, Andor feels different than other things we've seen Disney do with Star Wars. (I'll confess here that I never watched the Obi-Wan show and only watched the first episode of the Boba Fett one before checking out.) Having been a bit burned out on Star Wars, I didn't get in on this as soon as it came out, but after a somewhat slow first episode (I wish that these shows would at least act like they need to win us over in the pilot) I found myself really appreciating the difference in tone.

I always worry I'll come off as naive when I suggest that some mega-franchise that caters a lot to our childhood nostalgia (45 years' worth at this point in Star Wars' case) is making mature, adult stuff. But Andor... might be that.

And I don't just mean "dark." I think there's a certain genre of audience (typically adult men in their 20s and sometimes 30s) who feel that darkness is synonymous with maturity. Eventually, you hit a point (hopefully) where you realize that unrelenting doom and gloom can be its own version of childish. Andor is dark, in the sense that there are morally complex things that happen - Andor shoots a man who is at his mercy in the first episode, which is probably the best thing for him to do at the time, but still technically murder.

This killing, of a pair of private security officers who try to shake Andor down, ignites a hunt for him. We follow Detective Inspector Syril Karn, who decides that they won't sweep this under the rug so they can give a good report to the actual Imperial authorities, but decides to hunt the killer down.

Karn is interesting because he's clearly the protagonist of his own story. We see him frustrated by the inefficiencies and indignities of being some half-rate rent-a-cop, and puts into practice a desire for what he thinks of as justice.

But he is either blind to the hypocrisies of the system under which he serves or embraces them. Basically, he's a fascist, and the sort of person who likely thought they would thrive under the Empire. But we also see how a system like the Empire grinds away both those who resist it and those who embrace it.

There's a great deal of worldbuilding in just the episodes I've seen, and we get a fuller picture of how the Empire functions. The banality of evil is something that you don't often see in epic narratives like Star Wars, but societal evils require a certain numbness. We get a strong sense here that the reason the Empire was allowed to form was that people in the Old Republic were simply not willing to stand up to it, seeing it too easily as a minor transition, a change of name, but business being business.

This, of course, feels pretty relevant to the current state of things in our own real world, and I can easily see how existing anxieties about the rise and, even more disturbingly, normalization of fascism is here used as inspiration for the story. Star Wars has always borrowed imagery from World War II, using Nazi Germany as the most obvious visual reference for its evil empire - after all, what regime in living memory, and perhaps all of history, better embodied evil? But the original movies were light on delving into the nuances of how a fascistic society winds up that way and how it works. Really, it meant that we could feel no remorse whatsoever when a space station with thousands of people on board got destroyed.

I don't know where this series is going, but I've been impressed with what I've seen so far.

Thoughts on the Rings of Power and The Purpose of Humanity, Inspired by Rings of Power

 So, appropriately enough, I think The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings are the first high fantasy novels I ever read. Actually, if I'm being totally honest, I haven't read a ton of high fantasy. I've read more classic science fiction. But in the summer before my freshman year of high school, procrastinating on reading Ender's Game, which was the required reading (a book that is actually quite interesting, and all the more shocking when you realize that the homoerotic subtext was almost certainly accidental on the part of its homophobic author,) I delved into The Hobbit, and then, during the school year, I made my way through Lord of the Rings. The copies of each of these books (the exception being the Two Towers) were the short-run edition with concept art from the then-upcoming movies by Peter Jackson. The timing was perfect: I read through the books, and then the next year, in December of my Sophomore year (a year that, honestly, felt more notable at the time for 9/11 and the beginning of the War on Terror) we went to see The Fellowship of the Ring, and I freaking loved it.

I remember that John Rhys-Davies said he thought the series was going to be bigger than Star Wars, and I scoffed with skepticism, but while I think probably in the long run, they don't have quite the same cultural impact, in my personal pantheon of movies, they occupy similar spots near the top.

I tried reading the Silmarillion at some point, but I wasn't in a space to appreciate the dry, not-at-all-novelistic tone of the book. I wonder if I'd get more out of it now.

Anyway, the point here is to establish my experience with these works. I'm not a Tolkien scholar, but merely someone who loved the books and the movies, and wanted to get some thoughts down.

As the poem tells us, there are a total of 20 Rings of Power - Nine for humans, seven for dwarves, three for elves, and one made in secret by Sauron for his own uses.

But one of the things Tolkien was never really explicit about was what these rings actually did.

In practice, the One Ring when used by Bilbo, Frodo, Gollum, and briefly Sam, makes them invisible. As dramatized in Peter Jackson's movies, this also appears to be the effect it has on Isildur.

In Rings of Power, the power that Sauron is searching for, and the one the rings seem to be tied to, is the "power of the unseen world," and I think that the "invisibility" is more of a shift into that unseen world - which is why beings who already exist there, like the Ringwraiths, have no problem seeing someone wearing the Ring.

But the One Ring is kind of the big exception. It's there to tap into the others and connect Sauron to greater power - kind of pulling half of him into that unseen world, and thus when it is taken from him, he loses his connection to the physical world.

The other rings, though, are not as well-defined. In terms of specific effects, we really only see the results of using the nine rings for humans. These extend the humans lives beyond their natural spans, and as such, their bodies wither away until all that remains is the twisted, invisible wraiths that remain of their spirits.

In Tolkien's world, mortality is actually a "gift" from Eru Iluvatar - the thing that distinguishes elves and humans, and in fact a sign that Eru actually considers humans his favorite creation.

Which is weird.

Humans are shown to be far more fallible, ugly, and corruptible than elves. Indeed, I believe Tolkien conceived of his elves as what humanity would be like without Original Sin (though Tolkien's world doesn't have any religious practice as we'd understand it, Tolkien's own Catholic views were written into the source code of the world). Now, here my Tolkien knowledge is a bit spotty, but beyond the elves ageless form of immortality, in which they can only die from injury or heartache, but otherwise just stop aging after a certain point, I think that even if they do die, they are reborn in Valinor, eternally returning to the world (even if Valinor is arguably not really "in the world" anymore).

Humans die, though. They grow old and weak and eventually succumb.

Now, philosophically, I know there are some who argue that having a limited time to exist is a positive thing, granting meaning to one's life by its bounds (something of the argument that was made in the end of The Good Place,) but I imagine that Tolkien's reasoning for making mortality a good thing was likely instead that, ultimately, humans would be able to ascend beyond anything like the physical world, and join Eru at the pinnacle of reality (in other words, they get to go to heaven while the elves are simply reborn endlessly).

This, then, is quite a boon.

One of Sauron's means of manipulating humans is to stoke fear in humanity of their own mortality. The thing that was meant to be a gift to them from Eru is thus cultivated as humanity's greatest fear. Hence, the promise of longevity or even immortality is a powerful tool Sauron uses to get humans to join him.

As someone who would love to know that there's a benevolent God and a happy afterlife waiting for me, but who by no means feels certain or even confident that there is, the threat of dark oblivion being the form death takes would certainly make me receptive to someone who could promise that I'd be able to live forever.

Another way that people have described the Rings of Power is that they supercharge the inherent nature of the people wearing them. For the elves, the rings were there to allow them to preserve the life they had, and keep the vivid lands they held from growing dull and losing their supernatural beauty. The eternal nature of elves, and their fear of change, gets enhanced and manifested by the rings.

The dwarves' rings push them to greater search for riches. Again, I don't think the dwarves are "greedy," (while Tolkien said some progressive things about Jews during his life, I also can't help but notice that the people with a Semitic-based language are also obsessed with gems and gold and feel a little wary of his biases, but I prefer to give him the benefit of the doubt - there's plenty of other racial and especially classist things that are much easier to criticize) their drive to mine and craft and build gets supercharged. Dwarves are not as fleshed out as the other cultures in Middle Earth, and the dwarf rings are also the ones that aren't all accounted for. But you could imagine that a ring might have driven the dwarves of Khazad-Dum to delve deep and mine mithril without checking for the signs of some ancient evil like the Balrog beneath them.

Humans, we know, get the curse/benefit of not dying from their rings. But what is the defining trait for humans in Tolkien's Legendarium? If the elves were created to be caretakers of the world, their eternal, conservative and conservationist nature makes perfect sense. Aulë made the dwarves, but Eru gave them sentience because Eru's humility and genuine empathy for what Aulë was trying to do allowed Him to share the glory, and as the creation of a craftsman, the dwarves were dedicated to that. So, what is the purpose for humans?

That's obviously a question that I imagine Tolkien felt was for Eru to know and for mere mortals to have to merely contemplate. But to look at what humans are supposed to be, let's look at how they fail.

After all, the problematic behaviors of the other races are born out of their initial purposes. The rings supercharge elements of their natures that are meant to be for good, but pushes them into the extremes.

And the evil of humanity? It's generally tied up in ambition. Humans are driven to greatness, to become legends, and kings, and powerful. Their corruptibility is their willingness to accept evil if it grants them power.

But what if that means that power is, in fact, humanity's birthright?

Where I differ significantly from Tolkien is my total rejection of the legitimacy of monarchs. But in his fiction, Tolkien makes Aragorn something of a messianic figure - in a way, a more literal messiah than the one at the center of Christianity, because the concept of messiah in Judaism is a King who will return to lead the Jewish people. Gondor, and really humanity in general on Middle-Earth, has been waiting for the King to return, and Aragorn's return means the salvation of humanity on Middle-Earth.

But while, as a proud American, I spit on the concept of being ruled by a King (whether literal or figurative,) Tolkien takes great effort to show that Aragorn is the ideal king. Power is his right, and Tolkien shows that it's not just because of who his parents are, but also the way that he conducts himself. The thing that proves him to be the rightful king is not his victories on the battlefield, but when he manages to heal Eowyn and Merry after they are injured/cursed killing the Witch King of Angmar.

In other words, Tolkien attempts to write a character who is the person for whom humanity's will to power and ambition is meant - one who will use that power for good, and whose ambition is to make a better world.

And by "make a better world," I'm being quite literal.

Eru created the Ainur - the Valar and Maiar - and conducted the "Music of Ainur," which is how reality was created in the first place. Melkor, the most powerful of the Valar, introduced discord into that music, putting evil into the world in an attempt to wrest control of the Music for himself (again, I think Tolkien uses collaboration versus selfishness as a basis for his concept of good and evil).

But if humans, after their deaths, are brought to Eru (perhaps only the worthy ones, but for the sake of argument let's say all of them,) perhaps the reason is that Eru is looking for new collaborators for a new Music. Perhaps that is why humans are his favorite - or rather, they were created for this highest of all purposes, and thus Eru poured his greatest favor into them.

I might have this wrong, but I think in Norse myth, the aftermath of Ragnarok sees humans and the few surviving gods collectively creating the next world together. Tolkien took a lot from Norse myth along with other influences, so it would fit.

Anyway, it really puts the elves' somewhat superior attitude toward humans into an interesting context. Do they not realize that humans are set above them? Or perhaps are the growing pains that humans are going through just so frustrating when elves have been so good for thousands of years, not quite comprehending that the process of humanity coming into their own is going to be more difficult, messier, and more dangerous?

Rings of Power Concludes its First Season Finally Getting to that Sweet Bling

 Prequels always come with some pitfalls. Ultimately, most of them are rooted in the problem of predictability. Because this is all the backstory of an existing story, we know where the pieces need to get by the end. There's a piece of advice in storytelling (it might specifically be screenwriting, but I think it applies to all fiction) which is to start as far into the story as possible and finish as early in the story as is possible. The idea here is to make sure that the part of the story that your readers/audience is seeing is the most important part - the most satisfying, distilled into the highest drama.

On the other hand, though, fantasy as a genre is one that is often concerned with the larger, broader histories and mythology of its world. Fans of fantasy love to delve into the "lore" of the world, and while there are some more recent stories that play with that - such as The Witcher's ground-level protagonist who gets swept up in grand, epic tales despite belonging to an order that more or less requires a humble, borderline cynical focus on the practicalities of day-to-day survival - Tolkien's Middle-Earth (and the broader fantasy world in which Middle-Earth exists) is the quintessential font of fantasy lore.

But when we are introduced to characters here, we know that Galadriel and Elrond are going to live into the end of the Third Age (we're only in the Second right now,) and that Sauron's going to make those rings, that Numenor is not long for this world, and that that ambitious young Isildur is going to cut Saruon's fingers off and then find himself unable to toss the One Ring into the fires of Mount Doom.

Thus, to create dramatic tension, the show turns to what I think a lot of prequels do, which is not "what's going to happen," but "who is secretly the big bad?" And that trope is... Ok, see, the thing is, when that trope is used in an original story, it can be really impressive: the big reveal that some "good" character is actually evil (think L.A. Confidential as an example of this trope done really well). But because this is a prequel, and of course a serialized show with week-long gaps between episodes, what it creates is practically an AR-game where viewers go online to piece together clues.

And given that we're going to be talking about the answers to some of those mysteries, let's put a spoiler cut:

SPOILERS AHEAD

Tolkien, Orcs, and Rings of Power

 Rings of Power's sixth episode is called Udûn. It's a location in what will come to be known as Mordor (currently "The Southlands" in Rings of Power - though it looks like Mordor is coming soon). This actually makes Gandalf's calling the Balrog the "Flame of Udûn" kind of odd, as it's not clear that Durin's Bane has any loyalty or relationship to Mordor and Sauron. (Further Tolkien research has informed me that the region of Mordor is actually named after another name for Utumno, the fortress of Morgoth - so really it's closer to "hell," though technically I don't think Tolkien's Legendarium has a true "hell" as another plane of existence).

Rings of Power is an exciting fantasy show, and one I'm enjoying. But I think it's also important to note that it's an interpretation more than an adaptation. I'm not talking about the *gasp* presence of people of color in it (anyone who has a problem with that can go toss themselves into Mount Doom, and good riddance) but instead various conceits that allow the story to be told in which any human character lives long enough to be a character throughout the story.

There are elements I'm a little wary of - mystery-box things like who the "Stranger" is and, while not explicitly encouraged by the show, the natural guessing game of whether any given character is going to turn out to actually be Sauron or will become one of the Ringwraiths. (At the same time, I can't help but indulge in some of that speculation.)

One of the most interesting, but simultaneously canon-... I won't say canon-breaking, but canon-testing at least elements has been the introduction of a character known as Adar. And because his whole deal is a spoiler, let's put a spoiler cut ahead:

SPOILERS AHEAD

Star Trek Discovery's Third Season Changes the Game

 Given that I'm playing catch-up, this is old news to anyone who has been watching Star Trek: Discovery. But the third season features a shake-up of the whole premise of the show that bears looking at.

Naturally, spoilers abound, so beware:

Finally Getting into Star Trek Discovery

 With my roommates out of town and social engagements cancelled, and Los Angeles basically melting to the point where I needed to huddle up in the room with the air conditioner, I've been watching a lot of stuff.

As I've said many times on this blog, I was raised on Star Trek (TNG to be specific). But when a new series, Star Trek Discovery, came out, it was on a streaming platform that I didn't have access to. Recently, I have gotten access to it, but I also heard various disappointing things about the show, so I was a bit wary of trying it out.

Well, in the past 24 hours I've watched almost all of season 1.

It is certainly true that, structurally, this is very different from your typical Star Trek. This feels very much like a modern, serialized story (though admittedly, the season really switches gears I want to say ten episodes in).

My sense is that, judging the show on its own merits, it's pretty good. But it lacks a lot of the hallmarks that we tend to associate with the franchise. For one, there is a very clear main character: Michael Burnham. We don't even see the eponymous starship until episode three - instead, we get a sort of two-part prologue that shows how this model officer became the pariah of the Federation - more or less because she took actions that led to the Klingon/Federation War that the original series is dealing with the aftermath of.

(As a kid who grew up with Worf, I remember being surprised that the Klingons were villains in the original Trek - though of course in Next Gen the culture is clearly decadent and broken).

There are quibbles I have with the show - for one, after her actions, Michael is sentenced to a life term. In past series we've seen the Federation's penal system to be fairly enlightened, and I would think that just about any offense has a possibility of rehabilitation and parole (granted, this is set in the 23rd century, which might not be quite as evolved as the 24th).

The other thing that is rather jarring is the quite profound visual redesign of the Klingons. I'm sure a lot of original series fans were shocked when their look was overhauled in Star Trek III: The Return of Spock. This redesign feels extreme, though, and also strange in how it replaces the famously great hair that Next Gen Klingons have with universal baldness. There is one possible reason for their redesign that might have to do with spoilers for later in the season, but I do kind of wish that they were a little closer to the TNG version.

There are a couple of episodes that introduce fun, episode-specific sci fi concepts to play through - one episode features a time loop (not something that Trek hasn't done before, of course, but this one plays into the growing relationship between two of its central characters). Another introduces a world where all of its life has formed a collective consciousness.

Indeed, I remember when rewatching some of Next Gen that some of the most beloved episodes that were stand-alones would have to be incorporated into an ongoing narrative, and this show very clearly does that.

In a sense, then, it makes this play out like extra-length episodes - its arcs being its episodes.

I think perhaps I have less reason to be frustrated with the series' departure from the typical Star Trek formula because I've started watching in a period where Strange New Worlds and even Lower Decks have given us a much more classic approach.

I will say that I don't really get the desire to keep kicking things back to the 23rd Century. Maybe I'm just a generational chauvinist, but after a combined 21 seasons of 24th Century shows, to me that is, in fact, the "default" Trek time period. Obviously we've got Picard now, as well as Lower Decks, so it's not as if there's no representation there. But I kind of wish that we'd have a forward-looking 24th Century show - Picard seems built around call-backs and nostalgia, and Lower Decks is too (though at least in that case we have new characters as our focus - it's just that Lower Decks is basically built to make an entertaining show out of "hey, we're all giant Star Trek nerds here, right?")

I'll be eager to see how the show develops, and how it concludes the first season - which at the point I'm at has profoundly changed gears and is actually managing to use an element of Star Trek's lore that I've almost always found tedious in a way that I think is actually dramatically interesting.

The Gradual Rise of Respectable Game Adaptations

 When I was around six or seven, the first trailers for the Super Mario Bros. movie came. I was very into Mario despite not actually having played the games. Some time, maybe that year or a year or two later, I was at the defunct camp that my dad's friend and colleague had gotten as a vacation home in Maine where I was able to play his son's Super Nintendo and get my first experience of Super Mario World, which to this day is, to me, the "quintessential" video game.

But I was a little kid born in the 1980s, and as video games as an industry were exploding in popularity and pop culture influence, I was very excited about the film. I never actually saw it (I caught some of it on TV decades later) but the Super Mario Bros. movie is infamous.

Bob Hoskins and Joe Leguizamo (two actors of a caliber far above this project) apparently bonded over how miserable the production was. The producers, it's said, were really interested in making a movie set in a dark and gritty, brutalist metropolis, and so they transformed the bright and colorful Mushroom Kingdom into some kind of weird subterranean dystopia. Bowser, or Koopa (which, to be fair, is what he's called in Japan) was turned into a Donald Trump-type (see, we knew how awful he was back then. The dark alternate present in Back to the Future Part II also makes Biff into his equivalent. Too bad he didn't just remain a footnote in the history of how tacky 80s excess was).

As the first major adaptation of a video game in Western media, the movie really set the tone. The makers of the movie clearly felt no real respect or affection for the franchise, and basically slapped the brand onto their own weird, bad movie idea.

And adaptations of video games that happened since followed a similar pattern. No one was really putting much effort into making these good. Over time, the very concept of adapting a video game story to the screen came to seem like an inherently bad idea.

But things have been changing lately.

It's not a question of budget or the investment of star power - Uncharted was a failure despite the presence of Tom Holland (and Mark Wahlberg, though I'm not sure Wahlberg is a "put asses in the seats" kind of presence) but decades earlier we had Angelina Joli in two Tomb Raider movies.

However, where I've noticed things changing has been in animated series. Netflix's Castlevania series, while excessively gory and violent, still manages to tell a decent story and takes itself seriously enough to get through that story. The bigger example, though, and the one that I think really marks a big change, is Arcane. This series adapts the backstories of a number of League of Legends characters - one of those games where, whatever lore exists in the world, you don't see a ton in the game itself. Arcane has gone beyond the successes of the Castlevania anime and is now winning awards.

The reason for this change I think is pretty clear: In the old days, video games were a pretty exclusively youth-oriented medium. As gamers have grown older - not to mention the fact that some older people have also learned to embrace the medium - the respect and love for the storytelling in games has grown.

Now, you have people who understand the appeal these games have, and have grown up with their stories. Producers can also now expect audiences to take the stories seriously. Part of that, of course, is the maddening obsession with brand recognition that has choked Hollywood of late, but I think it's also a newfound respect for games as an art form. (It's also newfound respect for the fact that the games industry is bigger than Hollywood at this point.)

Having come of age at a time when you sort of hoped that they wouldn't try to make a film adaptation of your favorite games, I think it's kind of exciting to see that they're actually pulling it off now. At least sometimes.

Rings of Power

 Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy is up there with the original Star Wars trilogy as being one of my foundational cinematic loves. The timing was great: the summer before I started high school in 2000, I read The Hobbit, and then during my freshman year, I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy, mostly in editions that were emblazoned with "Soon to be a Motion Picture Trilogy from New Line Cinema!" The Lord of the Rings movies were a genuine event - and I think the hopeful, heroic tone was particularly resonant given that the first movie came out three months after 9/11 - a time when the idyllic, Pax Americana age of the post-Cold War 1990s was shattered by this act of spectacular violence.

Tolkien's Middle Earth is one of the most richly detailed fantasy worlds - and really codified the notion of a fantasy world in general, moving the genre beyond the gritty sword-and-sorcery of Conan the Barbarian and into this lyrical, mythic mode. I think basically every work of fantasy fiction to come after has had to be in conversation with Tolkien.

Amazon secured the rights to Middle-Earth and has reportedly spent a billion fucking dollars to make this series.

Honestly, in the run-up to its release, I was skeptical. I found myself tired about the re-hashing and franchising of these works. While I was a devoted Game of Thrones fan, the final season left such a bitter taste in my mouth that I found myself profoundly apathetic toward its House of the Dragon, and perhaps tired of the brutal, dark world that felt so refreshingly different when Game of Thrones came out in 2011.

I was similarly skeptical of Rings of Power. The Hobbit movies, which had tried to extract an epic trilogy out of a single book that was lighter and simpler in tone than the Lord of the Rings, felt like a cash-grab. And Amazon's Wheel of Time series was... just... not good. (I've never read the books, and I've heard some people say that the books aren't great either, but the show basically had a couple good actors, some very weak ones, and was a meandering mess.)

I've now watched the first episode of Rings of Power, though, thanks to some good reviews I've spotted. And, well, consider me intrigued.

As usual, Rings of Power has the burden of being a prequel, set within the Second Age, which begins with the defeat of Morgoth and ends with the initial defeat of Sauron (as seen in the prologue of Fellowship of the Ring.) This age, of course, is the one in which Sauron arrives as Ammenar, the gift-giver, teaching how to make his magic rings in a ploy to get everyone to secretly wind up in his thrall.

So, we know what's going to happen. The rings kind of super-charge the races natural tendencies, making dwarves more interested in treasure, humans more interested in power, and elves... maybe more wise and aloof?

But the rings haven't even been created yet at this stage. Instead, we have a few characters we're checking in with and getting to know.

The headlining character is Galadriel. We're introduced to her as a child during the First Age, when the world doesn't even have a sun - instead, two great, sacred trees provide the equivalent of sunlight and moonlight. Galadriel, as a child, already shows ambitions that go beyond her fellow kids - and the kids are actually quite cruel, trying to sink her magic (or, more precisely, delicate elvish-art) paper boat. (I don't know how granular Tolkien's conception of evil was, but maybe their attempts to sink her boat is a sign of Morgoth's influence already in the world). Galadriel has a beloved older brother, Finrod, who dispenses wisdom to her and whom she clearly adores.

But, when Morgoth comes and destroys the great trees, the elves journey from Valinor to Middle-Earth, to battle against him. The war is won, but Sauron takes over as the Dark Lord. Finrod hunts for him, but winds up dying in the pursuit. And so, Galadriel takes on her brother's mission.

Galadriel here is driven almost to the point of obsession - convinced that if she does not hunt down and defeat Sauron, evil will rise again. However, Gil-Galad, the king of the high elves, is convinced that Sauron is gone, and that her obsession will only cause more pain and death. Galadriel comes to an ancient fortress of Morgoth in the frozen north (I'm not sure if this is meant to be Angband or some other citadel of his - I never actually read through the Silmarillion).

Galadriel is recalled to Lindon, the elvish capital (which is near the Grey Havens as seen in the end of Lord of the Rings) and her company is awarded for their valor with a trip back to Valinor, the heavenly continent that Galadriel was born on (and seems to genuinely be another plane of existence).

In her trip to Lindon, we also meet Elrond, a minister and speech-writer for Gil-Galad and obviously someone who is destined to be a very important figure in the future (also, fun fact, his daughter Arwen is Galadriel's granddaughter, so presumably Elrond winds up marrying her daughter at some point). Elrond is on Gil-Galad's side of things, but clearly loves and respects Galadriel and is willing to hear her, even if he remains unconvinced and worried that it's her grief that has clouded her judgment.

Galadriel travels on the ship to Valinor, but as her fellow soldiers are divested of their armor and prepared to enter the brilliant, heavenly light, Galadriel jumps ship, apparently planning to swim back across the ocean (I mean, she's an elf, she can probably do that.)

But the show is not just Galadriel: we're introduced to a couple other focus characters.

First is Norri, Eleanor Harfoot, who is a Hobbit or perhaps some kind of proto-Hobbit, living in a hidden village with her parents and community. We're actually introduced to the Harfoots from the perspective of a couple of humans, who fear them the way one might fear the fair folk. The elder of the village has been seeing strange signs, including these unseasonal travelers, but Eleanor is showing her Baggins-like tendency to get into mild trouble, helping a bunch of kids break into an old abandoned farm where blackberries are growing - though there is the ominous sign of a wolf that has been there, and when we get a look at the beast, it seems clear this is no natural wolf, but more likely a warg.

We also meet Arondir, an elf soldier who is part of a garrison that keeps watch over a human town. The humans have ambivalent feelings about the elves, who come by regularly to check in on anything strange going on. It turns out that the ancestors of these humans threw their lot in with Morgoth, and the elves are something of an occupying army, with an admittedly light touch.

Strange things are going on here, though - to the east, there's a field with blighted grass, and the blight seems to be making people and animals sick. All the while, Arondir is reckoning with his romantic feelings for a local healer named Bronwyn, counseled against falling in love with a human by his fellow elves, who point out that these stories tend to end tragically.

But, given that Gil-Galad has declared the days of war over, believing that the darkness has ultimately been vanquished, Arondir's unit has been recalled. While Arondir goes to investigate the blight, though, he and Bronwyn find that the village has been set ablaze.

With all of this going on, a great shooting star blazes across the heavens, seen by all of the characters we've met with. Where it lands, near the Harfoot village, a seemingly human form rests within the crater, with long grey hair and a beard. I can only assume this is Gandalf, though he wouldn't have gotten that name yet.

Anyway, for a first episode, we've got a lot set up, and I have to admit I'm liking what I see so far. The writing has mostly replicated the stylized, mythic dialogue that the books and movies have, avoiding modernisms and quippiness. The show is also gorgeous - the budget shows (similarly to how it does in Apple's Foundation show). I'm eager to see the production design in new environments - I'm given to understand the second episode features Khazad-Dûm (aka the Mines of Moria).

I'm planning on watching the second episode later today.

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law

 So, if you're a sci-fi/genre fan of a certain bent, specifically one who has seen Orphan Black, seen in the US via BBC America, you already know how insanely talented Tatiana Maslany is. On that show, Maslany played a woman who discovers that she is actually a clone, and has several doppelgängers who have her exact DNA - all part of the same secret human cloning project. The clones and their friends team up to get to the bottom of the mystery and the cover-up that threatens their lives.

And Maslany, naturally, plays every one of the clones. The nuances and layers to her performance are astounding - one character will impersonate another, and rather than simply dialing in the performance she created for clone she's impersonating, Maslany convincingly plays both the character and the impersonation that that character is doing. It's astonishing to watch.

So, when Maslany was tapped to play Jennifer Walters, the cousin of Bruce Banner who gets his powers but has a very different attitude about it, I knew she was going to be great (Marvel's casting director, Sarah Finn, is really freaking good at what she does). And, two episodes in, that expectation has been validated.

The question here, though, is whether the MCU can resist doing a superhero story.

We're introduced to Jennifer as an assistant D.A. in Los Angeles, getting ready for a trial. Normal human, yes, but then she turned to the camera to explain a comment by her paralegal friend, and we get a signature She-Hulk 4th-wall break (she's been doing this in the comics longer than Deadpool). She then explains how she got her powers.

The story is fairly boilerplate here - she's driving with her cousin Bruce and an alien space ship (ok, maybe not so boilerplate) causes them to get in a car accident. Bruce's radioactive blood drips into Jennifer's own wound, and it apparently reacts with similar genes that allowed Bruce to Hulk out, turning Jennifer into her own Hulk.

After a few black-outs, eventually she awakens at Bruce's Mexican hideaway - a lab he built with Tony Stark to study his condition. Bruce is eager to teach Jennifer everything he's learned over the last decade and a half about being the Hulk. In particular, he emphasizes that being something like this means a total change of lifestyle. And that's the main thing that Jennifer cannot accept.

What Bruce doesn't realize, until Jennifer has repeatedly demonstrated it to him, is that she's actually far better equipped to handle her anger and rage than he is, simply by having to live as a woman in a patriarchal culture. Bruce comes from a place of love, trying to guide his cousin on the difficult journey that he had to make over many years, but doesn't really know how to handle the fact that Jennifer clicks almost immediately.

The truth is that Bruce's life as the Hulk has been deeply isolating and lonely, what might have started as a chance to impart his wisdom to his little cousin becomes a bit of a plea for her to keep him company in that same isolation.

But Jennifer's not interested in the life he's pitching: she doesn't want to be a superhero. She just wants to be a lawyer.

And, that, as I understand it, is kind of how the comics work. She-Hulk becomes a lawyer who specializes in superhuman law.

So, again, I wonder if Marvel and Disney can let this story just be the genre it wants to be.

Captain Falcon and the Winter Soldier was meant to be the first Marvel Disney Plus show, but delays pushed the far stranger and more experimental Wandavision ahead of it. Wandavision was probably the boldest the MCU has ever gotten in its style and format - for several episodes, there were only brief hints that this wasn't purely an anthology of progressive sitcom styles with Wanda and a strangely living Vision starring in them.

Now, sure, the show needed to eventually explain why all this was happening and not just be elaborate sitcom parodies with brief, Lynchian interludes, but even if it turned out that, despite the catching song, it was, in fact, Wanda's grief all along that was the big bad, the show still found its way to having a big CGI superhero fight throwing balls of energy at each other.

I'm fairly confident that the climax of She-Hulk will likely be a big action show-down. But I'd have a ton of respect for the show if they really do fully buy into the idea that this is, in fact, a court procedural show that just happens to take place in a world of superpowers. Let the climax be a big court scene.

We shall see.

Star Trek: Lower Decks: Maybe the Nerdiest Show Ever?

 I just finished the second season of Lower Decks, the animated Star Trek show that focuses primarily on four junior officers on one of Starfleet's least prestigious ships.

Kind of like the recent Harley Quinn show, Lower Decks is animated, and irreverent... to a point. The art style here is similar to Rick & Morty (I believe one of the showrunners is a Rick & Morty veteran,) and the show is emphatically comedic.

But it's not cynical. While the characters are bigger messes than one tends to see on Star Trek shows, ultimately this is a Star Trek nerd's show. And boy howdy does it pile on the fanservice. The ensigns (and even the senior officers) that make up the main cast are basically Star Trek nerds who know everything about the shows we've seen. There are also cameos from plenty of old school Star Trek characters, voiced by their original actors. Jonathan Frakes shows up as Riker (unsurprising as he's remained tied to Star Trek, directing episodes and popping up here and there since Next Gen,) and we get Robert Duncan McNeil showing up at one point as Tom Paris. Even Lycia Naff returns as Captain Sonya Gomez, who we met as an ensign on Next Generation, awkwardly spilling hot chocolate on Picard.

The references here are dense. But in a way, if any fandom is going to be excited to see that the writers really did their homework, I think Trekkies (or Trekker, or whatever nomenclature you prefer) are the ones.

Of course, the entire series is a reference to a quite good episode of Next Gen, called The Lower Decks, where we followed a group of ensigns on the Enterprise-D (an episode with a gut punch of an ending). Given that Star Trek's federation is supposed to be an egalitarian utopia, it is funny that our usual lens into that world focuses on the one aspect of that society that still has a rigid hierarchy, and traditionally we've only really followed the higher-ups on any given ship. Furthermore, we tend to focus on the flagship, or some elite crew that's doing the most important stuff for the Federation.

So, Lower Decks introduces us to the Cerritos, a California-class ship whose primary job is "second contact." Rather than being the first aliens a civilization sees, they basically go to check in on the places Starfleet has discovered and make sure everything's still working out ok. The ship's mission is, itself, the unglamorous work that our ensigns are assigned to in macrocosm.

The ensigns are Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, and Rutherford.

Mariner, played by Tawny Newsome, is terminally insubordinate and reckless, and has apparently been promoted and demoted multiple times. She has a certain disdain for the very idea of senior officers, and we soon discover that the reason for this might be because her parents are both high-ranking officers. Her father is an admiral, and her mother is, in fact, the captain of the Cerritos, Carol Freeman.

Boimler, played by Jack Quaid, in classic contrast, is the pathologically rules-abiding, ambitious rank-seeker. Desperate to prove himself, his sycophancy is offset by his genuine belief in Starfleet, an admiration that the show, despite its nitpicking and parody, shares.

Tendi, played by Noël Wells, is the newcomer to the ship, and new to Starfleet, and is filled with enthusiasm and a desperate need for people to like her. As an Orion (the green people), she completely flips the stereotype. Far from manipulative, she's guileless.

Rutherford, played by Eugene Cordero, is an engineer who has a cybernetic implant, and is socially clueless but has a very positive attitude.

What's fun about the show is that you get that reference-heavy parody about everything from prank-calling Armus to the apparent franchising of Quark's bar to the presence of aliens like Mugatos, but you also tend to get some enjoyable classically Star Trek stories along the way.

Very much like the recent Strange New Worlds (that is both spin-off to Discovery, prequel to the original series, and arguably the actual greenlighting of the original Star Trek pilot,) the show allows stories to be fun and done, with light serialization.

It's honestly a lot of fun.

The Sandman, Translation, and Adaptation

 One of the grand traditions of filmmaking is to adapt existing literature. At the Oscars, there's a whole distinction between Adapted Screenplay versus Original Screenplay awards.

And from a certain perspective, this makes sense - film is a profoundly expensive medium to produce. Television, in the last 20 years or so, has begun to be held to a similar production quality standard, making a season of TV in some cases significantly more expensive than a feature film. Adapting a known work means that there's a certain buy-in. It's a story that people already know is good (or at least already know) and oftentimes, there's an eagerness to see a work translated to the screen.

Alan Moore was a bit of a mentor, as I understand it, to Neil Gaiman. Gaiman's Sandman comics began when he was in his 20s in the late 1980s, the decade where Alan Moore (among others) really pushed the medium into a more adult-oriented, mature form. Alan Moore has had very bad luck with adaptations of his work - only a handful of movies or TV shows based on his writing has turned out halfway decent, with tons of examples, perhaps the worst of which is The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, that seemed to shit all over his work.

But Moore has another objection to the very idea of adapting his work: it suggests a hierarchy of media.

At least in America, film has been considered the pinnacle of popular art (again, I think that the Golden Age of Television, starting with shows like the Sopranos in the late 90s, has allowed TV to edge into that space - but the two media are basically fraternal twins anyway,) and in the case of comic adaptations, are often seen as elevating the story to a "higher" form, which Alan Moore has always objected to - he likes comics as a medium, and he writes comic books, and doesn't feel that turning his stories into something for the big screen improves them.

Neil Gaiman has had a little more luck  with adaptations, though there have been fewer. The American Gods show didn't turn out so well after Bryan Fuller indulged in his late-Hannibal penchant for naval-gazing at the expense of story. But the movie Stardust is generally well-liked even if not many saw it, and the stop-animated Coraline was also well-regarded.

Perhaps in response to his experience with American Gods, Gaiman has taken a strong hand in shaping The Sandman, as an executive producer, and one who seems to have been involved in the show's process pretty directly.

The result is that Netflix's Sandman adheres pretty closely to the source material. One could even argue that it's nearly a translation - as direct as one can get to just putting the comics into live action as you could get.

That's not entirely true, though. Indeed, there are plenty of changes. Many of the visuals of the comics are redesigned to be more cinematic in nature. Some of this, I'll say, is actually a loss - Dream's battle with John Dee does show our protagonist shifting in appearance with each frame the way he does in the comics, and his journeys through others dreams don't reflect the shift in art style between various peoples' dreams.

Apparently they tested out make-up and wardrobe to make Tom Sturridge appear just as Dream did in the comics, with chalk-white skin, black hair, and full-blue eyes, but they found that, while it looked like he'd nail a cosplay competition, it didn't really look right for the show, which, with physical actors, was naturally going to have to look a bit more grounded and realistic.

Still, I think many of these adaptations like to speed through plot lines, cutting and redesigning with abandon, and The Sandman is a pretty faithful, at least to my recollection (I've been flipping through the trade paperback volumes I got in college to check and see - it does seem that season 1 covers Preludes and Nocturnes along with The Doll's House.

There are elements that are cut - most noticeably the references to the larger DC universe - which only really existed in those early issues, as far as I remember. But the show still retains the structure of the arcs present in those volumes - we get Dream's captivity by Roderick Burgess, the meeting with Constantine (though admittedly a gender-flipped Constantine I think intentionally made to seem different than her DC universe equivalent) to find his bag of sand with her ex-girlfriend, the trip into Hell to play a high-stakes game to get his helm back, and the battle with John Dee over his ruby. We get his following his big sister Death around for a day to learn a bit about humanity, and the centuries-spanning flashbacks detailing his slow-growing friendship with Hob Gandling, and then the whole plot with Rose Walker and her brother Jed, the Dream Vortex, all the fun housemates as well as Lyta Hall, the Corinthian, and the Cereal Convention.

So, it really covers the bases and gives us pretty much anything we wouldn't want to lose.

It's a faithful adaptation, and that's a nice thing to see.

Does it say anything new? That's something I can't really put my finger on.

One thing that would be hilarious if it didn't remind me of how backwards our culture seems to be (and, sadly, especially in "nerd culture,") is the complaints about the diversity on the show. A few characters that were portrayed as white in the comics - Death, Lucien, and Rose and Jed Walker - here are played by black actors (Lucien was also gender-flipped to become Lucienne). Unfortunately, this has caused a vocal minority whose like of Neil Gaiman seems unlikely to complain about the show's "wokeness." The most baffling of all of these complains is against the casting of Mason Alexander Park, a nonbinary actor, in the role of Desire - a character who is explicitly non-binary in the comics. (This reminds me of people who complained that Rue in the Hunger Games movies was black - which she was in the book, too. Your poor reading comprehension is no reason to complain about "wokeness!")

With the first season and approximately a fifth of the original comic run completed, I'm hopeful that the adaptation will continue to succeed. The Sandman is an odd, and in some ways anthological series of comics - the title character is sometimes more of an elemental force in other peoples' stories than the protagonist. I'll be curious to see if the show can lean into that nontraditional story structure as it grows more pronounced. Rose Walker is the protagonist of the back half of the season, though Dream remains fairly active.

I'm tempted to read through the comics again.

The Sandman

 I think I was first exposed to Neil Gaiman when my friend recommended American Gods. That novel is probably Gaiman's second-most-notable work, which imagines the imported deities from the arrival of so many cultures in America manifesting as tangible individuals with their own plans and agendas.

The American Gods TV series came with much excitement, but wound up getting lost in a mix of creative impulses. Bryan Fuller, creator of shows like Dead Like Me, Hannibal, and Pushing Daisies, took a lot of liberties with the source material that... arguably distracted from the actual plot of the novel, and notably Gaiman himself found the deviation too extreme. Fuller was fired, and the show underwent a re-tooling but lost much of its good will.

The Sandman, made by Netflix and based on what I would say is Gaiman's original claim to fame, the surreal, epic, and somewhat dizzying comic series from the late 1980s and early 1990s, is one of those projects that has been rumored for decades at this point (I remember a time when Joseph Gordon-Levitt was going to play the eponymous anthropomorphic representation of dreams). Now, it's finally out.

Sandman's a weird story, though at least the first several issues, collected in the first trade paperback version (the entirety of which I read in college in the mid-2000s) focus on Dream (also known as Morpheus) and his recovery from spending nearly a century (or a full century in this version, as his escape is, I think, set in contemporary times) ensnared by an Aleister Crowley-like sorcerer who bites off way more than he can chew trying to capture Death (which happens to be our protagonist's sister).

In his absence, the realm of Dreams has fallen into decay and chaos, and his dream-beings have largely scattered and moved on - most notably the Corinthian, a nightmare that has decided to prowl the waking world as a serial killer.

Re-reading the comics a year or two ago, I realized that the first volume of the Sandman is incredibly dark and horrifying. The show, it seems, at least so far (I haven't gotten to the part with the diner yet, or the "Cereal" convention) to tone things down every so slightly - notably, when Dream punishes the son of his captor after he finally escapes, the fate is somewhat less cruel, cursing him with eternal sleep, rather than eternal waking, as in the comic (Eternal Waking, by the way, is that he keeps "waking up" from a nightmare only to find himself in a different nightmare).

So far, the adaptation is faithful, and it looks like Netflix has spared no expense - the visuals are grand and epic in scope, and polished. We haven't seen much of the Dreaming just yet - I do find that Dream's palace doesn't quite have the weirdly organic (and perhaps sexually suggestive) design that it had in the comics, though I haven't gotten a good enough look at it to decide whether this is a serious downside.

The early issues of Sandman were also strange because they took place within the broader DC Universe - Morpheus encounters Martian Manhunter and John Constantine, as well as an old superhero known as the Sandman that Gaiman's comics were in the broadest sense a reboot of (though not really). Here, we have Jenna Coleman as Johanna Constantine, who appears to simply be a gender-flipped version of John with no explicit mention of her DC equivalent (notably, in the comics, John's ancestor Johanna shows up to confront Dream and his immortal friend Hob in the 1700s investigating rumors that the Devil and the Wandering Jew met at a tavern every century, though she eventually grasps that that's not who they are).

Anyway, the first volume, which I suspect corresponds to this first season, is lent a structure by the fact that Dream must recover the three tools that were stolen from him by the sorcerer who imprisoned him. Later stories become a little broader and more episodic in scope, where Dream becomes less a protagonist than a force of nature within a plot.

I'm three episodes into the season so far, and honestly a little trepidatious about seeing adaptations of the really horrifying stuff that happens involving John Dee.

Reluctance to Move Forward in Narrative

 We're kind of in a glut of prequels, aren't we?

When Disney bought Lucasfilm, they announced a new trilogy of Star Wars movies, and we got them - a trio of films that tell stories a generation (or maybe a generation-and-a-half) past the events of the original trilogy.

The Star Wars sequels, as they've come to be called, were a mixed bag. The Force Awakens introduced fun new characters with a lot of potential while retreading very familiar plot beats. The Last Jedi subverted and undercut some of the expectations of Star Wars in a way that deeply polarized fans (and exposed a lot of racism and shittiness within the fanbase). And then the Rise of Skywalker managed to disappoint both those who wanted the more nuanced, adult interpretation of Star Wars and the people who just wanted more carefree adventure by being an act of utterly craven filmmaking.

Disney's tenure as stewards of Star Wars has been a mixed bag. The shining example, and the series that launched Disney+, was The Mandalorian, which was simultaneously like nothing we'd ever seen of Star Wars while also feeling perfectly in line with that universe. But The Mandalorian also suffered in the second season by becoming a launching pad for other shows and serving the franchise.

But The Mandalorian, also, took a step back, setting itself in the years shortly after Return of the Jedi, making it perhaps a sequel to the original series, but not treading on future grounds in the sequel era. The Book of Boba Fett (of which I watched the pilot and then decided against seeing more) was more or less a spinoff of the Mandalorian, and then the Obi-Wan Kenobi show, which I have not seen, is set between the prequels and original series.

We've seen a lot of franchises dip into the past for their spin-off stories. The Harry Potter series went back into the 1950s with the Fantastic Beasts movies (a series that has a protagonist utterly mismatched to the content of the story).

With Stranger Things coming to an end, but Netflix hoping to capitalize on its brand, there are talks of a spin-off, with some suggestion that there might be a younger Hopper in it, obviously implying it's a prequel.

Likewise, HBO is doing a Game of Thrones prequel series - something that I think could be too little too late after the final season of that show obliterated the public's considerable good will toward that world and series.

Amazon is promoting their "Rings of Power" series, which takes place in the distant past of Middle Earth, during the Second Age.

Now, I don't mean to say that prequels are an inherently bad thing: The Godfather Part II, which is half a prequel and half a sequel, is renowned as one of the best movies of all time. Better Caul Saul, which I must confess I haven't actually seen much of, is also thought by some to be better even than the original Breaking Bad - which is high praise.

I've also been enjoying Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which is a spin-off of Discovery, itself something of a prequel to the original series, though not as distant one as Enterprise was.

But I do find it interesting that there's so much reluctance to take these existing IPs and move forward.

Sure, maybe it would be best if we just started creating wholly original stories and worlds. I'm very much in favor of that. But if we're to accept that branding is too powerful a force in Hollywood to avoid this kind of IP-extension, why is it that things are looking backward so much instead of forward?

Prequels carry with them some inherent problems. Stakes are inevitably lowered at least to an extent. Indeed, the Star Wars prequels, which were quite a rarity in 1999 when the Phantom Menace (marketed, in fact, mostly as "Episode One") came out, taught us a lot of those problems - knowing the fates of characters meant that the story struggled to surprise us, and the vague backstory as we had imagined it watching the original movies potentially, and for many of us did, outshine what we later saw on screen.

But sequels can also have their own issues. J. R. R. Tolkien actually began working on a sequel to Lord of the Rings, but abandoned the project because, cosmologically, evil had been defeated in a significant way - to suggest that Aragorn's reign and dynasty would allow evil to creep back into the world would undercut the happy ending of the original series.

Indeed, this was one of the big problems of the Star Wars sequel trilogy - by the Rise of Skywalker, learning that not only was the New Republic basically destroyed by the First Order, that Han and Leia's relationship fell apart and their kid turned evil, that Luke wound up washed up and depressed, but on top of that even Palpatine was somehow still alive despite being vaporized in the bowels of the second Death Star, it basically took everything that had been accomplished in the original series and threw it out the window.

This is, of course, a reason why sometimes, even if we love a series or IP, we need to let it end. But I also think that there's another element at play here:

In our own real world, we don't have a lot of optimism for the future. Climate change is already affecting us, and we can only expect its effects to get worse. On top of that, we're seeing a growing tolerance for authoritarianism. On top of that, we've spend the last two-plus years devastated by a genuine plague.

Things feel bleak, looking ahead, and so there is, I think, a desire instead to fall back to earlier times, even in narratives that aren't really beholden to the same timelines we find ourselves in.

Millennials like myself are struggling with the fact that so many milestones we expected to hit at certain ages remain out of grasp. My dad, at my age, was married, had a kid (with me coming in only a little over a year), owned a house, and was on track to become a tenured professor at a world-class university. Yeah, not me.

Just thinking about the future is stressful, imagining what kind of world we're even going to have ten, twenty years down the line.

There is something weirdly safe about the past - even if horrific things happened there, the total scope of them is now more or less understood. And likewise, prequels offer that same level of comfort - we know that some characters will survive, we know that some institutions will remain intact, even if we already know them to be doomed in some future story.

I think we're looking for some kind of reassurance, and the stability of predictability.

I don't know that art can totally change the outlook of a population - as devoted as I am to storytelling and art, I try to be realistic about its ultimate impact on people. But I do sometimes worry that there's a feedback loop. Might we feel more energized, more imaginative, if we began to look forward, rather than backward?

The End of Stranger Things 4 and Anticipation for the Final Season

 I just finished the finale of the fourth and penultimate season of Stranger Things. This season has been quite good - my favorite since the first one. I was talking with my sister about the show the other day and thinking about how the first season very much seems set up with the expectation that it would be the only one - there are a couple of plot hooks to carry things on, but mostly things are wrapped up relatively tidily.

Season four's ending is the sort of thing that clearly anticipates the finale of the series, and the elements at play here are big - big reveals, big moments, and big character arcs.

Let's get into spoiler territory:

Stranger Things 4

 Stranger Things came out of the blue. In 2016, while I was back east in Massachusetts visiting my parents, and my sister was there too, we watched this show that had seemed to receive no marketing at all from Netflix. I guess the streaming service didn't expect that this revisionist 80s sci-fi horror riff would draw much of an audience. The Duffer Brothers, who created and run the show, have talked about how their pitch was shot down because it was a show aimed at adults but starring mostly children.

However, in those children, you had a whole bunch of Gen Xers who grew up in that era and Millennials like me who grew up on the residual pop culture of the 80s who saw themselves in these pre-teens dealing with government conspiracy and cosmic horror.

A Stephen King-style story (with a lower body count) mixed with John Carpenter music and a little touch of Spielberg made for what turned out to be a really effective story.

Seasons two and three struggled, I think, to retain some of the magic of that first season. I think 2 is probably the weakest, including what feels like the obligatory episode that introduces a whole bunch of new characters and concepts that are so out of place that it feels like a different show and you get the sense it'll never be mentioned again (this being when Eleven runs away from home and joins up with a bunch of anarchist punks led by another survivor of Brenner's lab). The third season was a marked improvement, with, I think more solid themes and stakes, though a weird tonal choice to use rather cartoonish Soviets operating out of an American mall.

Season four, to me, is the strongest season since the first, largely by trying new things, including a different kind of villain, known initially as "Vecna," named after another classic D&D villain (in D&D, Vecna is a specific character who is the quintessential example of a "Lich," a powerful, undead, extremely intelligent, wizard that is more or less built to serve as the ultimate villain of a campaign).

While the creatures of the Upside Down in Stranger Things have been truly alien, and all apparently expressions of a singular intelligence (the Mind Flayer, also named after a D&D monster, though ironically this one being simply a type of monster and not a specific character,) Vecna is more human - literally performed by an actor in heavy prosthetics and make-up, and his behavior seems more akin to an 80s slasher villain like Freddie Kruger (incidentally, Robert Englund, who played Kruger in the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, has a supporting role in one episode). So, there's a slasher killer invading peoples minds to destroy them from within, but he's also tied to the unfathomable and still very much unexplained Upside-Down (personally, I hope that we never get too much of an explanation about its nature).

Like the previous two seasons, the show divides the cast in a way that is still a little frustrating, but at the very least, the division of the cast is in bigger, fewer chunks. After the Byers moved away from Hawkins with Eleven after Hopper's apparent demise, Mike goes to visit them on Spring Break, though Nancy, despite doing the long-distance thing with Jonathan, decides to stay home.

As such, we have Mike, Eleven, Will, Jonathan, and Jonathan's new stoner friend Argyle forming one of the major "cast groups." This, I'll be honest, is maybe my least favorite one. Meanwhile, and spoiler alert if you haven't watched any of the trailers, Hopper is very much alive, and so we follow him in a Russian prison (or is it really just a prison?) while Joyce and Murray go on a mission to rescue him. Finally, the last cast "clique" has Dustin, Nancy, Lucas, Lucas' sister Erica, Steve, Robin, Max, and newcomer Eddie, who runs the high school's D&D club, known as the Hellfire Club.

This last group is the one that I find the most enjoyable, as it feels the most tied to the show's roots of young people having to solve enormous crises, but also gives us some of the most effective emotional beats, including a tremendous one centered around Max.

The season was released in two chunks - part two, which is just the last two episodes, came out only a few days ago. Episodes are longer, but with perhaps a few exceptions earlier in the season, it does not drag.

One thing of note is that, while the Soviets still play a role in this season, their presence I think works better now - it's a bit easier to imagine sketchy things happening in a secret prison in Siberia than with a bunch of Russian soldiers wearing uniforms in a secret base within the U.S.

I'm hoping the final season can at least match this one in quality, and hopefully put the cast together in Hawkins more.

With news of the new "Upside Down" production shingle Netflix has given the Duffer Brothers, I hope that Stranger Things is not milked totally dry of its charm, though given the way showbiz works these days, I can't be too confident it won't.

In any case, I'd say that if you're a fan of the show already and somehow haven't seen this season yet, you'll love it. If you found the last two seasons disappointing, try this one on for size.

Umbrella Academy Season 3

 So, this show, the Umbrella Academy, is one that I cannot figure out how I feel about it. I find myself eagerly watching new seasons as they come out, and enjoying it and most of the characters, while I also find myself judging obvious needle drops or feeling it's not grounded enough while also enjoying its absurd and off-the-wall tone.

I suppose that I feel it's a show that is very close to being a truly great show, but just missing something I can't quite identify that needs to be fixed.

Season two of the show, which focused more on the characters and their interpersonal dynamics, seemed to work better than the first one, but I think this season is a little more dour, and suffers a bit from the back-and-forth of character rivalries.

After the second season saw the Umbrella Academy, marooned in 1960s Dallas (all arriving at different times, meaning that these siblings who were all born at the same moment are actually different ages) save the world by ensuring that the Kennedy Assassination goes off as it previously did, they arrived to find an alternate future in which their really shitty adoptive father (who is literally a space alien) has picked an entirely different batch of children to raise as superheroes, naming their group the Sparrow Academy - the only familiar face being Ben, who in this world is still alive.

Much of the conflict in the new season is the rivalry between our time-displaced Umbrella Academy and the new, seemingly more powerful and very corporate superheroes of the Sparrow Academy. This conflict... I honestly found it a bit tedious, and was not entirely sure why these two groups jump into such open hostility.

An early dance-battle between the two groups is precisely the kind of stylistic gambit that this show loves to do, even when (especially when?) it doesn't totally earn it (this at least has an explanation based in one of the Sparrow Academy members' superpowers).

This show loves "weird for the sake of weird," such as how one of the Sparrow Academy members is a floating cube named Christopher. The problem is that I could imagine a show that is a little cleverer doing a lot more with the weird elements of it.

The show is gorgeous as ever - the starring set this season is the Hotel Obsidian, another nexus of surreal mid-century aesthetics that this show (and I) love. Also, well-handled (at least from this straight cis dude's perspective - I'll be curious to see what my trans friends think of it) is Elliot Page's transition, along with his character, who is now Viktor. We're able to see how his time in Texas and relationship with Sissy opened new doors for him, while the struggles that have nothing to do with his gender identity evolve on their own paths.

With this timeline still having a living Reginald Hargreeves, there's a renewed opportunity to explore just what his, well, whole deal is. I don't really know to what extent that opportunity is taken advantage of.

Basically, I want this show to make a little more sense without sacrificing its whimsical potential. The style to substance ratio leans a little too far toward the former. But three seasons in, perhaps I need to just accept it for the show it is. And that is one that I'll happily binge when it comes out on Netflix... but mostly forget about between seasons.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

 If you're not a giant nerd, you might not know that, in the original pilot for Star Trek, Kirk was not the captain. Instead, it was Captain Pike, and his first officer was simply "Number One," played by Majel Barret (who would later play Nurse Chapel, voice the ship's computer, and also Lwaxana Troy - oh, and she was married to Gene Roddenberry). Spock was there, but simply as a science officer.

The original pilot was somewhat re-cut for a later episode in which Kirk's predecessor is a scarred and catatonic wreck. Over 50 years later, with Star Trek Discovery as a kind of prequel series (but not as much of a prequel as Enterprise. I guess more of an interquel?) the pre-Kirk crew of the Enterprise appeared as recurring supporting characters (I have not watched much of Discovery, so I don't know all the details).

As such, Strange New Worlds comes as a weird mix of prequel, spinoff, and re-make. We follow Pike and his people on their five-year voyage.

In contrast with Discovery and Picard, Strange New Worlds brings back the largely episodic formula of the older shows in the franchise. So far at least, each episode has presented its own science fiction crisis to be dealt with.

And thus, in a lot of ways it really feels like the Star Trek we once knew.

We're only four episodes in, and in one of these ensemble-based shows, it can take a while to give everyone a turn in the spotlight.

Christopher Pike's inner conflict is arguably the most metafictional - we know that he's fated to have a horrific injury that will transform his life (if I recall correctly, some aliens essentially send him to some kind of paradise afterward, but he doesn't know that). And, evidently because of events of Discovery, Pike is also aware of that - having been dosed with some kind of temporal-warping mineral that gave him precognitive visions. His dealing with the knowledge that ten years from now, he's going to be a mute burned victim in a weird cyber-coffin introduces ideas of fate and free will that I wonder how they'll choose to explore. Changing his fate would not only break this prophecy, but also the continuity of a show that, in contrast to the recent movies, is meant to exist within the same canon.

Number One is given a name, finally, and it's Una Chin-Riley, which I find hilarious - her name literally means "One." Honestly, getting into her backstory is a bit of a spoiler for one of the early episodes, so suffice it to say she is the tough but empathetic XO who also takes on way too much responsibility for herself.

Spock, of course, is the most well-known character in the series. I don't really feel like I need to go into detail here because he's literally one of the most beloved science fiction characters of all time. We haven't had an episode really focus in on him yet, so I don't have a super clear sense of the angle they're taking with this familiar character.

Uhura is also a regular on the show. In this case, she's still a cadet who is exploring what she wants to make of her career and life on board. Here, we have another sort of interesting case where, of course, we know that Uhura is going to be an exemplary officer and Starfleet legend, but this version is still figuring herself out and even questioning whether she wants to be in Starfleet in the first place.

La'an Noonien-Singh is, I believe, one of the few brand-new characters on Strange New Worlds, though of course that last name has a pretty complex legacy. Interestingly, so far, La'an's story is less about her (unknown to this crew, one imagines, cryogenically frozen) ancestor and more about the fact that she survived a horrific trauma when her family was killed by the Gorn (for those of us whose first association with that particular alien species is the funny guy in a lizard suit fighting William Shatner, this show seems determined to rehabilitate the Gorn into a near-Borg-level menace). As seems to be the case for security officers, La'an is far less patient and philosophical than your typical Starfleet officer.

Characters we've had a little less time to get to know include Nurse Chapel (no, she's not also played by Rebecca Romijn, though I'd have to admire the chutzpah if they did that,) Doctor M'benga, Erica Ortegas (the helms person,) and Hemmer, the ship's engineer, who is an Aenar (which I believe were introduced in Enterprise as a subspecies of Andorian).

The show has a lot of fun being a sort of upgraded version of the original series. The ship has plenty of physical controls like buttons and levers, but they all look slick and up to modern production design standards. TV budgets have gotten a lot bigger, and visual effects have gotten a lot more advanced. One thing I find amusing and kind of great is that the opening titles, which include the classic "These are the Voyages" narration by Captain Pike, has the essential melody of the original Star Trek opening theme, but where that original has that kinda cheesey 1960s jazziness, this one sounds a bit like those YouTube videos you might see of an "EPIC VERSION" of some pop culture theme music. It works, and feels modern, while you can still hear that same original theme underneath it all.

I think, frankly, that we could use some of Star Trek's old optimism. The past few years have been rough, and I find that a lot of people, myself included, are finding it hard to imagine a brighter future. To be fair, Star Trek does have, as part of its fictional history, a period of extreme turmoil that happens, oh, well, around now - and that dark age is even referred to in the first episode, with some rather disturbing images of nuclear bombs exploding over major cities. What rises from that dark age, though, is the utopian future that Star Trek imagines. Here's hoping we can get to some approximation of that future without going through such a massive trauma.

Everything Everywhere All At Once

 Feeling sad that I haven't been going to the movies lately, I decided this would be my "weekend of the multiverse," going to see first this odd indie creation and then the product of the vast Marvel machine tomorrow or Sunday. The last time I went to the cinema, and the only previous time I've gone during the pandemic, was for Dune. Picking a weekday showing in the early afternoon assured me that the theater would have only a few people, which I still think is preferable in this era of plague.

The directors of the film, who go collectively by "Daniels," (making them part of the group that my oldest friend and I coined when we were in Middle School, the Dan Clan - I guess Dans just gravitate toward one another) previously made Swiss Army Man, one of those batshit premises that works shockingly well (Paul Dano is shipwrecked on a desert island and finds Daniel Radcliffe's washed-up corpse, who happens to be very useful in various ways) return with a story about the kind of broad malaise of wasted potential and existential drift that I think a lot of people have been feeling in the past few years.

At the center of this is Evelyn Wang, played by Michelle Yeoh, a Chinese immigrant living in what seems to be southern California. Whatever dreams she once had have been submerged beneath the need to run a failing laundromat that she lives above, dealing with what she sees as her sort of pathetic husband Waymond (Ke Huy Quan,) the distant daughter Joy (Stephanie Hsu),  about whom she feels conflicted that she's got a white girlfriend (both the white and the girl parts) and a father whose expectations have always weighed down on her (James Hong).

While going into the local IRS office to be audited - notably for equipment related to hobbies - Waymond suddenly shifts into some other personality, and reveals that he's been seeking her out as the one who can defeat "Jobu Tabacky," a villain who threatens the entire multiverse.

As she is initiated into this bizarre technology that allows the multiversal travel of her consciousness, picking up skills and abilities that other versions of her have acquired, we get into the absurd, ridiculous action story that is, ultimately, about regret and depression - regret about the choices we didn't make and depression about the ultimate meaninglessness of our own lives in the face of an ever-expanding vision of the cosmos.

It's the sort of movie where there'll be a fight scene where she's trying to prevent a bad guy from sticking something in his butt lest that give him better fighting skills, while another scene will be about the deep pain of passing on the pressures that caused you so much trauma to your own child.

It's funny, because I've been doing a lot of unpacking about generational trauma, and this is very much about the sort of internalization and even projection of fears and resentments.

In particular, I think that the movie has a lot to say about regret - there's a scene where Evelyn accesses the sign-spinning skills of a version of her that flips around one of those road signs for a pizza place, and then uses that skill in her version of the world to fight off a bunch of bad guys with a riot shield. There's a sort of suggestion that the value and potential of every life experience is there, even if we don't really see it.

And this applies to others as well - it's clear that Evelyn sees Waymond as something of a pathetic doormat at first, and that resentment is leading him to consider getting a divorce. But when we see him in a different timeline - one in which they never married - he explains how his worldview might not be conventional, but it's just as, if not stronger than what it could have been.

Rewatching 2021's Dune

 Well, I watched Dune again, this time in my living room instead of a nearly-empty theater. Dune's one of those stories that pervades science fiction - Star Wars might have borrowed the concept of Coruscant (seen only in the prequels directly, not counting the special editions of the original trilogy) from Asimov's Trantor, but the desert world of Tatooine clearly owes a lot of its DNA to Arrakis.

Matt Colville, who mostly does videos about Dungeons & Dragons, did a three-part series talking about Dune and some of the really interesting sci-fi concepts within it. Science fiction is a genre that I think engages the reader/audience from a different angle than other genres, even including fantasy, though those genres exist less as discrete categories and more along a spectrum.

I think the greatest science fiction stories begin with a question: "what if such and such a technology or scientific development came about?" and then attempts to answer that in a way that is dramatic and interesting.

In some ways, I think the primary question Dune asks is "what if humanity survives for tens of thousands more years?"

There's a bit of dark pessimism that has confronted us since the invention of nuclear weapons. While swords, crossbows, guns, and bombs have all escalated the potential for us to kill one another, nuclear weapons have raised the stakes to an absurd degree. Today, we are relying on the sanity of world leaders not to press the button that destroys the world. In some ways, the threat here has preserved peace on a large scale, the logic being that no two nuclear powers can ever afford to get into an armed conflict. Of course, we're seeing the risk of that concept in Ukraine, where a nuclear power is relying on the fear of escalation to prevent direct confrontation with NATO and attack a less powerful country with impunity. None of us today knows how that conflict will end, and I suppose I will just have to hope that this blog post is not some archaeological relic to be found by some distant future historians trying to piece together how the current civilization fell.

Dune isn't exactly optimistic about the future either. In contrast with the Star Trek-like vision of a future built on principles of liberalism, democracy, and the enlightenment, the universe as it is ten thousand years after the foundation of the Spacing Guild (itself ten thousand years from now) has reverted in structure to one of imperialism, aristocracy, and feudalism.

In some ways, I think Frank Herbert dodged some areas of speculation through the use of certain narrative devices. The Butlerian Jihad, in the distant past, saw the erasure of all artificial intelligence and computers. Perhaps Herbert knew that he would never be able to predict how advanced computer technology would get and thus sought to set aside any speculation. Today, thinking about how you could fly a space ship or an ornithopter without a computer seems absurd, but we're also in the thick of a computer-centric world - one that I would bet is far more saturated with computers than Herbert thought it would be even in the distant future.

The needs of the protagonists in the first novel of the Dune series are fairly immediate: their lives and their house is in danger of being wiped out in a feud with the Harkonnens. The plot is full of wheels within wheels - the Emperor fears Leto Atreides because he's a more popular leader who also understands the source of the Imperial House Corrino's power, so he arranges to put the Atreides on the back foot while helping the Harkonnens under the table. Leto knows that Arrakis is a trap, but is plotting to seek out and befriend the indigenous Fremen, who he thinks will be even better than the Emperor's elite Sardaukar. But the Harkonnens have an asset within the Atreides house, and they're able to launch their attack before Leto can reach out to the Fremen. But the Bene Gesserit have also been essentially breeding a messiah for hundreds of years, and Paul Atreides makes use of the abilities that have been bred into him to manipulate/recruit the Fremen to basically do what Leto initially planned.

And so, the first book ends with Paul defeating the Harkonnens and forcing the Emperor to marry him to the princess Irulan and thus make Paul the heir to the throne.

While we get hints of it, it's not until the later books that we see the consequences of all of this. The Fremen inflict the very colonial oppression that they suffered under onto the universe at large, and Paul, with an empire that literally views him as the messiah, has unleashed a fanatical holy war upon the universe - the sort of war where there are no compromises, no peace treaties to sign, and no limit to what your soldiers will do to defeat an enemy they see as definitionally evil.

Thinking about Villeneuve's movie, I wonder how exactly to judge it. On a visceral level, I like it. Visually I think it's fantastic - it looks very much as I imagined the story when reading the book, especially the brutalist enormity of the palace in Arikeen.

Adapting a novel to film is a tough thing to get right, and I think one area the film sort of sidesteps is some of those deeper sci-fi concepts that would be hard to work in. For example, we get some visual clues that Thufir Hawat and Pieter de Vries play a similar role for their respective houses, but the term "Mentat" is never mentioned. We hear about "superstitions" that the Fremen believe, but the source of those traditions and stories is not detailed in any specifics. Of course, the story cuts off before Paul and Jessica make it to Sietch Tabr, so we haven't yet had an opportunity to see how the Bene Gesserit tradition mutated and evolved within Fremen society.

I am still kind of shocked that they didn't just film this as a single production. Warner Bros. must have not had a ton of confidence in it, though I'm happy to hear that part two is going ahead. How sad it would have been to have this part one be the only movie, consigned to the dustbin like, I don't know, the Golden Compass movie. (Come to think of it, did the HBO show also get cancelled?)

I've read Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune, but I'll confess I got stuck on God Emperor of Dune. My dad had cautioned me to stick to the stories with Paul in them, and God Emperor of course takes place thousands of years after the first three books. I believe Villeneuve expressed a hope to do those first three books in film, though I think we might have to be content with just the first book, unless part two is a much bigger cultural phenomenon.

I do feel like Hollywood needs to grade on a curve in this era of Covid, but I suppose it's still about the money you rake it, regardless of outside circumstances.