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.