Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 25

Hilarious self-parody of TNG-era Star Trek. Funny on its own, but even better if you know the shows it’s riffing on. Great as a diversion or as a palette cleanser after watching something more serious (like, say, Picard).

Toward the end of the first season they start mixing in episodes with Big Changes™, Important Events, Mysteries and continuity. It’s not bad when it does those episodes. But I think it’s better when it plays to its strengths: the absurdity of the situations and the way the characters play off each other.

The Andre Norton books I’ve read over the last couple of years have all been on the action/adventure side of sci-fi, and this is no exception. What I found myself thinking about was how fuzzy, and sometimes arbitrary, the line between science fiction and fantasy really is.

90% of the book takes place on a world with pre-industrial technology. There are two factions with sufficiently-advanced technology that might as well be magic. The Cold War elements of the earlier books are pushed aside by the local conflict on Hawaika, with a handful of stranded humans and dolphins caught in the middle with nothing more high-tech than scuba gear and a convenient translator device. It could easily be a portal fantasy!

While the adventure was entertaining, I started paying more attention to the tropes connecting to the other books and, in some cases, being turned on their heads. Instead of a desert they spend most of their time on the ocean. The pair of empathic coyotes are replaced with a pair of telepathic dolphins. And the rough-and-tumble square-jawed agent finds himself out of his element so much (he has so little telapathic ability that the villains can’t even attack him mentally) that by the end of the book he’s desperately searching for situations where he can do manly things and fight with his hands or physical weapons, while the main battle is waged by women with “magic” and telepathy.

(There was also a floor maze that had to be danced properly to activate some great power, almost a decade before the first of Zelazny’s Amber novels.)

A more serious take on Star Wars, with a bit more personal scope. It’s not just the Empire and Rebellion fighting each other, seen from the perspective of a few heroes and villains. It’s how oppression and corruption grind people down, even those enmeshed in it. And the high cost of doing the right thing, desperately hoping that the sacrifice is worth it. And sometimes, hoping that it really is the right thing.

Amazing cinematography, and a show that will make you think in addition to the sci-fi action you’d expect.

That said, it starts off slow. The first two episodes didn’t feel like a story yet, just bullet points in things going wrong for everyone, waiting for the other shoe to drop. By the third episode the shoe drops, the puzzle pieces start to connect, and by the end of the season, it’s thoroughly gripping.

I’d recommend letting each episode sit for a bit rather than binge-watching (unless you want to watch the first 3 episodes as a block). It helps to let the story sink in.

An enjoyable space western with Apaches as the good guys, wrapped up in the cold war and tossing in the Golden Horde, a lost alien city and Russians with a mind-control ray.

Third in the Time Traders series, it stands alone pretty well even though it appears much more closely linked to the second book (which I haven’t read) than the first (which I have), largely because the setting has moved from Earth’s past to a distant world in the near future.

It’s kind of a mish-mash, but as an adventure it moves quickly. The characters’ memories are all scrambled, mixed with those of their ancestors (this is how the western and Mongol Horde tropes are brought into the future). But they’re still distinct characters, and when alliances shift they’re actually for character and cultural reasons, not just plot contrivances.

All that said, I’m a white guy reading a book written by a white woman in the 1960s. She treats the Apaches a lot better than most contemporary western stories, and one of the themes is the ongoing exploitation of indigenous people by powerful nations of white people. But I don’t know how cringe-worthy the depiction might be to people who are actually part of those cultures.

I liked season three of Discovery a lot better than season two. I think part of that was that it finally got to be its own Star Trek instead of trying to fill in the gaps between Enterprise and TOS. And it relies a lot less on the idiot ball, though I kept thinking they were very naive to simply assume the Federation still embodied the same ideals 700 years later.

Tonally, it amps up the Farscape: the madcap pace, the strange-to-the-heroes setting, and of course being the only ones with a rare travel tech that the ruthless villain wants. And it and adds a touch of Firefly: worlds are disconnected, with varying levels of technology, sometimes just scraping by.

Much as I missed Captain Pike, Saru really stepped up and continues to be one of my favorite characters. And while it’s still very much Michael Burnham’s show, the ensemble gets a lot more attention this season. The bridge crew finally feels like people and not just regular background characters.

As for the new characters: Adira manages to avoid the Wesley problem despite being a teenage genius, Book is so much more interesting than Ash, and Ossyra is an odd mix of ruthless and, well, casual. (There’s a great scene where she’s trying to psych out Tilly, and Tilly just throws everything back. It’s nothing she hasn’t already thought herself, and she’s learned from Mirror-Georgiou)

They did some really interesting things with the various ways familiar worlds adapted to the post-Burn galaxy (dilithium is scarce, the Burn destroyed most warp-capable ships, and no one knows if it will happen again), Discovery’s crew dealing with PTSD and overwhelming loss, and the importance of connection at every level from the minds in a Trill symbiosis to the worlds of a galaxy.

It would have been really weird to watch during 2020, when everything was still partially locked-down for the first year of Covid.