Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 27

I really wanted to like The Book of Boba Fett. I like Fett well enough and I like Fennec Shand…but I just couldn’t get into the story of him trying – clumsily – to become a crimelord.

The flashbacks showing his escape from the Sarlaac, his captivity and later acceptance into a Tusken tribe were fascinating, and I would cheerfully have watched more of that!

I think the problem with the show is that they put everything that audiences wanted out of a Boba Fett show into The Mandalorian. Cool armor and weapons, has his own code, always seen with the mask on, flies around the galaxy and gets into fights… They had to do something different for a Boba Fett show…but the approach they took just didn’t work for me.

(Spoiler: Also, I was so mad at Luke and Ahsoka in their guest spot. The two people in the galaxy best suited to understand that denying Anakin familial attachment is what enabled the dark side to get its hooks in him, and there they are repeating the old order’s mistake with their first student.)

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.