All posts by SF Bluestocking

Television

Childhood’s End: “The Deceivers” is the opposite of what I hoped it would be

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Well, that was a fucking disaster. Enough so that I want to take back everything positive I implied about this miniseries after the first installment, although I’m still slightly hopeful that the third part will make a bit more sense of things. “The Deceivers” is, ostensibly, all about revelations and the hunt for truth. However, probably a full half of the episode can only be described as filler material that has little or nothing to do with the overarching story or themes of Childhood’s End.

The character that I had the highest hopes for in this episode was Peretta, who seemed intended to represent the plight of religious believers after the arrival of the Overlords, but her storyline ended up going nowhere. Indeed, it felt as if the show’s writers just didn’t quite know what to do with her or, perhaps, as if they had written (and maybe even filmed) more than made it into the final cut of the episode. In any case, Peretta’s story, especially her supposed “friendship” with Ellie Stormgren, feels half-baked at best. Peretta’s connection to Jake and his family and her job as a counselor don’t make much sense, and Peretta comes off as irrational and paranoid.

Portraying Peretta’s religious beliefs as unreasonable seems to be the whole point, and this material is presented in a manner so completely without sensitivity and nuance as to make it uncomfortable to watch, even for a mean old atheist like myself. While there are certainly some strange and unsympathetic religious people in the world—and I can only imagine how they’d behave in a first contact situation—this show’s treatment of Peretta is, frankly, just cruel. Her suicide at the end of the episode is not unexpected, but it does feel meaningless. Perhaps it is meant to be tragic, but by creating the character as such an unlikable presence throughout the preceding hour and a half, the show squashes any gentle feelings the viewer may have about Peretta’s death.

That’s only the beginning of this episode’s problems, though. While I was feeling optimistic after “The Overlords” did so well at capturing some of the spirit of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, it quickly became obvious that most of the problems I had originally foreseen having with this adaptation were just pushed off into this middle part of it. There really are just two serious issues with this miniseries, though:

  1. There’s not enough source material to fill nearly six hours of television, and the way the source material is being supplemented is clumsy (at best).
  2. Condensing the source material’s multi-century timeline into just a couple of decades diminishes the impact of the story by reducing the book’s more epic scale into something much smaller and more personal, but not in a good way.

Peretta and her added story is the biggest way so far that the show has tried to expand upon the source material with terrible results, but “The Deceivers” also includes a new subplot—about Ricky Stormgren being sick and not being able to have children—that is also a colossal waste of time. It’s through this subplot that the show comes closest to revealing what is actually going on with the Overlords and their mysterious presence on Earth, but the whole episode is frustratingly coy about the matter, and the actual revelation is being saved for the final installment of the miniseries. This episode ends with Peretta’s death and the birth of a baby with creepy glowing eyes.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • The only parts of “The Deceivers” that really worked were the scenes with Milo and Rachel, though I mostly just ended up feeling bad for poor Rachel.
  • It’s a shame to get Julian McMahon to act in this and then waste him so entirely on a completely forgettable role.
  • The translation of the “dinner party” may be the worst book-to-film scene/sequence adaptation I’ve ever seen.
  • Why make a magic space Ouija board at all if it’s not going to be used in any way like a Ouija board?
  • The one way in which I think Childhood’s End is completely successful is in creating the look of Karellen. Charles Dance looks amazing in the makeup and prosthetics. I’m only sad that they couldn’t spring for more Overlords to show up. Probably they shouldn’t have blown their budget on that stupid Ouija board.
  • I literally cackled at the glowing baby eyes.
Television, The Expanse

The Expanse: “Dulcinea” starts this series off with a bang

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“Dulcinea” covers essentially the first forty pages of Leviathan Wakes, the first novel in the Expanse book series by James S.A. Corey, plus (apparently) some material from the second book. It’s something far more than just a pilot episode, but it definitely has something of the pilot feel about it, with its heavy focus on world building and character introductions. Still, it’s a thoroughly engaging hour of delightfully pulpy sci-fi television and an excellent start to a series that many sci-fi fans (myself included) have high hopes for.

The show seems to be combining three different stories. Detective Miller (Thomas Jane) on Ceres Station is investigating the disappearance of an heiress, Julie Mao (Florence Faivre), who ran off to join an activist movement after college. Jim Holden (Steven Strait) is the unwilling second in command of an ice-hauling spaceship in the asteroid belt. And Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) is a powerful and rather terrifying politician on Earth.

Most of “Dulcinea” is obviously set-up for the rest of the season’s plot, and very little actually happens in this episode that isn’t exposition. However, the episode ends with the sudden explosion of the ice hauler, which is sure to provide an impetus for plenty more actual action in the second episode. If the rest of the season follows the first book as closely as this episode seems to, we’re in for a hell of a ride.

Of course, what I’m most excited about is Avasarala. Leviathan Wakes is a book that has something of a problem with female characters—rather, a lack of them, and a lot of misuse of the few that it has—enough that I likely won’t continue reading more of the novels. Avasarala is an unusual character, though, and I can’t wait to see what her role is going to be in the show.

If the show was just a straight adaptation of Leviathan Wakes, I probably wouldn’t be watching it, but Avasarala is just fascinating. It’s not uncommon to see shady government types in science fiction, but usually they’re white dudes in suits.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • If you’ve read Leviathan Wakes, you’ll remember that the novel is peppered with allusions to Don Quixote, and this is reflected in the episode title which refers to the imaginary object of Don Quixote’s unrequited love.
  • My favorite detail of the first episode is the cracked screen on Miller’s handheld device. I’m not a huge fan in general of the “devices in the future are all clear glass” aesthetic, but this is one of many nice touches that make the world of The Expanse feel lived in.
  • I wish they had more consistently cast very tall actors as Belters, although the explanation that different people have different “tells” helps to explain that away for book readers.
Television

Childhood’s End: “The Overlords” is a mix of brilliant and bizarre adaptational decisions

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I was not at all sure that this adaptation would be even remotely good. The promotional material and trailers looked slick, but the obvious changes that were being made from the source material weren’t encouraging ones. Having actually gotten to watch the first installment of the mini-series, though, I’m glad to say that most of my biggest fears about Childhood’s End were unfounded. That said, while “The Overlords” manages to mostly capture the spirit of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, it’s also deeply flawed and often at odds with itself as it tries to translate Clarke’s 1950s vision of the future for consumption by a post-postmodern audience.

Right out of the gate, the adaptation makes its first misstep, and it’s a big one. Rather than opening, as the book did, with the arrival of the Overlords’ spaceships, we’re introduced right away to Milo Rodricks (Osy Ikhile) recording his final testament at the end of the world. Obviously this isn’t a spoiler for anyone who’s read the novel, but it basically gives a whole story away for those who haven’t. Unfortunately, the story that this opening scene tells isn’t the story that is going to unfold over the next several hours. I suspect the show’s writers thought this would be a clever way of setting up and demolishing the audience’s expectations, but it really just ruins the surprise. Worse is that it spoils the ending without really telling the audience anything useful. Instead, it functions as an immediately “shocking” cold open that is more a cheap trick to generate interest than an intriguing taste of things to come.

The next character introduced is Ricky Stormgren, played in all his Mid-Western dullness by Mike Vogel. I’m honestly just confused by the decision to replace Arthur C. Clarke’s U.N. Secretary-General Rikki Stormgren with this slice of mayo-covered white bread from Missouri, and it’s a major adaptational change that works chiefly to undermine Clarke’s original message by, quite deliberately, making the United States the center of the world for the purposes of this miniseries. Clarke’s decision to make Karellen’s ambassador an officer of the U.N. was a meaningful one, and while the U.N. isn’t viewed today with the same optimism as it was in 1953, the idea that a white farmer from middle America would serve as a unifying figure for all humanity is just plain laughable. This casting choice and story change reveal a decidedly US-centric agenda that ignores half a century or more of history and reproduces a particularly boring science fiction trope that Clarke himself deliberately subverted in his novel. As if to add insult to injury, that Karellen’s other choice was a Korean woman—a much better option in many, many ways—is something of a running joke throughout “The Overlords.”

I’m getting ahead of things, though.

After the first two brief—very brief in Ricky’s case—character introductions, Childhood’s End jumps straight into the story. The opening sequence of the Overlords’ arrival is really incredible. It perfectly captures the momentousness of the event and introduces several more major characters before returning to Milo and Ricky. We spend some time with Hugo Wainwright, the cynical media mogul (played by an extremely dour Colm Meaney) who coins the term Overlords to describe the aliens and then becomes a vocal opponent of the changes the world is undergoing, before returning to Ricky and Milo.

While Ricky is busy serving as Karellen’s ambassador to humanity—in a profoundly silly sequence of press conferences and meetings with foreign dignitaries—Milo is growing up in a rough part of town, a wheelchair-bound boy genius with a loving, but drug-addicted mother who struggles to relate to her brilliant son. I understand the necessity of beefing up the character’s backstory, but I don’t see why Milo couldn’t have just been a college-educated black South African like his book counterpart instead of this condescendingly stereotypical story of a disadvantaged black boy in the U.S. I suppose we can be grateful that the character wasn’t just whitewashed altogether, but this is another failure on SyFy’s part to really bring Arthur C. Clarke’s vision of the future to life.

Interestingly, the only major character introduced so far that isn’t U.S. American is Peretta, a highly religious Brazilian girl whose mother committed suicide during a crisis of faith after the appearance of the spaceships. While it seems almost certain that Peretta will be a more interesting character than Wainwright and present better opportunities for exploring the series’ themes surrounding faith and spirituality and their conflict with science and progress, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes when I realized that of course the extremely religious character is a Latino woman. And of course she’s set up in opposition to the progressive white male Midwestern farmer. If it’s not cynical, it’s certainly a disingenuous set-up.

The thing about Childhood’s End, though, is that it somehow manages to more or less retain most of the spirit of the classic novel in spite of some not insignificant adaptational decisions. For those of us who love the book and its vision of a globalized progressive future, this U.S.-centric adaptation may be a disappointment in some ways, but it also may not be a bad thing in this day and age. Certainly white male Midwesterners in 2015 aren’t exactly known for progressive thinking, but perhaps Ricky Stormgren will serve as an inspiration.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • The melancholy cover of “Imagine” over scenes of the world’s suffering was a little too on the nose in the opening.
  • Charles Dance has the most amazing voice. He is a perfect Karellen.
  • Excellent use of classic alien invasion and abduction tropes. I about lost it when Karellen first sends the ship for Ricky. This stuff helps to lighten up material that is actually quite serious.
  • I adored the #freedomleague ads. They’re exactly the kind of awful crap I would expect to be made by the type of people who get angry about things like world peace and the end of hunger.
  • Maybe Ricky would be less insufferable if he would put on a shirt that’s not plaid.
  • All of the stuff about Ricky’s dead wife was a waste of space and time that could have been much better spent on literally anything else. It’s incredibly boring and moderately sexist, to boot.
  • Wainwright and his Freedom League could have been used more smartly. I liked that the show kept in the kidnapping of Stormgren, but Wainwright was never a proper antagonist, and the group was too easily defeated in the end.
  • The final reveal of Karellan was amazing. I’m so glad they’re using makeup and prosthetics instead of CGI for this.
Television

Supergirl: “Hostile Takeover” is an aggressively mediocre winter finale

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“Hostile Takeover” is really the first half of a two-part episode, and it literally ends in the middle of a fight scene, which makes it hands down the most frustrating winter finale of anything I’m watching this year. Aside from that, it’s a largely run of the mill episode of Supergirl, with most of the shows greatest weaknesses on full display.

I was really looking forward to more Astra stuff, and while this episode did deal with her, it unfortunately felt relegated to B-plot status. Certainly, Kara’s interactions with Astra weren’t nearly as interesting or satisfying as the evolution of Kara’s relationship with Cat Grant. This week’s revelations about Astra suggest a level of moral ambiguity that Supergirl just isn’t well-equipped to handle, and even Melissa Benoist’s excellent performance isn’t enough to keep this all from being a big mess.

The biggest surprise this week is that maybe Astra isn’t quite a villain after all—except she totally is, because this show sucks at exploring grey areas. It turns out that back on Krypton, Astra was something of an eco-terrorist, concerned with ending the environmental degradation that eventually led to the planet’s destruction. Kara’s mother, Alura, captured and imprisoned her sister, and Astra blames Alura for Krypton’s fate. Now that Astra is free, she’s got some similarly nefarious plan to prevent humans from destroying Earth the way Kryptonians wrecked their planet. The problem, of course, is that Astra’s methods are questionable, so she must be stopped, I guess.

The obvious issue with this storyline is that it’s patently ridiculous. I can totally believe that the Kryptonians wrecked their planet—goodness knows, we sure are, and they’re just like us—and the Astra as eco-terrorist stuff isn’t a terrible idea, but the execution of it in this episode is just awful. Poor Kara is supposed to be just absolutely tortured by all these revelations, and there is some crying and stuff, but there’s not any serious examination of any of the issues, so in the end none of this is at all convincing and it’s not even very clear exactly what the crying was about.

The actual B-plot, which deals with a member of CatCo’s board scheming to oust Cat Grant from her own company, fares much better, though it’s also silly. Basically, this dude has managed to hack/leak a whole bunch of Cat’s potentially embarrassing emails. Kara uses her super hearing to find out the plot, and then James, Winn, and Lucy do some corporate espionage to save Cat’s job. That stuff isn’t that important, though, because the real point of all this is to finally let Cat figure out that “Kira” is Supergirl. I love how self-congratulatory Cat is when she’s confronting Kara about her identity; this scene was everything I could have wanted it to be, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing how this changes their relationship going forward.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • The Hank and Alex dynamic has a new dimension of fun after last week’s reveal that he’s actually the Martian Manhunter. This week he just casually and hilariously reveals that he can read minds.
  • Kara really should have a clearer understanding that this hologram thingy is not her actual mom.
  • I hate the conversation about Kara between James and Winn more than I’ve hated anything this show has done so far.
  • I always love this show’s fight scenes, but this week’s action sequences seemed a little lackluster.
Book Reviews, Books, Fantasy, Novella

Book Review: Genrenauts #1, The Shootout Solution by Michael R. Underwood

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Genrenauts: The Shootout Solution is the first in a new series of novellas by Michael R. Underwood that explores and interrogates genre tropes with a premise that is basically like what would happen if the mid-90s television show Sliders got mashed together with the popular fiction section of a Barnes & Noble. It’s a fun idea, and it more or less works.

Leah Tang is a great protagonist who’s funny, smart and resourceful. It’s not often that an Asian-American woman gets to be front and center in a speculative genre, and this makes her a great choice to take the lead in a story that is very overt in its critical examination of genre standards. It’s nice to see Leah’s race and gender considered as positive job qualifications that, along with her background as a stand-up comedian, make her uniquely and especially qualified for the work the Genrenauts are doing.

Starting the series off with a look at the Western genre, which isn’t widely read these days by the under-60 crowd, is an especially smart move on the part of the author. I expect that this is the genre that younger readers will be least familiar with, which makes it a perfect introduction to the Genrenauts world and an ideal backdrop for establishing characters and easing the audience in to some of the deeper ideas that Underwood is concerned with.

As an exploration of genre as a concept and an in-depth look at some of the more widely used tropes of genre fiction, The Shootout Solution feels a little simplistic, though it hints at more sophisticated genre analysis to come. Hopefully, future books in this series will raise the stakes and broaden their scope, as this one never felt particularly dangerous, and the actual solution, when it’s discovered, was obvious and too-heavily telegraphed to surprise anyone with a higher than 101 level understanding of literary criticism.

The author himself has referred to this book as the “pilot episode” of this series, and it definitely reads like one. Much of what we get in The Shootout Solution is worldbuilding, character introductions, and set-up for the rest of the series, so this volume ends up a little light on plot. Like many a promising pilot, The Shootout Solution feels just incomplete enough on its own to make me want to come back for more of the series.

Film

Star Trek Beyond: Is this trailer for real?

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I would love to believe that this is a cruel trick being played on us all, but this appears to be an actual trailer for the third Star Trek reboot movie.

I’m not sure what is most upsetting about this.

Is it the terrible music that ought to be completely inappropriate for Star Trek? Is it the slapstick-y “comedy”? Is it the liberal use of the “hot alien babe” to market the movie? Is it that Uhura screams in terror and gets physically pushed behind a man more than once in just 90 seconds? Is it that the Enterprise is getting destroyed again?

I don’t even know where to start with how much I hate basically everything about this disaster of a trailer. These reboot flicks have so far been more fun than otherwise, even if they haven’t been actually good, but I’d love it if they would quit calling these atrocities Star Trek.

They’ve taken out everything that was unique and compelling and powerful about Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future and replaced it with space babes and raised eyebrows and ironic detachment. It might be an entertaining spectacle, but it’s not Star Trek in any meaningful way.

Film

Independence Day: Resurgence gets a trailer, is surprisingly exciting

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I didn’t think I would care that much about this movie, and I haven’t paid attention to the production news at all, so this was really my first look at it.

Thoughts:

  • Kind of disappointed that they didn’t get James Duval back. I had a huge crush on him in the mid-90s.
  • Thrilled that they got Jeff Goldblum. I’ve had a crush on him since the mid-90s, which is much less weird the older I get.
  • Excellent use of the Independence Day speech.
  • Will definitely be seeing this one at the theatre.
Television

Ash vs. Evil Dead: “Fire in the Hole” almost crashes and burns because of a nonsensical “romance”

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I both deeply enjoyed this episode and felt as if I needed to shower once it was over, which I think is going to be, ultimately, how I feel about this whole show. This week, once again, I find myself thankful for Ash vs. Evil Dead’s half hour running time. While it’s fun to watch the show’s copious gory action scenes, and there’s some occasionally great banter, I don’t think I could stand any more, timewise, than what we’re getting.

The biggest problem I have with Ash vs. Evil Dead in general is the show’s seeming inability to write anything substantially good (or even just sensible) for Amanda Fisher to do. In “Fire in the Hole”, that becomes a huge issue in an episode that is otherwise quite good.

After having Amanda spend over half the season chasing after Ash with the mistaken belief that he was the bad guy in charge of the Deadites, she was fairly easily disabused of that notion last week. I didn’t love the way that happened, but alright. The show was always moving towards having her join up with Ash’s little gang, and Ruby being evil (although this is somehow completely unnoticed by Amanda) had always been pretty strongly telegraphed. Last week we also saw Amanda being surprisingly (and disappointingly) susceptible to Ash’s dubious (and, frankly, disgusting) charms.

This week, Amanda and Ash get handcuffed together and this gross “romantic” dynamic gets dialed up to eleven. This might be slightly tolerable if it didn’t require the complete destruction of Amanda’s character for it to even remotely “work.” The thing is, Ash is stupid, sexist, and only marginally competent at the best of times. Amanda was introduced in the first episode as an intelligent and generally sensible police officer on a hunt for the truth about a supernatural experience. She quickly transformed into a nonsensically violent and irrational impediment to our heroes, and now she’s changed again into a doe-eyed, empty-headed object for Ash to seduce.

It’s depressing (read: blind-rage-inducing) to see a potentially interesting female character so systematically diminished over the course of a series in 2015. I have the feeling that this is preparation for some kind of grand gesture or heroic act on Amanda’s part in the final episode or so of the season, but it’s mostly just tiresome. The idea that a clever, professional woman with a proper career and literally any other options would fall for Ash is the most laughable part of this show, and I don’t think that’s the intention of the writers.

Similarly frustrating is Kelly’s lack of character arc, though she’s not been wronged in the narrative in nearly the way that Amanda has. The “friendzoning” storyline with Pablo sucks, and I hate that Kelly’s development is in general kept decidedly subordinate to Pablo’s and Ash’s, and I didn’t love seeing her get semi-damselled again this week, but at least Kelly gets to use a big-ass gun instead of just gazing with inexplicable desire at some dickhead for twenty-five minutes.

Miscellaneous thoughts:

  • The brief nude shots of Lucy Lawless were lovely.
  • I know it helps to make disposable characters seem like they “deserve” to die, but I don’t think it was at all necessary to have the survivalists straight up threaten to rape Kelly.
  • Lem is my favorite Deadite on the show to date.
  • Ray Santiago is a national treasure.
  • At this point, I am firmly on Team Severed Hand.
Weekend Links

Weekend Links: December 12, 2015

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The most important news of the week is obviously that Margaret Atwood is writing a graphic novel called Angel Catbird. The bad news is that we have to wait until fall of 2016 to actually read it.

The Phrontistery is a thing that exists in the world, and it’s incredible. I’ve been reading a little bit every day since I discovered it, and I’ve learned far more wonderfully obscure words than I can ever hope to use.

Someone made a Christmas album that is goat noises instead of words. You’re welcome.

This weekend, you can watch the biggest meteor shower of the year if you are lucky enough to have a clear night.

This happened on SNL this past weekend. You’re welcome again:

Atlas Obscura has a short history of Martians.

Amazing Stories looks at Frankenstein imagery through the years.

The Barnes & Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy blog has an informative piece on the history of science fiction in China.

Zigzag Timeline talks about 10 bizarre ways that reading/writing while underrepresented messes with your head.

Wole Talabi lists some of his favorite African SFF short stories of the year.

Tor.com has a list of the sci-fi and fantasy characters they couldn’t stop talking about in 2015.

Buzzfeed has their lists up of 2015’s best fantasy and sc-fi.

Paste Magazine collects the best comic books of 2015, which reminds me how much I ought to read more comics.

Loser City is listing the best 100 comics of the last five years, which makes me feel even more like I’ve missed out on a whole sector of publishing.

Bookworm Blues has an epic best of 2015 list.

And if you’re like me and already building your reading list for 2016, Beauty in Ruins has an early list of the most anticipated fantasy reads to look forward to over the next year.

 

 

Book Reviews, Books, Fantasy, Young Adult

Book Review: Winter by Marissa Meyer

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This entire series of books has been middling at best, and Winter is no different in that regard than its predecessors. Still, it’s an enjoyable read. The biggest problem with Winter is simply that it’s enormously overlong. At over eight hundred pages, and broken up into nearly a hundred chapters, most of which are very short, it’s a monstrously lengthy read. Unfortunately, there’s just not enough going on in Winter to justify all that length, and while I did enjoy it, my biggest feeling when I finished was resentment at how long it took to finish.

The first three books in this series (I’m not counting Fairest, which I haven’t—and don’t intend to—read) were each one better than the one before. Although none of them exhibited any particular excellence, there was definitely a trend towards improvement that unfortunately seems to have plateaued—and that’s only if one is being generous. To be honest, Winter is just a huge disappointment.

I loved Cress in her book (after feeling very lukewarm about Scarlet), and I had hoped that Winter would be a similarly interesting character. Sadly, she’s not. For most of the book it felt as if even the author wasn’t sure exactly what to do with Winter, and the princess often languishes in the background, both figuratively and literally. While Marissa Meyer has often utilized fairy tale elements in interesting ways in this series, her choice to include Snow White’s poisoning and the glass coffin was simply a mistake. It had no significant effect on the story, never felt as if Winter was in any real danger, and was just one of the many ways in which Winter was kept sidelined and ineffectual in her own book.

The truth about Winter is that, for all its ridiculous length, not much actually happens in its pages. It’s as if all the story was told in the first three books and this one is just eight hundred pages of tying up loose ends. Winter’s personal story never manages to feel like much of a story at all, and while I appreciate that Meyer didn’t end Winter’s tale by having her be cured of her mental illness, I rather felt as if Winter was actually forgotten by the end of the novel, which focused mostly on wrapping up Cinder’s story. I mean, good, I guess, that Winter gets her man in the end, but that’s frankly more irritating than not, since it’s just part of the compulsory romantic pairing off of all the series’ characters.

This isn’t to say there’s nothing to like about Winter, but there’s absolutely nothing about this story that deserved such a lengthy treatment. Meyer does a nice job of cramming a happy ending into the last fifty or so pages for everyone, but it’s all really just a little too neat without having any particular dash of cleverness or panache. Even Cinder’s decision to reject being queen in favor of turning the Lunar government into some kind of democracy (it’s rather vague) just feels too on the nose and follows less from the story or character Meyer has created up to this point than it does from sheer convenience. The author wants Cinder to give up being queen and go back to Earth, and so she does.

It’s this sort of writing for narrative convenience that makes this series’ ending ultimately unsatisfying. After four books (six if you count a prequel and the upcoming collection of short stories that correspond to each book) and eight hundred pages in this one alone, all filled with things supposedly happening, none of it matters. We get the ending Marissa Meyer wanted to write, but it’s not an ending that feels real or earned or at all worth the journey to get there.

The best thing I can say about this series is that it’s an enjoyable read, but it’s got so little substance that I can’t recommend it except as pure guilty pleasure fluff reading. That may have its place, but this final book stretched too long to even be as enjoyable as the previous entries in the series.