A review of Ernest Cline’s Armada over at Slate manages to cover all the reasons why I probably won’t ever read the work of Ernest Cline (or anything else in that same vein).
And a short film to enjoy: One Minute Time Machine, which is hilarious:
I actually never read any of the Goosebumps books as a kid, although my younger sister did. I was just a little too old for them by the time they got really popular. My daughter has also never gotten into them, so I wasn’t particularly excited about the movie.
This trailer looks excellent though. Like exactly the sort of movie I want to take my kid to for Halloween.
With “The Harvest,” Killjoys is finally starting to get out of pilot territory, but I’m still not sure exactly what the point of the show is. I would have liked, three hours into a ten hour season, to have a better sense of what exactly is going on, but I’m just not quite there yet. It’s unfortunate, because there’s a lot that I like about this series, and I think it has some real potential.
The episode starts with D’avin passing his tests to become a Killjoy. He’ll actually start at level four, outranking his brother, as soon as he can pass a psychological evaluation. Of course, John is insecure about it, but we don’t actually get to see the brothers interact that much, and John’s feelings end up being worked out with Dutch instead in the final minutes of the episode. Instead, after the introductory scenes, D’avin spends most of his time trading barbs with a new character, Pawter, the shady doctor he’s trying to get to sign off on his psych eval.
The job of the week (retrieving a runaway migrant worker) seems like it should be an easy one, and it’s a favor for a friend of John’s, but for some reason Dutch is reluctant to do it. I know she’s wrapped up right now in trying to figure out why she’s supposed to be killing the guy she grabbed at the end of episode two, but this seems like the sort of job that should be right up her bounty-hunter-with-a-heart-of-gold alley.
Which brings me to my major complaint about the series so far, which is that it’s just damned inconsistent. While there are a lot of interesting things going on and a lot of neat ideas on display, everything seems to become more and more garbled with every episode. While this episode finally moves beyond (mostly, anyway) what I would consider first episode material, there still seems to be a lot of exposition and a lot of set up going on without any payoff. The one piece of drama that was resolved in this episode–John’s jealousy of D’avin–is actually something that would have been better either as a long term part of the dynamic between the trio of main characters or just left out entirely because it’s predictable and trite.
D’avin’s PTSD-like condition is ongoing and unresolved, although it so far doesn’t seem to have any serious impact on his ability to function. While I think it’s being treated in a serious manner by the writers, it seems like they don’t want it to be too big a part of the show. And aside from Pawter, who deliberately triggers D’avin in a public place in order to try and force him to seek treatment, neither John nor Dutch seem to be particularly concerned about it–even though D’avin literally almost killed a random dude at a bar for no reason early in the episode.
Dutch’s mysterious past (and present) becomes no clearer in this episode. While we do get to see her torturing the dude that she is apparently too ethical to want to assassinate, we don’t even know who the guy is or what his job is or anything about him at all that might give us a clue about what Dutch is involved in. It’s incredibly disappointing, because I was very hopeful last week that this episode would shed some light on things. Instead, I know less than the character does about what’s going on, and all I learned about Dutch this week is that, while she doesn’t want to kill people for money, she’s totally cool with putting the screws to some dude who doesn’t even know why someone wants him dead.
“The Harvest” continues exploring the idea of inequality, but I still don’t get how the Quad is organized. So there are people who are really rich and people who are de facto slaves, and this is bad. But our Killjoy protagonists also gleefully send some dude off to be a slave in a mine because he’s an asshole. I suppose it’s not so much that I’m not beginning to see what is going on in the Quad; I’m ust not understanding how our supposed protagonists fit into it.
Honestly? They don’t seem like sensible people. They seem very young, rather irresponsible, and totally directionless. Every damn one of them has some kind of dark past, but they seem to be only sporadically affected by their histories. They inhabit a world of drinking and banging married women and dealing with black markets. They kill people in the course of their work, and there doesn’t seem to be any real rhyme or reason to whatever half-baked honor code they live by.
Now, it could be that what is unfolding in this show is a coming of age and the political awakening of the characters, but that brings me back to the fact that we’re already three episodes into a ten episode season and I’m just not feeling very invested in the journey yet. I expect a coming of age or political awakening story to be messy, but as much as there is to like about Killjoys and as much as I’ve enjoyed parts of the show so far, I just don’t feel like the story has started yet, whatever it is.
Killjoys is a fun show with a theoretically likable concept, but if something doesn’t happen soon I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to stick it out hoping.
An Ember in the Ashes was a surprise. I was looking for (and expected) a fast, easy read that would help get me out of the reading slump I’d been in since breaking my foot in May. I don’t read much YA these days, but this book has gotten a lot of positive attention and I could have sworn that I heard somewhere that it was basically a standalone, which would have been nice since I’m not looking to get into any more uncompleted series. I figured this would be a quick, shallow, fun read that I’d never have to think about again.
It turns out I was super wrong about everything except it being a fast read. I did manage to race through it in about a day, but that was because it was really, really good, not because it was light reading.
This book is not light reading.
An Ember in the Ashes opens with a gut punch and then kicks the reader while they’re down, for over four hundred glorious pages. It’s a wild ride from the very beginning, and it’s definitely the best YA novel I’ve read in a couple of years.
At the same time, Ember is a sort of strange book for me to review. It has several glaring flaws that would ordinarily be dealbreakers for for me, but that Sabaa Tahir manages to make work.
First, I don’t love the names of the main characters, Laia and Elias. They’re just too close to each other, too many L’s and A’s, and though I never found them confusing, these names are just a little too match-y for my taste. They’re also part of a general lack of consistent naming conventions throughout the novel. The fantasy world of the book is ostensibly based upon ancient Rome, but the character names are a mix of Greek, English, Gaelic, and other origins. This could work as a way to differentiate between different cultures in the book, but that’s not how it’s done here. Instead, it’s just a mishmash of names, some of which make sense, some which don’t.
This sort of naming convention mess is increasingly characteristic of YA fiction in general, and it always turns me off a bit. It’s only tolerable here because the story Tahir tells is so well-crafted and because, while the names are sloppy, they don’t inhabit the realm of just plain silly and absurd that some YA character names do.
My second major criticism is also sort of about names, but in the general worldbuilding sense. Frankly, if it didn’t all manage to somehow work, I’d think that Tahir had used this humorous article at The Toast as a serious writing advice. Everything is just awfully generic.
There are the Scholar people, who are peaceful artisans and intellectuals who were easily overpowered and enslaved by the warlike Martial people. Aside from these two major groups, there are also Tribesmen, Barbarians, Lake People and Wildmen, The live in places like “The Empire,” “The Southern Lands,” and “The Tribal Deserts.” The one major holiday we see in the book is just called the “Moon Festival,” another extremely vague and generic piece of the world Tahir has created.
Even the prophesying Augurs seem generic when surrounded by so many other generic groups of people, and this isn’t helped much by the use of the name “Cain” for the main Augur. It’s a name that is so loaded with hackneyed connotations of antiquity, mystery and villainy (or occasional anti-heroism) that it should basically never be used unless an author is literally referring to the biblical Cain. I have a special loathing for the use of mythologically significant names in lieu of actual characterization.
All that said, there’s a lot to like about this fantasy world. There are definitely some bits of ancient Rome in here, but this isn’t Rome the great empire and foundation of western society. The Martials are Rome the violent colonizing juggernaut, and the Scholars and Tribespeople are clearly representative of the great civilizations of the Middle East and North Africa. While I think that the conflict between the Scholars and Martials is a little simplistic, it also offers a refreshingly different and much-needed perspective than the pro-imperialist ones that are more common in high fantasy.
Though there is much about this fantasy world that is bland and generic, there is still enough detail to make it stand out from more standard fare. The incorporation of creatures from Arab mythology is nice and helps to solidify the reader’s sense of the story world as vaguely Middle Eastern as opposed to the usual vaguely Medieval European fantasy.
The one really original fantastical element Tahir introduces is the masks worn by the uncreatively named Masks, and I would have liked to see this explained and explored a little more. Because Elias’s mask hasn’t bonded to him, we don’t get any firsthand details on what it’s like for any of the characters to have a mask permanently affixed to their faces. The masks are also mentioned inconsistently throughout the book, and it’s never quite clear exactly what the masks look like. It’s too bad that we don’t learn more about the masks because they’re probably the most unique worldbuilding aspect we’re shown.
The things that make all of the above-listed mediocrity okay and turn An Ember in the Ashes into a highly readable piece of work are the well-drawn main characters and a meticulously planned and beautifully realized plot. It also helps that Tahir avoids some of the more obnoxious YA tropes and what tropes she does utilize are smartly chosen. Finally, I really appreciate that Tahir isn’t afraid to hurt her characters. The stakes feel high and the danger feels real throughout the book, but at the same time I never felt like the suffering was gratuitous or overdone.
This book feels like it shouldn’t work as well as it does, and there are any number of things I can pick out of it that I ordinarily don’t care for. However, I really enjoyed it, and I’m definitely looking forward to reading its sequel. An Ember in the Ashes is a sprawling, challenging young adult fantasy that is much greater than the sum of its parts.
“All the Mirrors of the World” marks the halfway point of the miniseries, and, fittingly, it’s an episode that is heavily concerned with balance. More accurately, it’s an episode that deals largely with the ways in which things are out of balance and are not right with our characters.
The episode begins right where last week’s ended: with the chaos following Lady Pole’s attempt on Mr. Norrell’s life. We quickly learn that Lady Pole succeeded only in wounding Childermass and earning herself a trip to an asylum.
Childermass has an ominous (and foreshadowing) vision while he’s inconveniently unconscious from his wounds.
The standout part of this whole sort of opening sequence is the interaction between Childermass and Norrell. It’s probably the longest we’ve gotten to see these two characters alone together so far in the show, and I think it’s been worth the wait. This scene finally manages to really establish the sort of relationship that exists between Mr. Norrell and his servant. Mostly, it’s a weird relationship, characterized by Childermass’s self-assurance and Norrell’s awkward reliance on Childermass. Indeed, while Childermass is incapacitated, Norrell is seemingly barely able to function. At the same time, though, Norrell is suspicious of Childermass’s use of magic, and Childermass has begun to mistrust Norrell as well.
Meanwhile, the Stranges seem to be in somewhat better accord now that Jonathan Strange has returned from the Peninsula. As Jonathan prepares to return to his apprenticeship with Mr. Norrell, he and Arabella are extremely cute together.
King George III.
The first thing that Norrell and Strange do now that they’re back together is visit King George III, who is in the midst of his final bout of madness. They’ve been called to see the king by his children, who hope that they might be able to use magic in some way to help him. Norrell, of course, has already said that magic cannot cure madness, but Strange is more hopeful and even returns on his own after Norrell has already moved along from the matter. While Strange is unsuccessful in penetrating the king’s madness, he does get to see the king disappear into a mirror after having an odd conversation with someone Jonathan can’t see.
Lascelles and Norrell.
When Jonathan goes to Mr. Norrell to talk about what happened, Norrell is dismissive. Norrell is much more interested in promoting his own ideas, primarily through Lascelles’ book, which is nearly ready for publication. Strange is basically shut down entirely, and it’s becoming clear to everyone that Norrell intends to be the only magician in England whose opinions matter. Frustrated with Norrell, Strange takes his leave, returning to his home, where Arabella reminds him of the first spell he ever did–which warned him that Norrell was his enemy.
Segundus and Honeyfoot defend Lady Pole.
Lady Pole has been taken to Starecross, which Segundus and Honeyfoot have turned into an asylum since Childermass told them they couldn’t have a magicians’ school. Lady Pole will be their first patient, but she’s terribly unhappy about it. When she recognizes them as magicians, she’s convinced that they are Norrell’s men, only calming down when she observes them refusing Childermass entry to see her. It seems that Starecross may be a comfortable place for Lady Pole after all, and Segundus is even able to see the enchantment that has been placed upon her and Stephen Black, although he doesn’t know what it is.
Earlier in the episode, Arabella questioned her husband about a Miss Grey, who claimed to be learning magic from him, and Jonathan disclaimed any knowledge of the girl. While Jonathan is at a club with a couple of friends, however, he comes face to face with a pair of men who also claim to be his pupils. Clearly, someone is running a scam. When called upon to demonstrate his magic and prove his identity, Strange steps into a mirror, where he finds himself on the [Raven] King’s Roads.
The land behind the mirrors.
Jonathan Strange uses the roads to travel to where Drawlight is; unsurprisingly, Drawlight is in the middle of duping yet another person out of exorbitant amounts of money, and Strange speedily puts a stop to the scheme. When Strange finally returns to his own house, Arabella has been worried, and she turns furious when Jonathan is dismissive of her concerns. I am pleased that the show follows the book in presenting Jonathan Strange’s inconsiderate behavior toward his wife as a fault, and they do a wonderful job here of showing this conflict between the Stranges in a way that is fair to both characters. Bertie Carvel is affable enough as Jonathan Strange that he’s lovable in spite of his sometimes glaring faults, and Charlotte Riley as Arabella captures such a perfect mix of loving concern and absolutely justified anger that there’s no reasonable way anyone could think her shrewish or nagging. Indeed, I think the viewer is supposed to be almost entirely on her side in this argument, and her feelings are treated entirely seriously.
Norrell insists that magic must be made respectable.
Drawlight finds himself permanently exiled from Norrell’s presence and in a great deal of debt that is about to get him tossed into prison. However, this might be considered lucky, as Norrell is pushing to have some ancient magical court revived in order that Drawlight could actually be hanged–with the added benefit that such a court could be used to squash any opinions on magic that differ from Norrell’s. Fortunately, Sir Walter is there to, quite sensibly, put a stop to that idea, and he gets one of my favorite speeches so far in the show. This is also, I think, a really clever way of including material from the book without really including it. In the novel, there’s a whole thing where Norrell pesters Parliament for a while about reviving the Cinque Dragownes, and it would have been terribly boring to put that in the miniseries even though it’s a pretty important bit of Norrell’s characterization. This conversation, though, allows us to get that characterization in one short scene, communicating the concept from the book in a smart way. Also, it’s very funny.
Angry about Drawlight and upset that he won’t have his own personal court of law, Norrell turns to picking on Jonathan Strange, next, berating him for his injudicious use of magic. Strange argues, trying to get Norrell excited about the King’s Roads, but Norrell only insists that modern magic must be kept “respectable.” As Strange leaves in frustration again, he grabs a copy of Lascelles’ finished book, which he sets out to review when he gets home.
I am a little bummed that we don’t get the whole text of Strange’s scathing review, but I suppose that gives people a good reason to read the book after watching the miniseries. I did like seeing Lascelles rant about the review to Norrell, though.
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell having very civil breakup tea together.
Probably the most important thing that happens in this episode is the inevitable breakup between Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Following the publication of the infamous book review, Strange goes to visit his mentor and inform him of the end of their association. This scene is shot so perfectly and acted so sensitively that it actually made me a little teary. Norrell practically begs Strange not to leave him, and it broke my heart a little.
Lady Pole gets to be at least a tiny bit okay for about a minute.
I would have been happy if the episode had ended here, but there are still a couple of things to be wrapped up. In the last few minutes, we get to see Lady Pole finally settled at Starecross, which is nice, although I think I would rather have seen this finished earlier in the episode. Mostly, I feel this way because Lady Pole’s fleeting contentment is immediately overshadowed by a sort of triple cliffhanger ending.
First, Jonathan Strange is called back to war when Napoleon escapes and starts causing trouble on the continent again. This throws a wrench in the Stranges’ plans to return to their country home, where Jonathan intended to retire and become a theoretical magician.
The moss oak is pretty freaky.
Second, Stephen Black and the Gentleman unearth a “moss oak” from a sort of bog. The Gentleman said that he needed the moss oak for his plan to take Arabella away from Jonathan Strange, and it turns out that the moss oak is a piece of enchanted wood, or perhaps a piece of wood that can be enchanted. In any case, and much to Stephen Black’s horror, the Gentleman peels back part of the wood, revealing Arabella’s face.
Norrell becomes Jonathan Strange’s enemy for real.
Finally, the episode ends with Lascelles confronting Norrell about the breakup with Jonathan Strange. Apparently, they had a whole plan of how Norrell was going to browbeat Strange into retracting his book review and stuff, but Norrell didn’t do any of that stuff. However, Norrell is receptive as Lascelles encourages him to work against Jonathan Strange, and by the last ominous shot of the episode, Norrell is vowing to destroy his erstwhile pupil.
“All the Mirrors of the World” is the best episode of the show so far. It’s thematically consistent with its examination of how different pairs of characters balance each other, and it does a masterful job of breaking up the central pair of Strange and Norrell, who don’t know yet just how much they need each other.
As an adaptation, this episode probably hews closer to the source material than any episode yet. Though notable cuts have been made and we miss out on some of the book’s insights into the interior lives of the characters, this episode covers an enormous amount of story in a way that feels naturalistic and almost effortless. The shifts between story lines are smartly done and keep things interesting the whole time without being disorienting or confusing.
Overall, this was just a superb piece of television, and it’s exactly the sort of thing I hoped to see when I first heard this miniseries was in the works. I’m not sure how the whole series will stand up to the source material, but this episode at least definitely does it justice.
Terminator Genisys is a kind of objectively bad movie, but I genuinely enjoyed it. Probably, this is because my only expectations when I went in were that I was going to see robots and explosions, both of which Genisys delivered in spades.
The biggest problem with Terminator Genisys is the time travel. The Terminator franchise has always been about time travel, so it’s no surprise that it features prominently in Genisys, but the implementation of it just sucks. Basically everyone is time travelling, but there are several different timelines crossing each other and everything just turns into a big old mess.
It’s not terribly convoluted, really, but the mechanism by which all this stuff happens just doesn’t make sense at all. Something something time energy or some nonsense. Terminator Genisys is the sort of time travel story where the writers seem to have realized (incorrectly) that by waving their hands and shouting “alternate timeline!” they could pretty much change things up however they wanted to. It’s absurd if you spend more than about two seconds thinking about any of it, but it does manage to make Genisys more of a reboot than a sequel, and I think it’s in some ways a successful reboot. Certainly, there’s plenty of room left at the end for sequels in this timeline.
With the casting of Doctor Who‘s Matt Smith as Skynet/Genisys, all this time energy and time being rewritten stuff feels a little too on the nose. At the same time, I think any Who reference being made is going to go right over the heads of most of Genisys‘s target audience, which is presumably people who know enough about Terminator to be interested in seeing this movie. I just don’t see there being a ton of overlap between folks who want to see Terminator 5 and Whovians. And, really, if they were trying to draw the Whovian crowd to the theater, I would have thought they’ve spend more time using Matt Smith in their promotion of the movie. Perhaps the reason that didn’t happen is because Matt Smith’s character is perhaps the least sense-making thing in the movie. He plays the physical-ish embodiment of Skynet, and he seems to know basically everything, with no explanation for how he knows so much. Other than plot convenience, of course.
Emilia Clarke is fine as Sarah Connor. Although she seems to be slightly exasperated throughout the whole movie, it’s certainly a much less wooden performance than she usually turns in as Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones. When it comes to the actual action scenes, she does a credible job of projecting a toughness that belies her tiny stature.
Jai Courtney is little more than a pretty face in the role of Kyle Reese, which is really all he needs to be. Jason Clarke as John Connor shows up. I love J.K. Simmons, so I was sad that his character wasn’t used in a smarter manner, and the same goes for Dayo Okeniyi, who is criminally underused. The real surprise for me was how well Arnold Schwartzenegger performed. Certainly he was greatly aided by CGI and body doubles, but he was likable–even lovable. I’m not sure that terminators really ought to be lovable, but I think it worked here, and the couple of moments in the movie where I had feelings other than “cool explosion!” or “awesome robot!” were moments involving Schwartzenegger.
Terminator Genisys isn’t a good movie. It’s not a feminist movie, for all that it does include a pretty badass heroine. It manages to not be offensive in any particular way that I can think of, which is nice. However, the best thing I can say about it, if I’m honest, is that I had fun, and that is only because I purposefully kept my expectations low and chose to turn my brain off as much as possible.
SF Bluestocking 