Thoughts on Wonder Man

I just finished Wonder Man on Disney Plus, and I think it was pretty great. I wasn't expecting to be so captivated by it - I wasn't even really planning on watching it right now, but decided to check it out earlier this week, just to see how it was. And, to be honest, to give it kind of a pity-watch - I expected the bad-faith review-bombers to get to work on it, since it changes the lead from a white guy in the comics to a Black guy.

But I took to it immediately, in part because the episodes were short - only about half an hour each, growing to about 35 minutes toward the end. But also in part because of the two leads: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is great as Simon Williams/Wonder Man, and Ben Kingsley reprises his role as Trevor Slattery/the Mandarin from Iron Man 3 and Shang-Chi. Abdul-Mateen commands the attention in the lead role, especially when Acting. Meanwhile, Kingsley's portrayal of Trevor grows better and more layered every time we see him, with this show casting him first as Simon's friend and then (early on) revealing that he's got his own agenda.

In between we get a lot of enjoyable business about what it's like to be a jobbing actor in Hollywood, contrasting Simon being at the beginning of his career and Trevor being, if not at the end, certainly defined by his most notorious role as the Mandarin. As a creative person myself, it was particularly enjoyable to watch them navigate that life, even toward the end, where they find themselves in a different headspace than at the start.

As far as the changes to the character of Wonder Man himself, I've already referred to the change of ethnicity - though it's interesting that they gave Simon a Haitian background. The other big change is that, instead of getting his powers through some energy nonsense, as in the comics, their origin is just... unexplained. There's some suggestion that he's always had them, or that they emerged during puberty, which would imply that he's a mutant, which Marvel's been seeding through the movies and shows for a while (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Ms Marvel, Deadpool & Wolverine and the Marvels all refer to mutants in some capacity).

But this show isn't about superheroes or their origins. It's about getting out of your own way to reach your goals, and about how you lift yourself up by connecting with others, rather than focusing constantly on yourself. This eventually becomes... literal? You'll know what I mean if you've watched the last scene.

The important thing is that Wonder Man doesn't do the usual superhero pyrotechnics (even if most of the best MCU shows, like WandaVision and Loki, also didn't), preferring instead to tell a character-based story. I've seen some reviews suggesting it might even be Marvel's best show? I don't know if I'd go that far, as WandaVision (and yes, Loki, just to mention both again) were probably richer overall, but as I said, I watched it just to see what it was like, and ended up bingeing it in half a week.

I don't know if we'll get to see Simon (or Trevor) again, but I hope so. He's not a huge character (one of the reasons why I was a little reluctant to start the show), but he's always been associated with the Avengers in some way, so it might be fun to see him pop up in Doomsday or Secret Wars. Or, while we're thinking pie-in-the-sky, an Avengers West Coast movie?

Blue Lights May Be My New Favorite Brit-Cop Show

I just finished Series 3 of Blue Lights, and wow, wow, wow.

It wasn't even on my radar until fairly recently. I'd watched the first series of Line of Duty a couple of years ago on Hulu, and then wasn't able to get back to it until last year, when I knocked out Series 2 through 4 in short order and Series 5 when I got to the UK last July. When I discovered that Hulu here didn't have Series 6, I started considering taking a subscription to BritBox, reasoning that paying $11 to watch a full season of a show is completely fair.

Then at some point I read about Blue Lights, and was intrigued. So when I finally found the time to subscribe to BritBox (back in November, when it was offering two months for $6 rather than the usual $11), I finished Line of Duty and then went looking for Blue Lights. And I was hooked from the start.

The best I can say about it is that it's like the UK's version of the Wire, which is my absolute favorite TV show ever. It starts with following the cops, but expands to spend more time following the criminals as well, with investigations that expand from the first series through to the third. However, like the Wire, it's as much a profile of a city as it is a police procedural.

Series 2 expands from Series 1's investigation of a former Republican turned gang leader to look not only at the loyalist gangs of Belfast, but also the effects that the post-pandemic cost-of-living crisis, plus a decade and a half of Tory austerity, have had on the city's neighborhoods. The first image of Series 2 has two of the protagonists answering a call about a homeless man's overdose death - and it soon becomes clear that he was killed both by the drugs sold by the ongoing antagonists and by society's indifference and powerlessness in response to the ongoing and overlapping crises.

Series 3 is a little weaker in some ways, but still compelling TV. It's meant to look at how criminality has infected the higher levels of society, but I didn't feel like it delved into those characters' inner worlds as well as the first two seasons did with the Republican and Loyalist neighborhoods. In part that's because they're engaged in varying levels of child exploitation and abuse, which makes it pretty impossible to make them someone you want to watch, let alone root for. But none of the villains in Series 3 are as good as Series 2's main antagonist Lee Thompson, who's at once clearly a criminal but also disposed to see himself as a key part of his community.

That said, the final episode has a nice sting in the tail when Series 1's Tina McIntyre faces the Dublin gangsters she's been propping up since her husband and son went to prison. I don't know if it sets anything up for Series 4, but it was a satisfying ending to the show so far.

All of this means that I'll now have two reasons to subscribe to BritBox again down the line - the BBC has commissioned Series 4 of Blue Lights and Series 7 of Line of Duty, so I'll be keeping an eye out for those. I've cancelled my subscription in the meantime to save a bit of cash and not feel like I have to watch yet another streamer regularly, but again, paying $11 for a month in which to watch a full season of either show, plus whatever other Brit-delights I can fit in (the Responder! Silent Witness! Wire in the Blood! Rebus! The New Statesman!), is completely worth it.

The bottom line, though, is that I can't recommend Blue Lights highly enough - even if you might need subtitles to cope with all the Belfast accents.

Thoughts on Pluribus

It's been a while since I finished Pluribus, about a week or so, but I wanted to set down some thoughts on it while the show was still relatively fresh in mind. The TLDR is that I really liked it, more than Breaking Bad and more than what I've seen so far of Better Call Saul, although I've still only seen one season of Saul. I'm looking forward to seeing where Pluribus goes next, but to discuss that, I'll have to engage in some SPOILERS, so proceed with caution after the jump.

What I Read and Watched and Listened to in 2025

With the winding down of another year comes the chance to think about the stuff I've enjoyed (more or less) throughout the year. I found myself reading more books this year, but watching fewer movies, and I think my TV watching was also slightly down on previous years, for a number of reasons.

In terms of comics, I've mentioned a few of the books I've been reading this year, but the main thread remains the Uncanny X-Men. If I spent 2024 reading one issue of that series each day, from 1963 onwards, this year the question was reading through it until I got to the end of its original run, which I did the other day. That makes Uncanny volume 1 the first comics series I've read from its beginning in the 1960s to its end in the 2010s. Marvel subsequently relaunched it with new numbering, so I'll be checking those out in the year to come, but it's definitely the end of an era - when I was a kid I liked seeing those ever-increasing numbers and the increasingly ludicrous milestone issues (#500! #750! etc).

Quality-wise, it was a weird year for reading X-Men comics, quite apart from what's happening in the books at the moment. As I finished 2024, I reached the reboot that saw Grant Morrison take over New X-Men, something I'd been looking forward to since signing up for Marvel Unlimited. I liked Morrison's New X-Men, and I still think it's the second-most important point in the X-Men's history, but I suppose it didn't hit the same as in 2004, when I first read Planet X and Here Comes Tomorrow.

I had a similar feeling when I went back and read the original Age of Apocalypse event. I remembered a lot of it, but I'd just been reading the core X-Men books, and hadn't read much of the X-Factor or Excalibur or X-Force tie-ins - which may have been the wise choice back in 1995. I wasn't super impressed with the sequel miniseries from 2006, either, though Chris Bachalo's art on it was pretty good.

The other notable comic for me this year was an Epic Collection of the original run of Master of Kung Fu, the title featuring the original conception of Shang-Chi from back when Marvel owned the rights to Fu Manchu. It's not on Marvel Unlimited, and the Epic Collections are out of print, so I was super excited when I found it at one of my local comics shops. It's pretty dated, both in terms of Chinese representation and in terms of storytelling and art, but reading it, I can see why Douglas Wolk highlighted it in All of the Marvels. The book I have is the second collection, and I'd love to find the first and third, which apparently both exist - I don't know if I'm ready to go looking for individual back issues.

In terms of books, I stuck with my usual mix of SFF and history, for the most part. I read the second of Genevieve Cogman's Scarlet Revolution novels, which I quite enjoyed and I'm looking forward to reading the third, Damned, in the coming year. The first in her new trilogy was announced in January as coming out in October of 2026, so I'll be eager to snap that one up as soon as I can.

And I've spoken about romantasy, having started A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas and Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. I'm really interested in the storytelling potential of this genre, which is why I figured I needed to do some research.

I also spent a few enjoyable months reading John Julius Norwich's histories of Byzantium and Venice. I liked the one on Byzantium better, it must be said, because it was a good summary of that empire's long history, and because I feel like there's more drama to it than to the Most Serene Republic, though I liked getting an understanding of how Venice came to be such an important power in the Mediterranean.

But by far my favorite history book that I read this year was Unruly, by David Mitchell. The prose was entertaining, because he's a very funny man already, but I also appreciated that Mitchell really knew his stuff, providing insights into how the English understanding of the monarchy changed over the years. I'd love to see a similar book on the kings of France or the US presidents, written in the same tone, but I appreciate that Unruly will likely have to remain a one-off.

Outside of those genres, the Slow Horses series occupied a lot of my reading time. At some point this year I bought books 5-8, and ended up reading them all in quick succession, with book 9 pinch-hitting admirably after its release in September. Mick Herron has become a surer hand with his plotting, and even if certain tics seem to have insinuated themselves in his writing, they're still super entertaining in their glorious put-downs, skewerings of British politics, and generally twisty-turniness. I was happy to also get some background on certain Slow Horses secondary characters in the Secret Hours, which is set in the same universe.

Speaking of, I got Apple TV late this year so that I could watch the latest season of Slow Horses, and stuck around to watch Down Cemetery Road. The former was a solid entry, modified from the book in ways that make sense, and I'm looking forward to whatever else they do on the show. With regard to the latter, it was similarly twisty and paranoid, and entertaining enough that my dad also got really into it (he doesn't watch much of the same TV I watch). I'm curious how it differs from the book, but hopefully we get another couple of seasons to fully adapt the rest of the series.

Apple TV was on a bit of a hot streak this year, since I got into Severance with the approach of season 2. I tend to think Season 1 was better, but that final image of Season 2 was amazing - hopefully it doesn't take too long to come back. I liked Murderbot even more than Severance, having read a couple of the early novellas in the series (and it's another one my dad loved). I'm still about halfway through Pluribus, but I'm quite taken with it, even more than with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul (though my dad's less into it, so make of that what you will). I hope to write something clever about Pluribus when I finish it.

I didn't only watch Apple TV, though. Alien: Earth was well-made, but I don't think I loved it as much as many others did. It really came alive for me in the 5th episode, which flashed back to all the monsters running loose on the ship. Boy Kavalier and the other stuff on Earth was a little less of a draw, in the end. I got caught up with The Boys and Gen V, both strong entries though I found the parallels to current real-world politics wearing. I'm looking forward to the new season of the Boys, though, as well as Fallout.

I've already called Andor the best Star War in years, to the point that it overshadows Rogue One. This may seem like it's in contradiction of my complaint about the Boys, but at heart, Andor's less nihilistic and it's not rubbing your face in the comparison. Same with Daredevil: Born Again, which revisits and expands on the original Netflix show so well, while giving us a similar parallel in Wilson Fisk's ascent to NYC mayor. That said, I prefer the one we got in real life. As for Ironheart... I wanted to like it, but it came to a screeching halt for me when they had Riri get mixed up with magic, though I'll admit that the fabulous crew of bank robbers also felt like they belonged in a different show - preferably one that would give them more of a spotlight and not come off as box-ticking.

Another disappointment was Season 3 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. In contrast to last season, it didn't feel like it pushed as many boundaries or played with the structure, preferring instead to work in as many references to older Trek in place of storytelling (see "Wedding Bell Blues", where Rhys Darby plays Trelane). Where the show did play with the formula, the results could be... uneven. The "documentary" episode "What is Starfleet?" is an example, and ranks - for me - as the worst hour of Trek I've ever seen. I think part of the reason I was so disappointed was that I'd spent the year studying the show deeply while writing my spec script, so my expectations may have been too high. There's only two seasons left, and they've wrapped on the fifth, so I guess I won't be seeing my little script onscreen, but at least I hope they right the ship in the home stretch.

The main show that characterized my year though was Line of Duty - incidentally, another show that held my dad's attention. Keelie Hawes as Lindsay Denton in Season 2 was the best adversary, in my opinion, but every season's been a banger, and I'm glad that it's coming back for a seventh go. In the same vein, I've gotten into Blue Lights, which is sort of like the Wire but set in Belfast. I took out a subscription to Brit Box expressly for those two shows, just to give you an idea.

As mentioned, this wasn't a big movie-going year. I think I went to the cinema three times, all for superhero flicks? Whether at home or in the theater, old or new, my standout was Superman, imperfections and all. It certainly surpassed both Captain America: Brave New World and Fantastic Four: First Steps, which may have been better than Eternals or the Marvels, but still felt drifty to me. I'm getting excited about the next Avengers movie, though.

Turning to music, I listened to a shitload of it, but very little new stuff, though I appreciated some of the singles by Sabrina Carpenter and Addison Rae - wonder what that's about, eh? Something I got obsessed with late on has been Vince Guaraldi's Peanuts soundtracks - his Linus and Lucy seems to be on permanent repeat in my head.

My big British rock listen-through reached the Britpop era, which was great - I got to revisit Blur, Pulp, Oasis, Suede, plus other lesser-known faves like Ash and Supergrass. I was also weirdly taken with Cast and Sleeper - the fact that I kept listening to Cast's first few singles was not something I'd ever have predicted, but here we are. I then spent October listening to Apple Music's goth playlist, so I got acquainted with the Sisters of Mercy, and I quite enjoyed some of their stuff too.

Looking back right now, it feels like there wasn't much going on this year, but I've written a lot more than I expected to, so I'm clearly consuming more than enough media. TV is clearly my big thing, given how many strong opinions I have, but this year I've also learned about how it's produced, so I think that's given me extra appreciation for the good stuff.

Anyway, here's to an equally fecund and watchable 2026! As long as there's more than one studio left, and the output isn't all AI slop paying homage to David Ellison at Skydance, it should be an interesting year. We'll see.

A Mid-Term Report on X-Men Evolution

My usual rule is not to write about a show that I'm watching until I've finished it, but there are extenuating circumstances this time around. I'm only halfway through X-Men: Evolution, the second animated show about Marvel's mutant flagship, but given that I'm probably going to let my Disney Plus subscription lapse next week, I figured I'd write down my thoughts so far.

I think I've gone on record as not having been the biggest fan of the original animated series from 1992 (hereafter to be called X92). Whereas Batman: The Animated Series had a bold new design for the characters and a visual aesthetic borrowed from the Tim Burton movies, X92's visual language was a bit more nondescript - the character designs were the then-current looks that Jim Lee came up with for his and Chris Claremont's 1991 relaunch, but the animation style was pretty generic 90s Saturday morning. At least for the first four seasons: season 5 featured a notable decline in animation quality, as 10 new episodes were ordered and animated by a cut-rate animation house.

X-Men Evolution was meant to be a complete reimagining: instead of a team of adults, the core team (Cyclops, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler, Shadowcat, Rogue and new character Spyke) would be kids learning how to use their powers and navigate teenage life. Storm and Wolverine were teachers at the Xavier Institute, which was also a nice touch, and they'd be joined by Beast later in the second season. A new set of younger characters, mostly based on the New Mutants, would also join in Season 2.

The bad guys, or antagonists, were a group of mutant misfits drawn from the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (just the Brotherhood here), led first by Mystique and then by Magneto. But they weren't "evil mutants", because characters would switch between the X-Men and the Brotherhood, and there were themes like Shadowcat's kinda relationship with Avalanche that meant the relationship wasn't just trying to kill one another.

The big thing I like from this show, at least so far, is how it treats Cyclops and Jean. Cyclops is the victim of character assassination in the movies and X92 - if someone hates him, it's a good bet that they first encountered him in the original animated series. Here he gets more personality, kind of a dork, kind of a regular kid who likes cars and is in love with his best friend, but he's not the authority figure and killjoy from X92. Jean, meanwhile, is the popular girl who's also cool, but who's still prone to making mistakes and getting jealous (like when her friend Taryn moves in on Cyclops - meow). This version of Jean is quite a bit better than the X92 version who just yells "Scott!" and faints whenever she uses her powers.

I can't deny it: the development of their feelings for one another is my favorite plot thread in Season 2 of Evolution, and I can't wait to see how it plays out in the third and fourth seasons.

The other thing I like is the theme of the characters choosing whether to be X-Men or Brotherhood members. Avalanche tries to join the X-Men once, Boom-Boom joins the Brotherhood (and then leaves), and the two teams have to work together a couple of times. That question of how to be, and how to use their powers, is central to the X-theme in a way that X92 never really managed, as far as I could tell.

Now, I don't want to over-romanticize this show. It's clearly a kids show from the early 2000s, with sometimes dodgy animation, character designs and writing. Boom-Boom looks off-model most of the time, there are times when the movement looks cheap, and some of the plots make little sense.

But if you can get beyond those issues, it's a good reimagining of the concept that highlights the themes well. And it introduces one of my favorite characters, X-23, although not until Season 3. I'm looking forward to seeing if the subsequent seasons are as fun, as well as the 2009 follow-up, Wolverine and the X-Men. I have to do something while I wait for season 2 of X97, but as I got to the midpoint of Evolution, I couldn't help thinking that this show would also be ripe for a reboot. 

Anyone at Marvel want to take that on?

Unexpected Fecundity on Vacation

Given that this is my second time being between jobs, I've tried to improve on the previous bout, which was back in 2018. I had a lot more freelance work, then - scratch that, I had freelance work, full stop - but in between jobs I found it harder to maintain focus on bringing in business and taking care of other stuff I wanted to do. The main thing that I remember wishing I'd done more of was writing.

So this time, I decided to do things a little more intelligently. I built myself a weekly schedule, which broke each day into four parts similar to how I organized my time after I started working from home during and after the pandemic. While almost each day had to feature one block of time for job-hunting, I also built in a block for writing, and I've generally managed to stick to both, plus other important stuff like learning and going to the gym.

When I decided to take an extended trip to Europe I continued with my weekly scheduling, which was easier to do when I was in London and mostly on my own. It was a little more difficult in Oslo, but I gave myself a break for being officially on vacation... and I still managed to do a little job-hunt related stuff and a fair amount of writing-related stuff.

One thing that's helped keep me on track with writing has been the sequence of TV writing classes I've been taking through the UCLA Extension since last fall. I lost my job just as the first class in the sequence ended, and I've since continued plugging away at it, because I figured that at least I'd have something to show people once I finished (I'm now in possession of a Star Trek: Strange New Worlds spec script, if anyone out there wants to get me on that writing team before the show ends).

Now that I've moved on in the sequence to the part where I write my own TV pilot, I find the ideas flowing even more freely. In addition to the outline and script I'm writing for class, I'm developing a couple of ideas that have been percolating in my head for the last couple of years, as well as looking at revising a novel I was working on a year or two ago and writing novel versions of my TV pilot ideas.

It's actually been quite exciting to have so many things to keep me occupied during this time. Also, the class allows me to break up tasks in a way that deeply appeals to my methodical nature, which means that whenever I finish one component of a given project, I can just move on to the next project, knowing that I'll return to the first one the following week. Work for the TV class takes precedence, obviously, but the structure also gives me a way to break down my other stuff and devote time to work on it when I'm up to date on my homework.

The other thing that's allowed me to do so much writing is simply time. Of course I have the same 24 hours each day here in Italy that I have in California, but I also have fewer demands on my time. I'm way out in the country, so mobile internet is spotty, even with my roaming pass from T-Mobile; not only that, but the Wi-Fi in the house only reaches a couple of rooms, so I'm not doomscrolling from every horizontal surface I can lie on.

I also don't have a car, so I can't go out and do other stuff that I'd do in Palo Alto. The most obvious thing is going to the gym - though back home that got its own block of time on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so it didn't interfere with the writing. The main thing that should take time away from the writing is doing DIY work on the house, but even with that in mind I manage to carve out a couple of hours for writing and job-hunting and even some learning on Khan Academy.

Of course, I'm super fortunate. I have a pretty big emergency fund, plus I'm spending the month of August in a pretty cheap part of the world, and I'm not even paying for a hotel for the privilege. I had the wherewithal to depart for London, Oslo and Turin for two months in the first place, which not everyone in my position could have done.

There's also the fact that the freelance stuff has been singularly thin on the ground this year. When you don't have the option of doing that to earn a crust of bread, then you fill your hours with other stuff. I've just been lucky enough that I could fill my hours with writing a Star Trek script and plot out novel revisions. 

But the main point that's worth considering here is, how easy it is to get distracted from writing, or whatever else it is you think you "should" be doing. Even when you're not employed full time, your house can hold a lot of distractions, and the ability to deal with them. There must be some way to neutralize those distractions, and when I get home I hope to continue this streak of getting shit done.

In any case, the upshot is that, whatever else I remember and/or regret about this particular period of funemployment, when I look back on it at least I'll be able to say that I took the time to get serious about the writing. And hopefully that leads to something, somewhere down the line.

All of the Star Treks

Last week I finally hit a goal I first set for myself back in 2006, when I watched the final episode of Star Trek: Voyager. That means that I've now watched almost all Trek, with the exception of Short Treks and the Section 31 movie - which I suppose means my title for this post is somewhat misleading, but bear with me.

When I decided that watching every Trek show and movie was a worthwhile goal (yes, I know, I know), we were a couple of years off from the end of Enterprise, which was the last, somewhat labored gasp of what I like to call Trek's imperial phase: that period from 1987 to about 2004 that saw the launch of The Next Generation, Deep Space 9, Voyager and Enterprise, as well as four movies starring the TNG cast. Not only did Trek finally get a measure of critical and ratings recognition, but every one of those shows lasted longer than the Original Series (and Enterprise was the first Trek show to be cancelled since TOS).

When I made that goal, I'd only seen a few episodes of TOS here and there, none of the Animated Series, large parts of TNG but never in any systematic way, seasons 3-6 of DS9, and parts of the first two seasons of Voyager. I'd also seen all 6 of the original cast movies and three of the four TNG movies (Nemesis might not have come out yet). The Kelvin Timeline movies hadn't come out yet, and we were still more than a decade away from new Trek TV shows.

A big part of my decision to try to watch all Trek was that I'd just started a new job after graduating from journalism school, and I'd made a friend at work who was just as into Trek and all the other 90s SF shows that I'd loved. My new friend Paul lent me DVD box sets of Deep Space 9, Babylon 5 and the X-Files (as well as the West Wing), and when I discovered that someone in my building was stealing my mailed-in DVDs of DS9, Paul graciously allowed me to send them to his place and then brought them with him to work.

(No lie: this incident led me to rule out subsequent flatshares if they didn't have a personal letterbox in the front door, for fear of my rental DVDs getting nicked again)

Another coworker helped me catch up with a couple more seasons of TNG and the first two seasons of Voyager, and other shows I caught bit by bit, by renting from Sofa Cinema, which was the UK version of Netflix back then. But I wasn't very focused on my goal in those days: I watched all of TNG and Enterprise, but my attempts to watch TOS, DS9 and Voyager petered out - in part because TOS is quite slow and uneven, and Voyager takes a while to get better, if not ever properly good. I can't remember why I lost the thread of DS9 at that time, but on that attempt I only managed to get to the end of Season 4.

One thing that helped me stay focused on the TOS watch was the Mission Log podcast, which I've spoken about here. I remember seeing their first episode pop up on the Nerdist Podcast Network in 2012, so I listened to it eagerly even though I hadn't watched the Cage (TOS's first pilot). By 2013 I was watching more of season 1 of TOS and dutifully listening to Mission Log after each episode - but I took so long with it that in the interim I moved to the US and had to switch my DVD and streaming queue over to Netflix.

Now, I was a partisan of Netflix's DVD rental service up until the end, but I have to admit that once I was able to stream Netflix on a TV (first through the smart TV itself, then through an Amazon Fire TV and finally through Apple TV), it made it easier to keep up with Trek shows. I also determined that I was taking too long with too many shows - I'd finish a season of something, jump to another show entirely, and then by the time I went back to the first show I'd forgotten what I'd already seen of it.

So with that in mind, I finally decided to polish off DS9, all in one go. I took a few months, but it was the only show I was watching, and it was so good that I didn't feel the need to check out other shows in that time.

(I suspect that Kids These Days might have more trouble conceiving of a world with only one streaming service, Netflix, than of a world where Netflix mailed you DVDs)

With the end of DS9, I decided it was finally time to tackle Voyager, but I didn't do it in a very methodical way. It's so long ago now that I can't remember when I started it, but I must have given it a proper try after 2018, because that's when I worked with another colleague who also loved Trek, and assured me that Voyager picked up after Kes left and Seven of Nine joined the cast.

Getting a girlfriend put a little kibosh on the Voyager watch-through, especially because we were effectively living together during the pandemic and she didn't like Trek (she liked Star Wars, though). The other thing that slowed me down was Voyager's move from Netflix to Paramount Plus, along with the rest of the shows. I subsequently signed up for Paramount, and when I broke up with the GF, I had more time to watch whatever I wanted. I duly resumed Voyager, reserving it for lunch on Sundays.

That all still took years, of course. I finished season 7 of Voyager in June of 2025, and determined that I'd finished season 6 in June of 2024, with a similar amount of time since I finished season 5. It doesn't help that Voyager is still, for me, the weakest of the pre-2017 Trek shows - making it my only show, seven days a week, is probably more than I could handle.

And of course, yes, it took me so long to watch all these shows that Trek underwent a renaissance in the interim (two of them, technically). It's notable that in the time it's taken me to watch all of Voyager, I've also watched all 5 seasons of Discovery, 3 of Picard, 5 of Lower Decks, 2 of Prodigy, and the 2 so far of Strange New Worlds. 

So what does all this Trek amount to? I've watched the good (large chunks of TNG, almost all of DS9, large bits of TOS, Lower Decks and SNW), and I've watched the less entertaining (Voyager, Enterprise, Disco, those other bits of TOS and TNG). I've even watched TAS, which looks pretty abysmal but features the odd grown-up storyline, like a young Spock mercy killing his beloved pet to spare it a painful death, and the Devil telling children that they shouldn't let authority figures tell them who to be friends with. I'm not even joking!

My favorite period of Trek remains the imperial phase, specifically season 3 of TNG to the end of DS9. A lot of modern Trek is very good, but even the best of it sometimes feels too beholden to the past, as if they're worried that viewers won't like shows if they don't call back to every minute detail from the last 60 years of shows. This nostalgia works better on Lower Decks, which subjects every era of Trek to this treatment, and mines all that continuity for good-natured laughs; and while I love SNW, it sometimes feels too beholden to fan service as well. But it's still miles better than Star Trek Into Darkness, the second JJ Abrams-helmed Kelvin Timeline film, which does... not a great job of revisiting The Wrath of Khan.

And unfortunately, even when Trek does try to break free of the past, it feels very self-conscious. Look, Discovery is, hands down, my least favorite Trek, but I applaud it for making a clean break with the past at the end of season 2 and jumping forward over 900 years, so that it's nominally not beholden even to the TNG era. And yet, the show still fails to hold my attention as much as I'd like - its attempts to discuss hot-button social issues feel inorganic and labored, we never learn enough about the non-Michael Burnham characters to really like them, and the plots just don't feel that urgent. Even Prodigy, which grew into a fine show by the end of season 1, sometimes feels like it's laboring under the burden of showing that it's a Trek show.

This isn't to say that 90s Trek is perfect. Seasons 1 and 2 of TNG are absolutely terrible, with only one episode of note (Measure of a Man) to redeem them. DS9 can be slow at the start, and even up to the final season isn't completely immune from subjecting to us to some duff episodes. And for a supposed showcase of futuristic values, 90s Trek can be pretty disappointingly regressive: early TNG episodes like Code of Honor are rightly held up as grossly racist, while Harry Kim, Voyager's Asian cast member (the first since TOS's Sulu), always seems to get belittled and forgotten compared with the boorish white character, Tom Paris.

But the best summation I've heard of Trek (I believe from Mission Log) is that it's "competence porn", i.e. a show about smart people working together to solve problems. This squares with Gene Roddenberry's original vision, and his oft-quoted disparagement of "ancient aliens" hokum: he used to say that of course humans built the pyramids, because they're clever and they work hard. This spirit suffuses the best of Trek, and it's why Lower Decks and SNW and Prodigy have landed the best for me among the most recent entries.

It's worth noting that I've finished Voyager at an odd time for Trek in general. We're only a few weeks off from the premiere of SNW's third season, but Paramount has also announced that the show will be ending with season 5, which will be an abbreviated 6 episodes, rather than SNW's usual 10. Given the long lead times for the show, that could take a while yet, but it means that Trek is going from having 5 series on the air to just one, the Starfleet Academy show that's meant to emerge at some point.

Trek hasn't been immune to the toxic fandom that plagues other nerd-world properties, like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars. It's also suffered, in my opinion, from over-production on the TV shows, meaning that Paramount had to cancel them all to save money as it looks for a buyer; that over-production, in turn, has meant that the Trek creative teams relied too much on visual effects and action scenes, and not always enough on the interpersonal relationships among the members of each ensemble cast that made Trek so good (at least in the 80s and 90s).

I want Academy to do well, but I also kind of wonder if it wouldn't be good for Trek to have a little break again for a year or two. It'd be nice to see it come back with something important to say, rather than always trying to recapture the magic of TOS - a quest that goes back all the way to 1995, when Voyager launched. My friend Paul, the one who lent me those DS9 and X-Files and Babylon 5 DVDs almost 20 years ago, hasn't really warmed to the latest generations of Trek, because he'd like to see another time jump like the one between TOS and TNG - one where there are reminders of the past, but where the shows aren't in thrall to it.

I'd like to see that new, third generation myself. And I'd like it to bring the best of both worlds with it: the actual recognition of non-white, non-male, non-hetero characters that New Trek does so well, with the episodic but still interconnected storytelling that Old Trek did nicely.

And if it goes away for another long period, well: today I restarted Enterprise. As long as it's available somewhere on streaming, we'll always have Trek to inspire us.

Andor Season 2: The Best Star Wars of All

I've been trying to formulate my thoughts on the second, and final, season of Andor since I finished the last couple of episodes earlier this week. The first thought that came to mind was that it may well be the best Star Wars offering of all, including the much-hallowed original trilogy.

Perhaps that's overblown. Andor and the original films represent very different things, based on the times when they were made and the audiences they were aimed at. Moreover, they're connected by Rogue One, which is my favorite of the new Star Wars movies but has its own problems. Still, I want to explore these ideas in this blog, and I'm gonna need to spoil the hell out of the show to do it, so you can catch that after the jump.

Daredevil Born Again Mostly Sticks the Landing

When I previously wrote about the show, I was three episodes in and we'd just seen the culmination of the White Tiger storyline, along with a tease of things to come in the shape of the assailant's Punisher logo-bearing shirt. Since then we've gotten the real thing, and in a fairly prominent role, as well as hints of the wider Defenders and/or MCU continuity. I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out, but if you haven't seen it yet, be warned of spoilers ahead.

Thoughts on Star Trek: Prodigy (with Spoilers)

Just finished Prodigy last night, and wanted to set down some thoughts. The first being, it's nice to see that it did get picked up somewhere after Paramount Plus cancelled it and dropped it from its platform. It was a bit slow going at points, but in the end it came good, with an emotional ending to the second season and nice tie-ins to the rest of Trek. Anyway, there are probably going to be some spoilers, so catch my more detailed thoughts after the jump.

Daredevil Born Again Is Off to a Good Start

Once again I'm breaking my rule about not writing a post about a show that I'm currently watching. But I've been considering the first three episodes of Daredevil: Born Again, and I'm interested to capture this moment and see where the show goes.

Obviously, I'm covering big spoilers, which come after the jump, so don't read on if you don't want to know what happens.

Thoughts on TV Writing Classes

I've been looking for evening classes for a while, to get me either out of the house or to help improve some skill that's important to me. And then last summer/early fall I started seeing ads on Facebook for TV and film writing classes at UCLA.

Because I'm not quite on the verge of moving to LA, I was glad to see that these classes through the UCLA Extension are mostly offered online. I started off with an Intro to TV Writing course, which consisted of six weekly sessions on Zoom. As the name implies, it was an introduction to how TV is generally written, both 30-minute comedies and 60-minute dramas. Each week we had to watch an episode of one or more specific shows, then compare them with the scripts or write our own beat sheets summarizing the various plot lines going through each episode.

It was in this way that I got introduced to Barry, on HBO, and Severance, on Apple TV Plus. I've sort of fallen off with Barry, but I want to get back to it soon, while for Severance I'm currently taking advantage of Apple's promotion to get a month of Apple TV Plus for free, so that I can catch up on the first season and watch the second season. I'm even considering keeping the subscription for an extra month, so I can get to the end of Season 2.

After that, I decided to keep on doing it, so I found an Intro to 60 Minute Drama class, as that's more in line with the kind of TV I'm interested in. That's a ten-week class, so I'm still in the middle of it, but so far it's pretty interesting. Where the previous class talked a lot about theory and the business, this class drops us straight into the plotting aspect - early on we had to choose a show for which to write a spec script, and every week we've been refining the idea for our spec. Because I don't watch loads of network TV, and most of the stuff I've watched lately is more of a limited series than an ongoing (stuff like Agatha All Along and the Penguin), I opted for Star Trek: Strange New Worlds.

It helps that SNW is episodic rather than serialized, so I don't have to worry about fitting into something so tightly plotted - although a couple of classmates are tackling shows like House of the Dragon, which I found too intimidating (apart from the fact that I'm not watching it).

At any rate, I've enjoyed coming up with a story for my own episode of SNW, and at the same time figuring out the B and C stories, and determining how they fit into the overall whole. Because SNW's episodes are mostly self-contained, it's easier to watch them to piece together how that interplay works, and then try to replicate that in my own story.

We also have to give feedback on classmates' work, so I get to examine storytelling from that angle, too - looking at what works and what takes me out of the story. A couple of other people are doing SNW stories too, so I've mostly commented on theirs, but I've also given comments on a few other shows, though some of the ones that I don't watch are tough to find comments for.

With regard to the teaching, I think it's pretty good so far. For this week's assignment I had some questions for the instructor, and she got back to me with some helpful comments quite quickly. That meant I ended up submitting my assignment a few days early (we have a deadline every Friday), and so I can do other stuff, like this here blog.

Another thing that's been helpful about this class is that, while it seems focused on network dramas with ad breaks, the format that it teaches is still relevant for shows on streaming services, which typically don't have ads. It's one of those things that feels very "duh" when you see it, but it's been a revelation to see how act breaks work, especially with the need for a good cliffhanger to keep that audience there from act to act. This is a relic of network TV, when viewers might use act breaks as an excuse to flip to other channels, but it's still relevant when you're competing against whatever they're looking at on their phones.

I don't know if it'll lead to a TV writing job, since I don't know what the prospects are for a 45-year-old with no experience, but I'm also looking at it as an opportunity to improve my storytelling in other media. The main thing I'm taking from it is plotting out my main plot and subplots, from start to finish, and then plotting the story by putting them together. I figure that any skills that improve my writing should be transferable to whatever form I'm writing in, whether it's TV, movies, prose or comics. It's also given me a taste for deconstructing books and shows that I like, to see how they're telling their stories.

And yeah, if it does end up leading to a Hollywood writing career... that's not such a bad outcome, is it?

2024 In Review: Media Consumed

One of the things that struck me this year was just how much media I consume at the moment. At any given time I'm watching a few TV shows and movies (based on interest and on feeling like I'm getting my money's worth from the various streaming services I pay for), reading a number of books and comics, listening to music and podcasts, and maybe playing video games. Which all makes it odd when I consider that it doesn't feel like it's been that good of a year for it all, somehow?

In fairness, I have kept up with a number of shows, particularly from Disney Plus. Of those, X-Men 97 was the clear standout, both because it was a good treatment of the characters and because it dovetailed well with the comics I was reading this year. Echo was decent, though maybe not as memorable as Hawkeye, where Maya Lopez originated, and the Acolyte had some promise but didn't necessarily live up to it. Its cancellation feels like capitulation to the toxic review bombers, but I also don't feel like I'll wither and die not knowing what happens next. 

Agatha All Along was another promising one, which did a very nice job of playing a long con on its viewers, at the same time that it was pulling the con on its characters. Its seventh episode, "Death's Hand in Mine", was the standout, but somehow I felt like it whiffed at the end - not in undoing Agatha's death, but rather in failing to really explain her motivations. I liked the fact that the Witches' Road never really existed, though.

That said, there was one other big standout, and that was Shogun. I already wrote about it, so I won't go on at length here, but it was probably the most compelling show I watched all year. Honorable mention also goes to Slow Horses, Fargo and Fallout, while Bel Air remained the most fun cheesiness. I'm expecting Slow Horses and Fallout to get more seasons, but I'm also hoping for more from Fargo and Bel Air.

In terms of movies, I feel like the one standout was Deadpool and Wolverine, which is the only film I watched twice. It held up just as well on the second viewing, on Disney Plus, but I'd have even been happy to catch it in theaters a second time. Dune Part Two was pretty good, though maybe not the visual feast that the first part represented, while the Maxine Minx/Pearl trilogy of horror movies from Ti West was good, trashy fun - particularly the first two movies. The Zone of Interest was so different from the book that it might as well have had a different title, but it was a fascinating, harrowing watch. And for ongoing comfort watching, I started the year with Fox's X-Men series and continued with a new MCU rewatch, which let me re-evaluate a couple of films and confirmed my opinions of the others.

Turning to books, the one that was most influential was Douglas Wolk's All the Marvels, which has brought me into the world of critical analysis of American superhero comics. It led me to The New Mutants, Ramzi Fawaz's review of how postwar comics informed progressive activism and imagery, and vice versa, as well as Guy Mankowski's Albion's Secret History, which I picked up because of its references to music but was pleased to see that it talked about other cultural aspects of Englishness.

I also read a lot of Richard Osman and Mick Herron, and I'm debating picking up Osman's latest, even though it's not in the Thursday Murder Club series. Other than that, history was a big part of my reading, particularly the Shortest History series, as I took in the volumes on Italy, Japan and India.

For comics, I mostly read X-Men related books, though Wolk's book convinced me to try The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, which turned out to be a great read. A friend lent me Image's W0rldtr33, and that was a nice change from the superhero stuff. I'm still debating whether or not to get the DC Universe Infinite app, but somehow the pile of physical comics beside my bed isn't diminishing fast enough for me to go ahead with that one.

For podcasts, I finally finished Revolutions, which I started in 2022, just as it was ending. Ironically, just as I was finishing its final series on the Russian Revolution, Mike Duncan started it up again, but this time with a speculative story about a possible Martian Revolution. I don't know if I'll check it out, but it might have to wait until it's done - somehow I found it harder to retain information from the Revolutions format than I did from Duncan's History of Rome.

Keeping the X-Men theme going, however, the standout podcast for me this year was Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men. I've mostly been listening in order from when they started, so I'm only up to the episodes from 2016, when they were covering Inferno, though I made sure to listen to their more recent review of X-Men 97 and their interview with Lenore Zann, who played Rogue. Their show's given me a taste for more comics-related podcasts, so I've started exploring Wolk's Voice of Latveria, and at some point soon I'll be checking out the Cerebrocast for more X-related goodies.

And finally, my video gaming has been limited primarily to various Kingdom Rush tower defense games on my iPad. I've been playing them off and on for about a decade, but my interest really took off when the Youtuber Voduke published his magisterial ranking of all the heroes in the series. That led me to buy a few heroes and towers across the various games of the series, including the DLC levels for the fourth installment, Vengeance. 

The big news for this year was the launch of Kingdom Rush Alliance, the fifth tower defense game in the series; for the first time I was there from the start, though on some level I found it a little underwhelming - I still haven't been able to figure out if that's because it only offered the main campaign at launch, whereas I discovered all the other games after they'd been out for a while and had released a lot of elite levels. Alliance has its charms, though, so I won't say it's terrible or on the wrong path, but it does feel a little lacking in replayability. I'll have to see how I feel when the next elite levels and its first DLC drop.

Looking ahead to next year, I'm hoping for big things from Marvel's new offerings, particularly the fourth Captain America movie, Brave New World. Having watched the MCU's Infinity Saga again, it's clear that Marvel dropped the ball a bit in the Multiverse Saga by not giving us more glimpses of the core characters - if you think about it, this is the first time we're seeing the new Cap since 2021's Falcon and Winter Soldier, and we're not getting a new Avengers movie until 2026, so it'll be a gap of seven years since Endgame. That means Brave New World will have a lot riding on it, particularly since Marvel had to pivot away from the Kang storyline they were doing.

I'm also hoping for a good new season from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which will hopefully make up for the end of Lower Decks next week. I'm sure other, unheralded shows will come up, and I'm looking forward to being pleasantly surprised by them as they launch.

Overall, though, I'm hoping to spend a little less time consuming media and more time... I dunno, doing stuff? I wouldn't say my media diet made me stay home more, but now that I'm not really sequestering myself like I did during Covid, I think I can go out and explore the world more again.

Or maybe we'll be stuck inside again thanks to the new administration? I'll explore some of those concerns in my next blog, which will be a rundown of my 2024. Though I'll spoil the main theme for you here: 2024 sucked, just like the eight years before it, and like the four years that are coming now. But next time I'll explain just how 2024 sucked. Lucky you!

Netflix's Beckham Documentary is a Weird Snapshot of a Weird Time

I try not to do this, but sometimes I'm just taken with a show and I feel the need to talk about it here, even though I'm not through watching it yet. Add the fact that I had no idea what else to blog about this week, and voila: I want to talk about the David Beckham documentary on Netflix.

I heard about it when it first came out, and gave it a hard pass, because Beckham's a footballer that I made my mind up about years ago, and I've been content not to revisit that opinion. Whenever he comes up in conversation these days, it's usually negative, like the flack he took for shilling for Qatar ahead of the 2022 World Cup. After years (decades) of playing to the LGBTQ community and presenting himself as an ally, many in that community felt betrayed by that move.

I've also been a little bemused by his whole thing at Inter Miami, not that I knew about the details. Having checked out the ownership section on Inter Miami's Wikipedia page, it looks like he received an option to buy an expansion team when he joined MLS in 2007, which I guess is the same deal the league gave to Lionel Messi when he joined Miami. Nothing too odd, at least without doing full due diligence.

So I was a little surprised when I learned, or was reminded, that the documentary had been directed by Fisher Stevens, who played Hugo on Succession and has made a career for himself as a director of well-regarded documentaries. It came up because I heard Stevens talk about the Beckham doc on Marc Maron's podcast, WTF, in an episode from last year. They talked about the various people Stevens spoke to for the doc, and that's what persuaded me to have a look.

It's authorized by Beckham, which is both good and bad. Good, because Stevens gets access to a lot of people, from Beckham's wife Victoria to former teammates, his parents, and various others. I think what made me want to check it out was the fact that they spoke to Sir Alex Ferguson, which felt like a good get. The bad thing about being authorized is that sometimes it feels a little sanitized - Beckham gets to present himself as he wants, which is his right but is also at the heart of why I'm a little disdainful of him.

On the other hand, the documentary does give Sir Alex a voice throughout, including when it discusses his rift with Beckham. The only person that's clearly thrown under the bus (so far, because I'm partway through the third episode, of four) is Glenn Hoddle, who was the England manager at the 1998 World Cup. That means he was in the hot seat to talk about the red card in the match against Argentina, which Beckham received for kicking out at Diego Simeone. In fact, it's kind of cool that they talked to Simeone about it, and he's quite forthcoming about it.

More than anything, the episodes I've seen have been a nice time capsule back to the 90s and early 2000s, and the football culture that prevailed. There's a lot of archival footage of Beckham from the time, both on the pitch and off it, which takes me back nicely. The music is pretty on-point too, capturing some of the Cool Britannia stuff that was happening around then (see also my love for the Britpop documentary, Live Forever).

There are some things I didn't know, or had forgotten about. For example, that red card against Argentina may have galvanized the whole of England against Beckham, but it was good to be reminded that his sending off didn't actually make them lose the match - they held on for penalties, which is when England came a cropper. Though it wouldn't be the last time the English collectively blamed a single individual for an early exit from a tournament...

It was also interesting to hear directly, from Beckham and Ferguson, about the incident that led to (or at least presaged) Beckham being sold to Real Madrid. I remember hearing about the boot to the face incident in the dressing room, but hadn't read up on how it was Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's boot, or how it was effectively a freak accident when Ferguson kicked a pile of laundry and the boot hit Beckham in the face. I also hadn't known that they'd originally sold him to Barcelona, only for him to ask to go to Real Madrid.

The other thing that was helpful to be reminded of is just how good Beckham actually was on the pitch. My enduring memories of him are missing a penalty against Portugal at Euro 2004 and of his tear-filled tantrum when the same opponents knocked England out of the World Cup two years later. But the documentary, without spending too much time on the intricacies of football, does a good job of showing the ways Beckham could be influential. The prime example is the qualifier against Greece, which Beckham essentially won single-handed (though my abiding memory of that qualifying campaign was the October 2001 demolition of Germany).

I suppose my memories of those years are erased by the unceasing juggernaut of the Messi-Ronaldo rivalry that dominated the 2010s, and by the importance of Wayne Rooney to the English game. Though it's worth noting that Beckham's stardom and ubiquity essentially paved the way for the circus that surrounded Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, as evidenced by the religious ecstasy Beckham provoked in fans when he got to Real Madrid. Rooney, on the other hand, was a creature that the English fans understood better - a chaos agent with a rampaging style similar to that of Paul Gascoigne, who however didn't squander his gift like Gascoigne did.

My memories of Beckham end when he left England, though I had a good laugh at his first couple of seasons as one of Madrid's galacticos, since they didn't win many trophies, being too top-heavy to play well. I do remember when he came to MLS, and how they allowed him to break the salary cap, which has become known as the Beckham rule. I even (vaguely) remember when he went to AC Milan, though I think I didn't know he'd ended his career at Paris St-Germain. I'm looking forward to seeing what the documentary has to say about those years.

Overall, the show isn't perfect, but it's been nice to revisit those years through the lens of Beckham's career. I made a point at the time of ignoring the celebrity stuff he was involved in, thanks to his wife (who I should add was also my favorite Spice Girl), so the hoopla around his wedding and children was new to me. But it all brings me back to those years when I'd first moved to the UK, so it's fun to watch.

Also, the sections where Stevens talks directly to Beckham about his life now are unexpectedly interesting, like the joke about playing football against his son Romeo and threatening to invite his former teammates, like Zidane and Figo and Roberto Carlos, to destroy Romeo and his friends. It's nice to see that will to win is still there, even when it seemed like he was more interested in being a fashion icon.

Let's Fucking Go: Spoiler-Filled Thoughts on Deadpool & Wolverine

I just got home from watching Deadpool & Wolverine, and yeah... it was pretty fucking good.

Maybe it's not quite as good as the first one. The first Deadpool benefited from that tight focus on Wade and his desire to get back to Vanessa, with only a minor nod to the wider X-universe, so we got more of the unfiltered Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool. This could be good or bad, depending on how much you like Reynolds, but it feels like it was the breakthrough role for him, in that his public persona then became Deadpool.

But if this one is a bit more sprawling and laden with references, and the jokes about Deadpool fucking Wolverine get old after a while, it's also a fun movie in its own right. The first thing to note is that the references, in the form of Marvel Multiverses, are part of the movie's grand joke. The wasteland that Wade and Logan find themselves in features not only the 20th Century Fox logo, following Disney's acquisition a few years ago, but also various characters from the X-Men and Fantastic Four movies. I guffawed pretty loudly when Chris Evans's character in this sequence was revealed to be not Captain America, but the Human Torch.

(Incidentally, per the expletive-laden post-credits scene, I couldn't shake the feeling that Chris Evans was really enjoying playing against the Boy Scout type that he's played since 2011 as Cap)

All the Multiverse stuff was used well here, to poke fun at the way the concept's been used. The main joke delivery mechanism was Channing Tatum as Gambit, whose lines all talk about forgotten characters or those "who didn't get a chance", which is surely a reference to the Gambit movie that was in development but never came to pass. At any rate it was good to see Gambit doing his thing on the big screen.

Along the way we get to see a bunch of versions of Logan, from the one that's close to his height in the comics, to the Age of Apocalypse version, to a version played by Henry Cavill (who I think would make a good Cyclops - if we discount Matt Bomer). We also get a bunch of different versions of Wade, and they all get massacred in hilarious and satisfying ways, even if they get better because of Wade's healing factor. I also appreciated Wade's fourth-wall breaking plea to stop using the Multiverse as a gimmick, though I suspect Marvel's not going to listen to that plea.

Another thing that made me happy about this movie was the presence of X-23, as previously seen in Logan. I know we saw her in the final trailer, but I was still worried that she appeared as a flashback or a character in Logan's head, so it made me happy to see that she wasn't only in that scene, and that she played a key role in Logan's character development for this movie. Since I started reading newer X-Men comics, she's become one of my favorites of the new characters (i.e. the ones introduced since 1993), so it was good to see her, and the actress who played her, Dafne Keen, have those good moments with Logan.

For me, the best thing about this movie, beyond seeing Hugh Jackman back as Wolverine in a role that doesn't diminish his last appearance in Logan, was the hard R. Marvel's gotten a lot more violent and sweary since the 1990s, when they couldn't even say hell or damn, but even now, you don't really get to see the effects of Wolverine's claws or Deadpool's swords or Gambit's explosions. This movie didn't pull its punches, either in terms of violence or language, and given the consistent PG-13 tone of the rest of the MCU, I'm not complaining. Though it'd be boring if they all turned into this.

I don't know if there's going to be another Deadpool movie, and I kind of hope not. This does, however, make me feel a little more confident about the MCU accommodating the X-Men, whenever that's going to happen. It's also a nice companion piece to X-Men '97, which kind of kicked off this annus mirabilis for the X-Men - but whereas that was full of loving homages to the old show and to the Chris Claremont comics, this was an irreverent (but still loving) take on the same corner of the Marvel universe. If we can keep an energy somewhere between those two extremes for the MCU X-movies, the future should be bright indeed.

Or as Wade, Logan and Laura say at various points: Let's Fucking Go.

X-Men 97: Probably Marvel's Best Offering Since Iron Man (more spoilers)

So here's why I usually wait until I finish a show before blogging about it here. In the past I've written about shows I was watching, while I was currently watching them. I've never had a Battlestar Galactica style crack-up between post and end-of-show, but the danger's always there.

With X-Men 97, the danger is the exact opposite. When I wrote my original post, I'd only seen two episodes and the show hadn't really taken off, as it were. I was cautiously optimistic, but not prepared to rave about it.

That's now changed. Largely on the strength of the fifth episode, Remember It, I'm prepared to call this season the best thing Marvel's put out since Iron Man, back in 2008. The comparison isn't entirely fair, because there have been individual MCU movies I've liked since then (Avengers, Civil War) but it does reflect the drift the MCU's been suffering from - compared to that, X97 is admirably cohesive and well-structured.

So let's get some quibbles out of the way first. When I say X97 is cohesive, that kind of ignores the fourth episode, the double-header of Lifedeath and Motendo. Lifedeath (and its sequel, Lifedeath II, which was the sixth episode) is a classic story, a quiet moment amid the chaos where Storm reckons with the loss of her powers and her complicated feelings toward Forge, whose technology cost her those powers.

I wasn't sure that giving Lifedeath barely 10 minutes of runtime was the right decision, nor that having Storm reclaim her powers so quickly worked either. It isn't to say that either episode is done badly, but more that the power-loss story doesn't really get to breathe. Storm leaves the mansion in Episode 2, doesn't appear in Episode 3, we see Lifedeath for half of Episode 4, and then she comes back again in Episode 6, where she regains her powers.

I don't want to be churlish, because for one thing, it's amazing to see these classic stories from the comics get the TV treatment. For another, the beats of the stories, while different from the comics, are broadly pretty satisfying. Lifedeath II is basically not at all an adaptation of the story from the comics (where Ororo is finding herself in Africa and comes to terms with her loss of powers, rather than regaining them), but it still does right by her, showing how strong she is as a character.

However, if I had to point to something wrong with this show, it's that: the classic stories are referenced but not always explored in depth. The original show had the advantage of more episodes per season, so it could do 4 or 5-parters like the Phoenix saga, and that would be unfair to expect of this show, with its 10-episode order. But the original comics were better able to set up storylines across a long time, so we got to go into a lot of the characters' motivations and relationships. That said, there are some amazing character moments here, like where Morph confesses their love for Wolverine, or where Jean and Storm have a good sisterly moment before they kick all the ass.

Overall, Motendo is really the one dispensable story here. It was nice to see Mojo (to the extent that I like Mojo stories, which isn't much), but I don't feel like it gave a sense of either Roberto or Jubilee's characters. As I read more of the original Mojo stories, I might have to revisit it, but for the moment, I'm glad it only got 10 minutes or so of runtime.

But back to the positives! In my previous post, I wondered if we were going to see any Grant Morrison or Jonathan Hickman stories, and I now have my answer. Remember It is basically a street-level view of E is for Extinction, the storyline that Morrison opened their run with, and it really fucking works. There's a lot of emotional and relationship business in the first half, as we see Rogue and Gambit dealing with the Magneto love triangle, but then Cable shows up trying to avert some catastrophe and then basically everyone gets killed.

Part of the reason it's so audacious is that the previous four episodes didn't really prepare us for the sight of the Wild Sentinel vaporizing everyone. We see Banshee and Archangel get killed, Madelyne Pryor and Callisto are confirmed dead, and even poor Leech (one of my favorite minor characters) dies horribly, despite Magneto's best efforts. This is a big difference from the Quiet Council scenes at the start of the episode (and there's our Krakoa reference: Sebastian Shaw, Emma Frost, Moira MacTaggert and everyone sitting together and governing an island nation for mutants).

The rest of the show maintains the momentum of Remember It, and works in commentaries on alt right intolerance and the cynicism of the news cycle. Bastion - who's revealed to be the season's big bad - explains at one point that the attack on Genosha was necessary to deaden the sympathy the mutants had built up since Xavier's disappearance: by killing so many at once, Genosha just became a news item that could be superseded. There's a bit of a chilling resonance with the wars in Ukraine and Gaza there.

The fact that Bastion is the big bad is another of this show's strengths. The original show could only play with the storylines and characters from 1963 to 1997, but this can hop forward, giving us references to Krakoa, E is for Extinction and Operation Zero Tolerance, not to mention Fatal Attractions. There are possibilities of Age of Apocalypse and other storylines in coming episodes, given that the final episode ends with half the team in Apocalypse's past, Scott and Jean in his future, and the man himself unearthing one of Gambit's playing cards in the rubble of Genosha, hinting at the storyline where Gambit became the Horseman of Death.

The thirty years since I stopped reading (I consider it that, though I was there for most of Morrison's run) are a worrying tangle for me, so I'm hoping the show can make sense of it all. The 90s, in particular, seems to be held up as the X-Men's worst time, just because they had so many bad storylines and writers who didn't know what to do with certain characters (usually the women).

It's also significant because of all the Marvel cameos in the second half of the season. I never watched the 90s Spiderman show, or the other programs referenced here, but apparently they're all canon to this show, and we get to see a bunch of other characters, like Daredevil. This is important because of the way that Marvel was essentially erasing the X-Men during the heyday of the MCU, just because they didn't want to boost the Fox X-Men franchise. So while I'm glad that X97's show runners have cooled rumors that this is part of the MCU, it's also good to see the X-Men being embraced once again as part of the wider Marvel Universe.

On that note, the question is now how the House of X will integrate into the existing MCU. Deadpool and Wolverine is expected to hint at it this summer, but that's also going to turn on the multiverse concept that's been driving the MCU since Endgame. There's an X-Men movie in the works, but I'm hoping that its creative team takes its cues from X97 - they shouldn't follow the cartoon slavishly, but they should keep its obvious love for the characters and storylines, and take into account that X-Men is about the characters as a family, rather than just a vehicle for Wolverine.

It's been 4 years since we last had an X-Men movie (New Mutants), and there's been very little mention in the MCU's 16 year run, apart from the odd Easter egg or post-credits scene. But now that all of Marvel's characters are back under its control, I'm looking forward to seeing the X-Men take their rightful place as Marvel's premier characters.

And it'd be nice to see Beau DeMayo involved in some way, given his deep love and knowledge of the characters.

Shogun: Early Candidate for Best Show of 2024

I just finished Shogun and the thought struck me, that this is probably the standout show for me of 2024. One may qualify that with phrases like "so far", but it's hard to see what's going to surpass it. BTW, there are likely to be spoilers in this post, so proceed with caution.

When I first heard about a new adaptation of the James Clavell novel, I wasn't exactly skeptical, but I didn't think of starting on it straight away. As I've mentioned, I fear I'm going to lose access to Hulu soon, so I'm trying to be very careful about which shows I start watching there and on Disney Plus. I was watching something else when Shogun started, so I didn't want to start a completely new show.

But then I started seeing and hearing comments about how good it was. My mom said it was great, and so did Craig Mazin, one of the hosts of Scriptnotes (and, as the guy who wrote HBO's Chernobyl and The Last of Us, he knows a good TV show when he sees one). When I heard Mazin's recommendation, I immediately checked it out, that very evening.

In terms of the plot, it's probably not the most groundbreaking or pulse-pounding premise I've ever seen. Though Shogun is kind of the grandaddy of the "Westerner goes to Japan and becomes a samurai" genre. That said, the characters are mostly fascinating - Hiroyuki Sanada is particularly good as Lord Toranaga, the scheming warlord who drives much of the politicking of the show. Toranaga is based on Tokugawa Ieyasu, the warlord who essentially brought Japan under his control in the 1600s, so you can see how the show is informed by historical fact, if not exactly a perfect recreation of it.

Anna Sawai is also excellent as the doomed love interest, Lady Mariko, of our POV character John Blackthorne (played by Cosmo Jarvis). Because she's a Christian (specifically a Catholic), she acts as an interpreter for Blackthorne throughout, though there are multiple interesting strands to their relationship. For one thing, as an Anglican he's considered a heretic by the Portuguese, who have converted a number of locals to Catholicism, and Mariko shares some of this religious distaste for him.

They also predictably have a romantic relationship, which is accompanied by her guilt at her estrangement from her overbearing husband, whom she believes dead for a while. On top of all that, Mariko has a tragic past as the daughter of an accused traitor, which diminishes her in the eyes of her husband but also means she's able to connive along with Toranaga to achieve his aims of control over the Imperial Heir and of all of Japan. Sawai plays the conflicts in the character very well throughout, especially when she acts as the intermediary between Toranaga and Blackthorne's sparring.

For me, the star of the show isn't a specific character or actor, but rather the set design. The mansions and castles and villages in which the action takes place all look amazing, and the costumes, movements and camera work all add drama to many scenes that are essentially just people sitting in large rooms and arguing. Not being a scholar of feudal Japan, I can't tell how accurate the costumes or blocking are (though I did some searching and discovered that the dialect of Japanese spoken in the show is accurate to the time period). But almost everything looks amazing, even down to the splashes of blood on the shoji doors when assassins try to murder characters at various points.

The one thing that looks a little dodgy, at times, is the scenes onboard ships. One or two of those scenes looked like they were shot on a green screen, which is unfortunate, because you shouldn't be able to notice that. That's a minor quibble, though, because everything else is just so good.

Apparently it was initially planned to be a limited series consisting of these ten episodes, but the reaction has been strong enough that it appears to have been greenlit for a second season, with Sanada returning. I've never read the book or watched the previous adaptation, so I don't know how much of the story this version adapts, but it should be interesting to see what happens next and if it's as well-done. Though I wonder if, rather than continuing Shogun, subsequent seasons shouldn't instead revolve around Clavell's other novels in this series, such as Tai Pan or Noble House.

In any case, despite my initial inertia, I'm glad I gave this show a try. It may not be as compulsive as HBO's We Own This City or The Last of Us, but it's a worthy addition to Hulu's library of prestige TV. If you don't mind blood and subtitles, it's a great watch and well worth the investment of time.

Spoiler Filled Thoughts on X-Men 97

I wasn't going to watch X-Men 97 on Disney Plus, or not quite yet, for a number of reasons. The big one was that I didn't want to get sucked into a new TV show, and I reasoned that I needed to watch the previous five seasons before I tackled this new one. I get my Disney Plus from a friend and Disney is getting ready to crack down on password sharing, so I didn't want to find myself cut off mid-season (this is why, when I heard about the imminent crackdown, I binged Daredevil and The Punisher on Disney, and series 1 of Line of Duty and Modok and Justified: City Primeval on Hulu).

The other, slightly more fundamental reason, is that I don't actually have that much regard for the X-Men animated show. It came out at about the right time for me to appreciate it, when I was at the height of my first obsession with the X-Men, but I seem to remember being put off that it played fast and loose with the lore (this was important to me when I was 13), and it didn't have a lot of my favorite characters. The animation style wasn't that great either, as I recalled - it looked and sounded cheap, like the worst of the Ninja Turtles show or other contemporary cartoons, whereas something like Batman: The Animated Series might have variable-quality animation, but it looked interestingly stylized.

What happened, as ever, is that my social media feeds exploded with X-Men 97, and the YouTube algorithm, in its wisdom, also knew that I'd want to see a bunch of videos related to it. So I got served up a bunch of this stuff, and then, on Friday night, I cracked and watched the first episode.

Well, it was a lot better than I expected, in various ways. First off, the animation is miles ahead of the original show. I know, because immediately after watching the first new episode, I watched the first episode from way back in 1992 (this is the exciting life I lead on Friday nights). I'd gotten an inkling of this in some video clips I'd seen, but it was confirmed in the entire first episode. Standout scenes are Jubilee dancing in the nightclub when the X-Men go looking for Sunspot, and then the bit where Cyclops uses his optic blast to cushion his fall.

The sound was cleaned up nicely, too. Some cartoons from the 80s and 90s had this weird distortion, which I always associated with VHS tapes, but it was present in the first couple episodes of X-92, whereas X-97 was free of such artifacts. The voice acting was also generally better, though a couple of voices (mostly Rogue) sounded a little more aged than the characters warrant, though as one YouTuber put it, that's what happens when you hire the original cast 30 years later.

As far as the X-lore, there were some super interesting Easter eggs and teasers here. I don't know all the internal lore of X-92 because I don't think I watched anything beyond the first season, but the stuff I saw that was intriguing was a series of storylines and deep cuts from the books, specifically the 80s and early 90s era that I know best. The Trial of Magneto, in the second episode, was extremely well done, both in terms of visuals (the bit where he rips whole chunks of the UN building and flies them into space) and storytelling (specifically the X-Cutioner, who's presented as the reason Storm loses her powers here, as she did in the 80s). 

The second episode also ends with a great cliffhanger, as Jean Grey has just given birth to her and Cyclops's son, but there's a knock at the door and when they open up it's another Jean. Everyone looks surprised, but Jean (the one in the house) looks aggrieved. I guess this is them setting up Madelyne Prior, but I wonder how the Phoenix arc from previous X-92 seasons will be involved.

There's also all the cultural baggage to contend with, because of course there is. First off is the supposed wokeness, which many, many, many commentators have noted is the EXACT FUCKING POINT of the X-Men. Of course Gambit's going to dress... not entirely straight, and folks are going to drool in unseemly ways over the shipping potential of various characters whose sexualities in the comics have always been subject to discussion. If you're not prepared for someone to float the idea of a Magneto/Gambit/Rogue throuple, then I hate to be a gatekeeper, but wtf are you even doing watching X-Men?

The stupidest cultural baggage is the thing where some dummy got mad that they made Rogue's ass smaller because of "wokeness", because this is the darkest timeline and somehow people take you seriously when you argue that libs hate women with hourglass figures. This is just another manifestation of the alt-right mind virus that spilled a lot of ink when Sydney Sweeney was on Saturday Night Live a few weeks ago, and rightwing idiots made this argument that by having a figure she was triggering us. It's a different kind of triggering, I guess? By which I mean, appreciating Sweeney's acting chops and work ethic, because showbiz is harsh, y'all.

More serious is the firing, on the eve of the premiere, of X-97 show runner Beau de Mayo. When last I checked neither party had given a reason, so I won't speculate, but I'm curious what it will mean for any subsequent seasons. De Mayo is credited as the writer for both episodes so far, and he hasn't turned X-97 as fucky as Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa did with Riverdale, but, y'know, he might have if given the chance. I don't know if I'd like to see X-Men turn into a big gay melodrama like Riverdale, but I also hope that this firing isn't the result of some weird struggle for control that sees Marvel water the show down and make it less interesting.

Though for the record, turning X-Men into a big gay melodrama a la Riverdale would at least honor the source material from Chris Claremont, and it would be my second most desired treatment. My absolute greatest wish would be for someone to turn Patrick Willems' video of "What if Wes Anderson Directed the X-Men" into an actual movie, but again, darkest timeline.

Anyway. My verdict on X-97 is "cautiously optimistic", as well as "resigned to eventually having to add another damn streaming subscription". They've teased Jean's Clone Saga, Storm's search for herself post losing powers (and presumably hanging out in a hot tub with Callisto), and Morph's weird situationship with Mr Sinister. We've also seen cameos from some favorites like Colossus and Psylocke (though both were played by Morph). I'm hoping de Mayo worked in some references to Grant Morrison's run and the recent Krakoan Age, but we'll see. At any rate, it's a fun show and better than I was expecting.

And yes, it still has the absolutely iconic theme song. Go watch it.

In Praise of Batman: the Brave and the Bold

Just finished Batman: the Brave and the Bold yesterday, so I wanted to get some thoughts down on how it took me a while to warm to the show, but as I did, it also got more interesting. It's not part of the wonderful DCAU that started with Batman: The Animated Series, but it shares a lot of similarities, even though it's consciously aimed at a different aesthetic.

The first thing to say is that it took me a long time to finish the show. I first discovered it when I was poking around Netflix after finishing Justice League Unlimited, and at first glance it seemed aimed at a much younger audience than the DCAU shows. It mined both classic DC characters, which I knew well, but also newer versions of them (like the Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle), which I didn't know, so it was hard to get a sense at first of whether I liked it. That said, whenever I'd go down some Wikipedia rabbit hole about an obscure DC character (something that happens quite often, I'll admit), more often than not I'd see that the character had appeared in BTBATB. Not only that, but it also implied some relatively more mature storylines than I'd seen in the few episodes I'd watched.

Fast forward a couple of years, and we're in the pandemic. I'm at my then-girlfriend's house, we've merged our streaming apps, and there's nothing to do but watch TV with all our free time. So I started BTBATB again on her version of HBO Max, watching bits here and there during my lunch breaks from work or when she was doing something else.

Then we broke up, and I had to get access to HBO Max (subsequently Max) on my own. Somewhere in that time I got into the habit of watching cartoons while eating lunch on Saturdays, so I started splitting my Saturday lunchtimes between Gravity Falls on Disney Plus and BTBATB. This meant that I was watching one episode a week, so it took a while - indeed, I finally finished the first season in January of 2023. Between holidays and Saturdays when I wasn't home to watch my usual shows, it's taken me this long to finish up the rest of the show.

By this time, I was pretty onboard with the substance of the show. Like the comic book series it's named after, BTBATB featured different team-ups every week, sometimes doing different ones in the cold open than in the episode's main story. Where Batman TAS started off as an homage to 1930s serials, this show was more indebted to the Silver Age of 1950s and 60s comics, where Batman was more of an adventurer with gadgets than the brooding crimefighter we normally associate him with, and the guest stars reflected this. There were a lot of guest appearances from Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth (an old Jack Kirby feature from the time in the 70s when he was feuding with Marvel), as well as from Blue Beetle, Aquaman Green Arrow and others.

The interesting thing was that it had few other trappings of Batman that we commonly think of. There wasn't any reference to Bruce Wayne until the second season (we didn't even see Batman out of costume until then). We also didn't see the Joker for the entire first half of the first season, and his first appearance was as an alternate-universe hero version, the Red Hood; even then, we didn't hear the name Joker for a while. The show's creators were similarly reticent about big-name guest stars: we don't see Superman or Wonder Woman until the third season, and other big names were replaced by Golden Age versions or other alternates - for example, Guy Gardner was the main Green Lantern in this show.

For the guests they did have, they typically went very deep. The episode featuring the Doom Patrol has Batman teaming up with the original 1960s version, but there are references in the background to Grant Morrison's seminal run on the team, such as Dorothy Spinner and the Russian doll motif that dominated Morrison's issues. There's even a poster of Shasta, the Living Mountain, a throwaway character from Doom Force, the parody of X-Force/Rob Liefeld/90s mutant books that capped off Morrison's run. Talk about your deep cuts.

Another similarity with TAS is that it benefited from some great voice talent, in part because both shows had the voice director Andrea Romano casting them. Diedrich Bader is maybe not as iconic a Batman as Kevin Conroy, but he did a good job with the less brooding version of the character; also Conroy appeared a few times as an alternate Batman (in an episode that also brought back Dana Delany as a version of Lois Lane) and as the Phantom Stranger. Joe Dimaggio had a recurring role as Aquaman, but a version that was gleefully oblivious and loudmouthed. And Peter Reubens played Bat-Mite a few times, always in episodes that wreaked meta-havoc on the show's continuity.

The best example of the show's devotion to deep cuts, clever casting and meta commentary is the final episode, Mitefall, where Bat-Mite decides to shake up the show to get it cancelled and bring back the brooding version of Batman. He adds in merchandising tie-in vehicles and costumes, gives Batman a wife and daughter, and recasts Aquaman as Ted McGinley, all in an attempt to make the show jump the shark (listing off all the elements that make shows jump the shark, he lists casting Ted McGinley as one of the important factors in any show's cancellation).

Opposing him is Ambush Bug, the Keith Giffen creation who essentially played that same meta-role in a couple of mini-series in the 80s, generally making fun of the weird and forgettable characters that popped up in the less-known corners of the DC Universe in the 60s. The best part is that Ambush Bug is voiced by the man who gave us the phrase "jumping the shark", Henry Winkler.

Not that the silly, meta stories were the only ones with relatively sophisticated storytelling. Chill of the Night featured a retelling of the Batman origin (and featured Adam West as Batman's father), while the Doom Patrol episode had the team giving their lives to save an island of hostages from the Brotherhood of Evil. B'Wana Beast also died heroically in an episode after having been mocked for being a Z-list character. In its way, this show had more death and heartbreak than the mainline DCAU shows, like JLU.

It took me a while to warm to, as I mentioned, but once I did, I was all-in. I don't really miss the 60s Batman, which was generally silly and unsophisticated, but BTBATB was a good, modern way of tackling it, making the references smarter for adults and long-time fans, while also being suitable for kids. It stands alone in its corner of DC's universe of animated shows, but in the end, it's a worthy addition and well-worth watching.

What I Watched and Read and Listened to in 2023

It's Christmas, so the year is basically in the can. I'm going to do a more comprehensive post later on how my year went, but here I wanted to consider books and movies and TV and all kinds of other art I experienced this year. Because the pandemic is influencing my decisions less and less (though I still take certain precautions), it meant I could also start experiencing movies in theaters again, as I wrote in an earlier blog this summer.

I also indulged my geeky/obsessive side more this year by keeping a spreadsheet not only of books I read, which I do every year, but also one each for movies and TV shows. I've always been curious about how much TV I watched, and because I was still quite locked down in 2022 I was watching more movies than usual, so I wanted to see just how much I was watching, and where I was watching them.

The short answer is that HBO Max, and subsequently Max, was where I watched the overwhelming majority of my movies in 2023, and I suspect it's also where I watched most movies in 2022. This is partly skewed by all the DC-related movies I watched, which accounted for almost half of everything I watched on that streamer. But Max also remains one of the best places to see older movies, including from before the 1960s, as well as generally decent films from the past decade or so. At the start of the year I was getting it from a friend, but when he decided to cancel his subscription it was a no-brainer for me to set up my own subscription (and I shared my credential with him, since that seemed only fair).

Overall I watched a decent number of 2023 movies, including some finally back in theaters. Realistically I could have gone back earlier, but it always felt like a hassle to pay $20 to watch a movie with a mask on and having to share a bathroom. Still, it was nice to see something when it came out, rather than waiting months for it to come to Max or Peacock.

Some favorites that I saw this year were Barbie, Oppenheimer, Asteroid City and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, with special honorable mentions for Maestro, Super Mario Bros and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. There's not much to say about Barbenheimer that hasn't already been said, apart from marveling at this cultural moment where the two biggest films of the year were a feminist deconstruction of a children's toy, scheduled against a dense, dour biopic of a mid-century physicist. Without pretending either is high-brow, it's heartening to see that people still enjoy smart movies.

Asteroid City is probably the movie that haunted me the most in 2023. I'll have to do a blog about Wes Anderson at some point, but this movie showed how he's much more than just the meticulously designed camera tableaux that everybody imitated for their generative AI pastiches of his work. I'm not entirely sure I understood it all, and I had to watch a couple of YouTube discussions to get a better sense of it, but it certainly worked as a meditation on the pandemic and its dislocations. It doesn't rank as highly for me in his oeuvre as Grand Budapest Hotel, Rushmore or Royal Tenenbaums, but it's a worthy addition.

Super Mario Bros and D&D were both surprisingly better than I'd expected. To put it another way, I had higher hopes for D&D, which it met, and lower hopes for Mario, which it exceeded. Chris Pratt remains my least favorite Hollywood Chris (and coincidentally, Pine is probably my favorite), but Mario was entertaining enough and made enough cute references to impress me that I was finally seeing a beloved character onscreen. Maestro, meanwhile, was anchored by Bradley Cooper's great performance and also his clear love of both cinematic language and Bernstein's music.

TV was more of a mixed bag, especially the shows that came out this year. First off, there wasn't a single streaming service that dominated like in my movie watching. Disney Plus probably accounted for more TV shows than any other streamer, but it was fairly close. I don't buy into the doom and gloom surrounding the MCU at the moment, but it was notable that Secret Invasion was a pretty spectacular misfire. On the Star Wars side, season 3 of the Mandalorian and season 1 of Ahsoka were okay but never scaled the heights of last year's Andor.

Some favorites were the latest seasons of Picard, Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks, which all traded in varying degrees on heavy nostalgia and in-universe references. Picard was so good that it almost made me mad, considering how inessential it made the previous two seasons, but it was good to see the old gang back together. SNW and Lower Decks, meanwhile, just went from strength to strength, with SNW in particular showcasing a range of genres that you really never get in Trek.

Succession's final season was pretty compelling too. For me the high point (SPOILERS!) was the episode where Logan died, and it was fascinating seeing how that event shone new light on certain characters. For instance, when Kerry showed up at the memorial and was kicked out by Marcia, it was oddly illuminating that Roman was the one who comforted Kerry and treated her kindly. The finale was a bit of a letdown for me, though.

I've also talked about how much I loved Slow Horses, and that's inspired me to start reading the full book series. But some MVPs that held my attention this year were Fargo and the Expanse. I started watching Fargo via Netflix's DVD.com, RIP, and just adored the first two seasons in particular. Season 3 had some high points but wasn't quite as successful, though still better than a lot of other stuff. I have yet to watch the fourth season, as that wasn't available on DVD.com, but I'm hoping to catch that and season 5 in the near future.

Meanwhile, the Expanse got better with each season. I originally watched the first two seasons on Netflix, pre-pandemic, back when SyFy was airing it; they were faithful recreations of the books, but the interest was more in seeing characters and plot lines foreshadowed or appearing earlier than in the books; it suffered a little from the same syndrome as the first season of Game of Thrones, where the world was well-realized but thinly populated. However, the show really came to life in season 4, when they went to Ilus, and I'm now midway through season 5. I'm preemptively a little sad about season 6, because it's a short one and it's clear they won't be able to fully tackle the Laconian invasion from the last few books.

Another honorable mention was the Last of Us. I had the great pleasure of watching the show at the same time that I was playing the game, so that an hour or two per week let me keep up with the show. I also thought the show was paced brilliantly, giving us digressions like Bill and Frank or Ellie's backstory at the exact right times. It also did a great job of conveying the same emotions in certain scenes as in the game, like when Ellie sees the wild giraffes toward the end. I've never played Part II, but I'll be interested to see how the second season of the show goes.

Speaking of games, Last of Us dominated the early part of my game-playing in 2023, but when I finished that I started up another one that I hadn't touched since I got it, Dragon Age: Inquisition. It's been fun to play that and to look at all the resources on the web that have sprung up over the ten years since it came out. It's a very complex game, though, and sometimes I'm in more of a mood for something easy, that I can boot up and start without worrying about updates and cutscenes.

Super Mario Wonder, on the Switch, filled that niche for me. The learning curve is simple if you've ever played a Mario game before, but it also does a nice job of adding new elements. Whereas The Last of Us or Dragon Age are sprawling games with lots of areas to explore, it's easy to get through a lot of Super Mario Wonder's levels quickly and soon you find yourself ready to beat the game. I'm hoping to finish Inquisition this coming year and also Wonder, and to take on more of my immense backlog of Switch games.

In terms of books, I didn't read a lot of recent stuff, but I did enjoy Annalee Newitz's The Terraformers - even if it's not quite as mind bending as Autonomous was, their books are always reliably entertaining. I also bade farewell to Genevieve Colman's Invisible Library series, which came to a satisfying end, and in the new year I'll be starting on her next book, Scarlet, featuring vampires during the French Revolution. Wes Chu's War Arts Saga also made its way onto my Kindle app, and I'm looking forward to continuing that one as well.

Special mention also goes to Richard Osman's Thursday Murder Club. I ran out of books to read while in Munich, so I found it at an English-language bookshop near the university, and tore through it (luckily I finished it after I got home). I'd been hearing about it for a while, because I follow Osman's agent on Twitter, so I got to see for myself how enjoyable it is. It's an odd, but pleasing, counterpoint to Mick Herron's Slow Horses books, and I'm finishing the rest of the series soon. Just a shame Osman didn't start his series back in 2010, like Herron did, because I'd love to have a big backlog to catch up with.

In terms of listening, I continued my British bands project, and quite enjoyed Erasure's back catalog. In new stuff, I discovered Olivia Rodrigo because I go to the gym again, and Get Him Back! is a fun companion song to Kelly Clarkson's Since U Been Gone.

And finishing up with comics, I already mentioned my new subscription to Marvel Unlimited in my last post. It was prompted by my discovery of Comics Conspiracy in Sunnyvale, and my subsequent spending of crap tons of money on old Excalibur, X-Factor and Vertigo collections. I'm still in the early phases of the Uncanny X-Men, but as the year goes on I hope to branch out into more recent books, though for this year I'm probably not going to focus on Spider-Man or the Avengers yet. 

For 2024, I haven't decided if I'm going to keep tracking movies and TV shows, or if I'll add music, podcasts or video games to my spreadsheet, but overall, I've been taking in a lot of stories and stuff for the past two years. In the coming year, I want to spend less time consuming art and more time making it - but I'll have more to say in my final summing-up post.