Review of United Polaris Class Cabin

Little bit of a different post this week. I'm collecting my thoughts on my trip to Rome and Munich, from which I returned home yesterday, but I wanted to start with my impressions on flying there in business class, which I bought as a last-minute upgrade when checking in the day before my flight to Rome. I've been wanting to treat myself to something like that on a long flight, especially after the grim experience I had in economy on Swiss when I flew to Italy in February, and so I took the opportunity for this trip.

I wasn't able to do the same upgrade coming back, because I was code-shared onto Lufthansa (otherwise I would have waited to buy the upgrade for the trip back, of course). However, it wasn't as much of a comedown to go back to coach as I'd feared, for two reasons: the seat beside mine was empty for the flight, so there was some extra room to stretch out, and more crucially, I felt like I had more legroom than I did on the Swiss flight in February. This could be down to the two companies using different planes, or just that Lufthansa doesn't crowd us in as brutally as Swiss does.

Anyway, here are my thoughts:

The seat in Polaris is pretty nice. It's not super wide, as I discovered when trying to sleep during the flight, but all the same, it was nice not being hemmed in on either side, like I tend to be when flying in economy. The lie-flat seat is a nice touch, which I took advantage of at various points to stretch my legs while seated. There's also loads of storage, from a little alcove under your screen, to a shelf beside you where you can put bedding, electronics that are charging in the power plug (both an outlet and a USB-A port), to a little cabinet with a mirror for a water bottle and the headphones they lend you for the flight.

The inflight entertainment screen was nice and big too, though it's not clear to me if there's actually more content to watch than in economy. To give you a sense, on both flights I counted the number of movies available that I'd already seen; on the United flight I topped out at over 100, meaning there were probably around 200 to 300 movies in total, while on the Lufthansa flight home I counted about 25 or so, suggesting up to 100 total. But that difference could stem from Lufthansa not licensing as much movie and TV content as United?

The other thing that makes me wonder if the entertainment is actually better than in other classes is the games and music on offer. I always check both out, because games are a good way to pass the time, while music is good for listening to while doing something else, whether playing a game, reading, or trying to sleep. The games were the same as I've seen on other flights in the last year or so (but not the same ones I had on Lufthansa yesterday), while the music consisted of a few playlists for various genres. 

Oddly, these playlists weren't on-demand: when I started one, it was in the middle of a song, and when it came to the end it just started over again from the beginning. I haven't encountered anything like that on a plane since about 2006/2007, when I first experienced on-demand entertainment, and TBH, it was a flashback to flights I took in the 80s and 90s.

The one negative about my seat was kind of my fault. In the Polaris cabin, your access to windows depends on whether your seat number is odd (which comes with more windows) or even (which has fewer). I, in fact, managed to choose the seat that didn't even have one window - this is due to the architecture of the cabin, with each seat set at diagonals to enable privacy. Because I couldn't see, I got really airsick on the landing, though it wasn't a problem during the rest of the flight. I'm just mad because when I was selecting my seat, I was originally assigned to a better row but moved up to the seat I eventually got. If you ever find yourself in Polaris class, avoid row 12, is all I'll say.

I had some apprehensions about the food, because of some reviews of Polaris class that I watched on YouTube. One, which flew on the same model of plane as me but a different route, got a pretty lackluster inflight meal, while the other (on a different model of plane and a different route) got a much better meal. This latter YouTuber then ran another video reviewing Polaris on the same kind of jet as I flew, and had a bad meal, as well.

My meal was pretty great, though. The starter was a king prawn cocktail with a couple of giant prawns on offer - shrimp is one of my favorite foods, so I was happy. The main dish was a beef short rib with broccolini and mash, which wasn't huge but was pretty tasty. It reminded me of the premium meals I'd always reserve when I used to fly on Aer Lingus to London via Dublin.

Mainly, though, it was nice to be served with proper cutlery and have my drinks poured into actual glasses. In business class, when you order a Coke they also give you the full can, which is a nice touch.

The service was okay. I don't know what I was expecting, but it didn't feel particularly special. Rather, the staff treated me like I usually get treated on planes (when I'm not flying American carriers or Lufthansa), which is to say, mostly invisible. This is fine, of course, because on quite a few other long-haul United flights I've seen staff argue or snap at customers, and generally exude an air of menace, so maybe that's the difference with economy?

As for the bathroom, it was your bog-standard (no pun intended) airplane lavvy. I suppose I'd hoped for something a little bigger, but maybe that's in first class? Anyway, compared to my Lufthansa flight yesterday it had a few more lotions, including a crease removal spray for your clothes. 

I'll finish with some thoughts on the lounge, which was, of course, the first part of my experience. It was pretty nicely appointed, with quite a lot of seating along the edge of the building, giving a view of the outside of the terminal. I'm not enough of a planespotter to really appreciate that, but it was nice looking out through the huge window while I enjoyed my snack.

The food was pretty good: I had some noodles and other odds and ends from their buffet, though I didn't have a full meal in the restaurant because, my flight being at 4pm, I'd already eaten lunch and knew that I'd get dinner onboard. I also skipped the cans of Coke in the lounge's fridge because they'd just been put in, so they weren't cold yet.

Another aspect of the lounge left me a little cold, but it isn't really United's fault if shitty humans fly their airline. While I was snacking and looking out the window, I heard a couple beside me complaining about SFO and the lounge we were in. It started innocuously enough, when the woman was complaining about not being able to get a plastic water bottle "because it's San Francisco". This is actually kind of fair, because I'd brought my own bottle, but had to fill it at the fountain outside the lounge, because inside they only had the lime-infused water that somehow always makes me need the toilet.

From there, the couple moved on to bitching about "their tax-dollars" being spent on free Covid tests. This is bad enough to hear, because I love getting free Covid tests, but her husband's reaction nearly killed me right there: all he said was, "Well, it's so they can rig the election."

Which. Um. What the ACTUAL fuck?

But again, it's not United's fault if crazy rich right-wingers fly on their planes. Though it feels telling that I never encounter that kind of nonsense in coach (mainly because everyone's too miserable while waiting at the gate).

As a final verdict, I'd say it was a pretty good experience, apart from the window thing. It certainly beats my business-class flight on ITA from Rome to Turin last year, where "business class" just meant the same seats as in economy, two banks of three separated by an aisle, just with the middle seat blocked so you had no one sitting right next to you. It also beats first class on Virgin America, because the seats were actual lie-flat seats and it was designed so you could get in and out if the people around you were reclined. Frankly, it also beats those other two on duration: I got to experience Polaris class for 12 hours, rather than the 3 hours (aggregate) that I spent on those other two flights.

I think I'd like to do it again, but ideally on long-haul, transatlantic or transpacific flights, and ideally with more miles, rather than cash. For business upgrades, my rule of thumb is to consider it if it costs less than $1,000 dollars (and, er, if I have enough in my bank account). Though as I always point out, check-in is a great time to upgrade: I once scored a premium economy seat on British Airways for about $50.

Fast X: Spoiler Filled Thoughts

I spent the day getting ready for my upcoming trip to Italy and Germany, and when I'd finished packing and other logistics for the evening, I sat down to finish Fast X. I started it last night and wanted to finish it before I leave, so you get my thoughts on that instead of my anticipation of my first trip without family since before the pandemic (the Germany part; for the Italy part I'm going to see my mom).

There are spoilers after the jump, so be warned:

What the Heck is Going on with Britain

Since about 23 June 2016, observing the UK from my safe perch here in California has been like watching a slow-motion car crash. Everything was in slow motion for the longest time, but as time has gone on the suck has accelerated, so it sometimes feels like everything's going wrong all at once. I'm going to try to put things in order, because although everyone over there is talking about the next election, which a) is scheduled for sometime in 2024 and b) can't come soon enough, there are reasons, to paraphrase Ian Dury, not to be cheerful.

A lot of this is based on my reading of UK news, particularly in the Guardian, but also on reading social media accounts based in the UK. I also chat from time to time with friends and relatives who are there, but it's worth pointing out that a certain point of view is over-represented. Still, the destruction of the economy through Brexit and the fact that schools are literally collapsing in on themselves and the fact that the UK has had four prime ministers just since the Brexit vote (and three just since last year) are pretty clear to see, regardless of whether you read the Grauniad or the Torygraph.

Starting with the Tories, then: they seem to be going through a similar evolution as the Republican Party here in the US, though there are differences. The main one is that the Conservative Party has not, as a whole, abandoned the principles of democracy the way the GOP has here. There have been some moves by select figures here and there to circumvent the parliamentary process, as when Boris Johnson was trying to get his Brexit deal approved without having it go through Parliament. Those moves have largely failed, in part because I suspect that, crusty and hidebound as they may be, even the most inveterate Tory MP is less willing to permit such guff than their US Republican equivalent.

Another similarity is talk among Tories of "the blob", which is similar to the "deep state" that apparently plagues Donald Trump here. But whereas the deep state is the entire apparatus of political insiders, in the UK the blob mainly just refers to career civil servants who sometimes object to Tory ministers' more outlandish behavior. This could be plans to upend the economy by announcing unfunded tax cuts, plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, or just bullying senior civil servants until they quit.

The deep state seems to have found more fertile ground here, whereas it sounds to me like the blob is something that only senior Tory frontbenchers complain about. Again, because Brits seem not to be as susceptible to guff as Yanks, though they did keep Boris Johnson in power for an inordinately long period of time.

The main similarity is the Tories' war on woke, which is probably the thing that's gained the most traction outside of Westminster. The war on woke isn't just around racism or LGBTQ issues, but also refers to climate protests and Brexit, which are a bit more prevalent there than here. Leaving aside Brexit, it doesn't sound like the US has any comparable organization to Just Stop Oil or Extinction Rebellion, though that might be more to do with the fact that a lot of states have legalized running over protesters in your car.

What's most striking to me of all the Tory nonsense at the moment is the scandal around substandard concrete in schools, which has blown up all of a sudden just a week before schools are set to reopen for the fall. This is something that was flagged a couple of years ago, when the roof of a school actually collapsed (on a weekend, so no one was there), but that the government has ignored until now.

In fairness, two years ago Boris Johnson was dealing with the pandemic and with the beginnings of the outrage over his violations of lockdown rules. His successor, Liz Truss, wasn't in office long enough to look at the issue (which is probably best, because she'd have probably contrived some way to just knock down every school in Britain at once). So it's fallen to Rishi Sunak to deal with it, which he's done in the inimitable Tory way of ignoring it until he couldn't any longer, and then blaming everyone else for the problem.

So why don't I feel good about Labour and the upcoming election? Well, Labour seems to have lost the plot in general since 2015, when everyone kind of shat the bed and freed the Tories from having to govern in coalition with the Liberal Democrats (who also shat the bed, because they'd been in a coalition with the Tories). I don't consider Jeremy Corbyn's time as Labour leader to be a loss of plot, but he was undone by a lot of infighting within the highest echelons of Labour, and by the antisemitism scandal. 

It's also true that he was maybe a little too right-on, Red Wedge, 80s Marxist Labour, which undoubtedly scared off a lot of people, though I appreciated that he was at least trying to position Labour as a different party to the Conservatives, something that has eluded most Labour leaders since 2005. And it should be remembered that he led Labour to a much stronger showing than expected in the 2017 snap election, so he clearly wasn't turning off that many voters back then.

No, I have severe misgivings about Keir Starmer. He seems to have taken his cues from the Tony Blair following wing of the party, and has staked out the most centrist positions he could on just about everything. The most recent was Labour's U-turn on introducing a wealth tax and raising the top rate of income tax, which they'd promised to do in their platform in 2020. 

Now, I've heard the argument that Starmer can't be too radical, because he can't implement any progressive policies if he doesn't win. But at what point does he jettison so many policies that he doesn't win anyway? And, to be blunt, is he just waiting to get into power so he can then introduce a wealth tax after all? Is he lying now, or was he lying then, in 2020, when he said he'd introduce this new tax?

It seems unlikely that Sunak would be able to outmaneuver Starmer the way David Cameron did to Ed Milliband in 2015, by promising a whole raft of seemingly progressive policies that undermined Labour's centrist positioning. Cameron did a good job of pretending to be modern and progressive in certain things, and responsible in the ways that people want Tory PMs to be, but I think that level of charisma is beyond Sunak. And even if Sunak himself were a magnetic personality (let's not forget that this is a man who lost an internal Tory leadership election to Liz Truss), it's clear to all but the most RT-addled Tory voters that the Nasty Party isn't pretending to care about the environment or worker safety or any of that crap.

The danger is that Starmer spunks away so much goodwill that he does manage to win the next election, but that he only earns a slim majority, which doesn't let him do anything. Four or five years later, the Tories could therefore come back, probably under Boris Johnson again, and point to the government's lack of achievement to win themselves another term.

What's frustrating is that this current government is on its last legs, devoid of ideas beyond fighting culture wars. Starmer has the opportunity to be a transformative figure, more than just a safe pair of hands to right the economy after Brexit and the pandemic and the European energy crisis, but he seems unwilling to take this opportunity. To put it another way, he's on the Blairite wing of the party, but he seems to have none of Blair's good points.

Britain doesn't just deserve better: it needs better, unless it wants to end up experiencing Blackadder's vision of England with his manservant Baldrick in charge: cavorting druids, death by stoning and dung for dinner.

Blackadder, or The Forgotten Art of Not Binge Watching TV Shows

Since I started keeping track of how many movies and TV shows I've watched in 2023, I've fallen into the same trap as I have with books, namely that of chasing numbers rather than enjoying what I'm watching. In the context of books, it manifests in trying to read a certain number of books per year, per quarter, per month, etc, and trying to read a certain number of pages per day to hit those goals.

I haven't reached that level of obsessiveness with movies or TV shows, but it manifests in other ways. For example, earlier in the year, I was assigning certain TV shows to certain days of the week, which was useful for managing the concurrent seasons of Ted Lasso, Succession, the Mandalorian and Picard, among others. The adverse result, however, is that I become less willing to add a new TV show to my rotation, because I'll have a limited number of days to watch it.

Part of the problem there is that everything is serialized now. If you skip an episode of a show, you'll have missed developments that inform subsequent episodes, so you need to obsessively watch everything in order. It also means you can't just enjoy a few episodes or a single season in isolation, because you're missing the developments that came before, and not seeing the resolution of what comes after.

Serialization has been good for TV overall, at least to some degree. Star Trek is (as always, around here) a good case in point. The original series is criticized now for essentially resetting the characters between episodes - any character growth or lessons learned don't appear the following week. This makes sense in the context of TV at the time (and for a few decades after), where the real money was made in syndication, where episodes were broadcast out of order. The expectation was that an episode would run, say, at 6pm in syndication, and if someone wanted to watch some Star Trek, they watched that episode or nothing. Subsequent shows have been more serialized, though TNG was still easy to run out of order in syndication, while DS9 and most of the New Trek shows are harder to appreciate out of sequence.

The trouble is that sometimes you don't want to get sucked into a whole multi-season story arc, or even remember what happened prior to the episode you're about to watch. This is particularly true when a show falls out of your rotation for whatever reason, and revisiting it therefore feels like a chore.

Enter Blackadder, one of my favorite shows growing up and still one of the absolute classic British sitcoms. When I got on Hulu, I discovered that it was available there, which made me happy because it's been a long time since I watched it. I've started watching episodes here and there, when I don't have time or inclination for a one-hour drama, and I've been doing it out of order, which has been particularly refreshing.

Like all British sitcoms of the era, there's no overarching plotline or character arc to contend with. Each series has its own premise (Medieval England, the Elizabethan Age, the Regency, WWI), and most episodes make just as much sense in any order other than strict broadcast order. The only exceptions are the very first episode, which introduces the main characters and how Edmund becomes the Black Adder, as well as the final episode of each series, where the whole cast usually dies horribly.

So far I've just gone through and identified a few key episodes in each series, and watched one or two of those. For example, in the first series, my favorite episode is The Archbishop, so I watched that in isolation from the others around it, especially Born to Rule and The Queen of Spain's Beard, which are the other episodes from that series that stand with the best of the show overall.

Incidentally, the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth, Goodbyeeee, ends on a poignant note that critics still talk about more than 30 years later as a moment that transcended its usual silly comedy. And the best part is, you don't have to watch a minute of anything that came before it, neither in its own series or the three preceding ones, for it to land.

As I say, serialization has led to more sophisticated and enjoyable TV overall, like my absolute favorite, the Wire. But sometimes it's nice when you can just watch a show, kind of mindlessly, without worrying about how it fits into the overall story. Blackadder's a good example, as is Law and Order, Star Trek TOS and TNG, and the Simpsons. The point, after all, is entertainment, rather than some obsessive chronicling of internal continuity.

That said, I'm looking forward, at some point, to starting another British show, Line of Duty, which I believe is completely serialized and has to be watched in order. Luckily, that's on Hulu as well.

Arleen Sorkin, the Voice of Harley Quinn

Just a quick one this week to pay tribute to Arleen Sorkin, the actress who originated the role of Harley Quinn on a variety of DCAU shows. I didn't know much about Sorkin, but like a lot of fans I loved the Harley Quinn character and was excited to see her show up in the comics. 

She also became a queer icon, thanks to her team-ups and implied (later confirmed) relationship with Poison Ivy. That episode, Harley and Ivy, had her breaking up briefly with the Joker to become a criminal mastermind in her own right, and is held up as one of the classics from the show. It would also form the basis for a spin-off that never materialized, and for the Harley Quinn TV show on Max (originally DC Universe).

The character also got a new lease on life when Margot Robbie played her in the first Suicide Squad film, and came back for Birds of Prey and the second Suicide Squad movie. There have also been a bunch of almost-versions and not-quite versions in other DC/Batman-related shows over the years, so it's fair to say that Sorkin's character was something of a hit. Not bad going at all, but par for the course of a show that also gave us Kevin Conroy, probably the best Batman of my generation.

Reading Sorkin's Wikipedia entry, it turns out she was a co-host of America's Funniest People with Dave Coulier, so I must have seen her on that, though admittedly my memories of that show are hazy at best.

In any case, while Sorkin may not have been a household name in her own right, it must have been nice to see the character she originated hit such a chord with viewers, to the point that she's probably one of the most recognizable DC characters outside the Big Three of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman. 

She may have retired from playing the character after 2011, but it's still sad to see her go so young, especially so soon after Conroy's passing. But we'll always have Harley... especially my particular favorite episode, Harley's Holiday.

Guardians of the Galaxy 3 and Marvel's Diminishing Returns

I just caught Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 last night on Disney Plus. It's my third MCU movie this year, after Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but not including Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (and as a quick aside, why does every sequel have to have a sub-title these days? What's wrong with 2, or even II?). I've seen all of the MCU films at least once, and have kept up with them pretty assiduously since the pandemic and the simultaneous releases on streaming. I've also kept up pretty closely with all the tie-in TV shows, from WandaVision on down to Secret Invasion.

I can't help feeling, though, that maybe the world needs a bit of a break from all of this. The irony is that Guardians 3 was probably my favorite of that specific sub-series, and certainly the best MCU movie in a while, at least since Spider-Man: No Way Home.

The thing is that the MCU has been drifting a bit since Endgame. There's been a lot of retrenching from the events of that movie, particularly Thor and Spider-Man. There's also been some recovery from real-world events, like Chadwick Boseman's untimely death, which threw a spanner in the works for the Black Panther sequel. Some of the TV shows and movies have also hinted at the next Big Bad to come, which is meant to be Kang.

However, very little of this has been as exciting as the first three phases. First of all, it's hard to muster much enthusiasm for Kang after Thanos. There's a bit of a cliche about the way all Marvel villains are sympathetic in the same way, and if you pick apart Thanos's motives then they don't really hold up, but it's hard to argue that a guy who's so powerful and cruel that he just wipes out half the universe with a snap of his fingers is boring. 

Not so for Kang. His motivations haven't really come through, beyond the fact that he wants to rule the multiverse/timeline/whatever. There are some Kangs who are good, and most who are bad, and at least one Kang that we've seen is a later version of the one that the Avengers are set to fight in Secret Wars, which is scheduled for 2027.

The other problem's the characters they've hung these movies around. Only two of the seven movies in Phase 4 have been around real deep cuts/previously unseen characters: Shang-Chi and the Eternals. Black Widow felt like an afterthought given her death in Endgame, though, and Thor: Love and Thunder missed out on a lot of what made Ragnarok charming, while also burning another actress (Natalie Portman) and character (Jane) that the series didn't really do right by. As for Black Panther, because I had a particularly bad run-in with anti-vax ideology during the pandemic, I can't separate Shuri from Leticia Wright, so I was pretty uncomfortable with that.

I also thought Dr Strange in the Multiverse of Madness gave us none of the crazy psychedelia promised by the first Dr Strange movie, and also walked back some of the character work that the Scarlet Witch went through in WandaVision (as far as I could tell; it all came through a bit garbled). Eternals was just kinda boring. I liked Shang-Chi, but appearances by Wong and the Abomination aside, it didn't do much to show that it was part of the shared universe.

The worst of the lot, though, wasn't a movie at all. It was Secret Invasion, which was billed as Nick Fury's triumphant return but, like so many of the post-Endgame movies, showed that the creators had no idea what to do with the characters or plot lines. It could have been the spiritual successor to Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but it just ended up killing off Cobie Smulders and Ben Mendelsohn's characters, who'd otherwise been classing the joint up. I hope to see more of Olivia Colman, but will the creators know what to do with her?

So what did I like about Guardians 3? It felt like the first movie in a while that made us care about the characters and their relationships to one another. By making it all about Rocket's origin and his link to the villain, the High Evolutionary, it gave us some nice glimpses into his motivation for sticking with the Guardians. It also got to give all of the characters scenes with each other, showing how they've changed over the course of the MCU. Most importantly, it made for a nice stopping point, as we said goodbye to a couple of actors (Dave Bautista and Zoe Saldaña) and characters (Peter Quill, though he'll probably be back). It ends (spoilers) with a new team, but it also feels like a fitting goodbye, which rang true for me, even though the Guardians movies were never my favorites.

I know that Disney has announced it will be scaling back new Marvel and Star Wars movies and shows for the time being, but part of me wishes they'd just stopped altogether for a couple of years (on the Marvel stuff; Star Wars can be another discussion when I've watched Ahsoka). Leaving the pandemic aside, they could have taken some time to figure out what the next big arc should be, who should be involved, and most crucially, how to involve the X-Men and Spider-Man characters in future. BTW I still think it would have been neat if Endgame could have worked the X-Men into the MCU, via multiversal shenanigans.

Maybe we'd have missed out on genuinely good shows like WandaVision, Loki and Hawkeye, but maybe that would have been worth it if the films themselves had been executed better. Instead of burning off good actors and beloved characters, we could have gotten the version of Secret Invasion that lived up to the hype while also giving us a proper send-off for Samuel L Jackson and Nick Fury.

It might all be academic. The WGA/SAG-Aftra strike is ongoing, so there's little work being done anyway, and very few of the coming movies seem that interesting, though I'm intrigued to see what The Marvels will be like. But overall, it all feels very far from the sense of fun that I got from Iron Man, way back in 2008, and that post-credits scene where Nick Fury shows up to tease the Avengers project. The difference is that there weren't the same expectations back then, whereas now everything Marvel has to be the biggest event.

I just don't think they're going to maintain that momentum.

Strange New Worlds Season 2: Too Much Nostalgia?

I was kinda surprised to see I hadn't given my thoughts on the first season of Strange New Worlds, but better late than never, I guess. Of course there are spoilers here, for both seasons, so if you've watched them come check it out after the jump: