The Doctor and the Wardrobe

The big Doctor Who news this week was the reveal of the 13th Doctor's costume. I like it. When I heard about Jodie Whittaker being cast, my main concern was that, as good as she is on Broadchurch, she doesn't display any of the silliness I like in my Doctors. The outfit looks like it's already doing some heavy lifting in that department while not going too far into Sixth Doctor territory. A lot of people have brought up Colin Baker's infamous costume in reference to this one, in fact, and there is something about her overall look that brings Six to mind. She's definitely wearing the most yellow of any Doctor since Six--her, Six, and Five are also the only blonde doctors so far. But fortunately the odds of her having any of Six's drawbacks are slim to none.

I really like the return to button braces. I hated Eleven's clip-ons. Though I don't hate clip-on braces as much as I hate clip-on ties. David Lynch wears clip-on braces and so did Marcello Mastroianni.

It's hard to find fault in his sense of style. But the Doctor's supposed to be vaguely Victorian and there's nothing Victorian about clip-ons. Maybe it's my own bad experiences with clip-ons, too--they just don't hold your trousers up (no, I don't have an embarrassing story there, but there might have been if I'd worn them outside). They tend to pop off if I bend even just a little. So thumbs up to Whittaker's braces. And incidentally, anyone who's comparing her to Mork from Mork and Mindy--A. Robin Williams was great so that's not such a bad thing and B. Mork wore clip-ons.

Though maybe it's the rainbow paired with the braces that brings Mork to mind. I was actually reminded of Bill who was known to wear rainbow tops and wondered if it was the Doctor's ode to her.

I suppose it's probably just a sign that it comes from the same costume designer. Anyway, I like it. Peter Capaldi is my favourite of the new Doctors but I've been itching for a costume that attempts something closer to the wildness of the classic series and this is the closest I've seen so far.

Cupid's Now Time

While The Orville is generally a mixture of drama and comedy, it showed last night that in the comedy department at least it can outdo Star Trek. The occasional comedy episode of any Star Trek series is usually pretty awkward but in a homage to the "Naked Time" and "Naked Now" episodes of Star Trek and Star Trek: TNG last night The Orville showed it's much more of a natural at comedy--even while maintaining the sincerity of its universe. A lot of the credit here goes to writer Liz Heldens and director Jamie Babbit who are both clearly more at ease handling relationship humour than MacFarlane and they finally gave Kelly (Adrian Palicki) more of a personality in the process.

Spoilers after the screenshot

The episode also features a guest appearance by Rob Lowe, playing the blue skinned alien who was in bed with Kelly when Ed (Seth MacFarlane) walked in on them in the pilot episode. This is the crisis that led to Ed and Kelly's divorce so naturally it's uncomfortable that duty requires Lowe's character, Darulio, to be onboard in his professional capacity as archaeologist. He's examining the DNA on an ancient artefact that factors into territorial strife between two species with exceptionally impressive makeup and wardrobe.

This subplot mostly falls by the wayside as Kelly finds her flame for Darulio rekindled. Ed, of course, is passionately angry until . . . he also falls for Darulio.

One review I've read has claimed that the joke here is that Ed is lusting after a man--something I'd find improbable just from the fact the episode's director is gay--but while Ed's monologue about the uselessness of labels is funny (as is Malloy's helpless counterargument "I--think it's just easier to have words . . .") the joke is in the extreme shift in Ed's feelings. This bit is at least as old as Midsummer Night's Dream but it's deployed well here and MacFarlane delivers Heldens' dialogue sincerely and with nuance.

It ends up that Darulio's species emits some kind of pheromone when they go into "heat" that makes them irresistibly attractive, something that has an unexpected effect on the recurring slime creature named Yaphit (Norm Macdonald) who suddenly finds Dr. Finn (Penny Johnson Jerald) responding to his advances. The surprising part of it is how sweet Yaphit comes off showing Claire around his quarters and explaining how mitosis turned his mother into himself and his brother.

And this episode definitely had Kelly's best moments since she was interrogated by Robert Knepper. The scene where she thanks Darulio for the cheesy move where he brushes a stray strand of hair from her face was perfectly played by Palicki, her sudden clear attraction explaining why she's cool with the move being conveyed subtly to make the shift funnier.

Also featuring some nice stuff with Alara (Halston Sage) getting business done and a surprisingly effective space battle at the end, this mostly felt like a light episode but it was still pretty satisfying.

Not Such a Crazy Place

By the mid-70s, Vincent Price was already known well enough for horror roles that he could star in a tongue in cheek murder mystery homage to them, 1974's Madhouse. The film's awareness of its own camp never amounts to the joy of a Rocky Horror Picture Show or Little Shop of Horrors serving instead merely to undermine tension. It amounts to a soft serve vanity piece for Price but it has some fun in its way.

Price basically plays himself, an actor named Paul Toombes known for his roles in horror films from the 50s and 60s, particularly for a recurring character named Doctor Death.

Unlike Price--or at least, so I suspect--Toombes is constantly beset by beautiful young women trying to get into his pants and advance their careers. The novel on which the movie is loosely based, according to Wikipedia, has Toombes in a more predatory role regarding women, familiar to to-day's headlines about powerful men abusing women in Hollywood. Maybe Price objected to playing a character so close to himself behaving so apprehensively though the film does retain an almost uncannily Harvey Weinstein-ish producer named Oliver Quayle (Robert Quarry) who's trying to revive Toombes' career.

Toombes career had stalled some years before because, as we see in the prologue, his fiancée was decapitated by someone in a Doctor Death costume. Toombes has spells of memory loss but there are also several likely suspects in the film for the crime that, of course, is soon repeated as other girls are murdered once Quayle brings Price back onto the scene. Did Toombes commit the murders? Was it Quayle? Was it Faye Carstairs (Adrienne Corri), his former costar whose love he rejected? Or was it former Doctor Death screenwriter and wouldbe actor who warmly invites Toombes to stay with him in his weird mansion, Herbert Flay, played by Peter Cushing?

It's not hard to figure out, really. The film does a lot of silly things to keep us off the trail, though. One of the murders takes place on set of the new Doctor Death movie where the director is crushed to death by a slab of metal that lowers over a bed, something meant to be a device of Doctor Death. It's weird how often movies about movies portray filmmaking in such an unrealistic way--why would some goofy effect actually be lethal?

The movie's attempts at ghoulish fun mostly made me feel impatient. I longed for a more sincere vehicle where Cushing and Price had more screentime together.

Twitter Sonnet #1052

A mountain like a puppy placed a call.
In scrawling inks of hist'ry signals float.
Above the rains now shining down the wall.
The snowy tops with steps're surely wrote.
In cordless mazes fit for phones we walked.
Approaching beams appeared to hold the car.
Facades in shades of marble sweetly mocked.
Discursive pipes could not the throatless mar.
Reminding ghosts of screens the sand arose.
In timing roofs to hit the store they built.
From amber dust horizons were composed.
From massive forts and castles came the silt.
A giant foot eclipsed the canopy.
In sleep, the ghost reversed an entropy.

Paper Thin Rebels

I finally got caught up on the new season of Star Wars Rebels, which as of Monday is eight episodes in. Unfortunately I'd been rewatching Clone Wars so the problems with Rebels were even more painful. It's not as bad as those excruciating Forces of Destiny shorts, there are one or two things about Rebels that'll keep me watching, among them the almost constant stream of stunt casting. Which is itself a sure sign the people behind the scenes are well aware the show can't stand on its own.

Spoilers after the screenshot

Why isn't Rebels as good as the cgi Clone Wars? I was still only in the first season of Clone Wars in my rewatch, generally considered the weakest, but even at that point the characters had better chemistry, the serial style plots were more exciting and unpredictable, and above all everything felt less sanitised than Rebels. Yet Rebels has many of the very same writers as Clone Wars--Henry Gilroy, Steven Melching, and of course the same showrunner, Dave Filoni. Disney has been unwilling to hire any of the female writers from Clone Wars for some reason--for obvious reasons as far as Katie Lucas is concerned but there's no reason they couldn't bring in Bonnie Mark or Melinda Hsu. Anyway, I'm starting to think the real missing element is George Lucas, not necessarily for what he contributed, which I suspect was more than seems obvious at first, but surprisingly for his willingness to get out of the way.

Katee Sackoff was the stunt casting in this season's two part premiere, "Heroes of Mandalore". Stunt casting on Rebels is either in the form of a celebrity voice (Tom Baker, Gina Torres), a character from elsewhere in the franchise (Ahsoka Tano, Princess Leia), or, as in this case, both since Sackoff is reprising her role as the Mandalorian Bo-Katan Kryze from Clone Wars. She's mostly in the background in these episodes, though, as Sabine (Tiya Sircar) and Ezra (Taylor Gray) are centre stage showing us the new ways they're going to be annoying this season--one of the show's problems, the seasonal rebooting of character development, probably arises from attempts to make things better. Ezra has gone from misfit street rat searching for his parents to wouldbe Jedi with the power to commune with and command animals to troubled, generic brand Anakin tempted by the Dark Side, to who he is to-day, which in the premiere seems to be Jar Jar Binks.

Jar Jar was one of the weakest aspects of Clone Wars so it's fitting that Rebels would choose to emulate him, making Ezra's latest personality and role that of the bumbling, anachronistically zany fool, comically unable to handle his Mandalorian jet pack but, like Jar Jar, somehow managing to accidentally take out the bad guys anyway. Sabine, meanwhile, who in the previous season looked to be on the path to being an imitation Ahsoka after Disney received so much flack for its poor attention to female characters, gives up the Dark Sabre she'd spent so much time training to use. Is there any talk of giving her a lightsabre? Nope. Not that I mind that she's not going to be a Jedi--the show needs fewer Jedi not more--but it doesn't help remove the impression of an untethered, schizophrenic production.

I say untethered but maybe I should say yoked. The first half of "Heroes of Mandalore" ended with what appeared to be the death of Sabine's mother, apparently killed by a weapon Sabine herself had designed. It was a stunning moment that gave me hope the show had finally found some guts and it ended with Sabine overcome by grief and guilt. But--right at the beginning of the next episode--look, Sabine, it's your mom, she's fine, she was just offscreen the whole time because nothing really bad ever happens to the supposedly desperate rebels fighting against the evil Empire! This certainly ranked among the worst, most awkwardly artificial moments in television of 2017.

This season has so far of course seen Star Destroyers and Imperial bases destroyed while the Rebels get off scot-free again and again. Listening to the characters talk about how tough things are has all the charm of the poor little rich kid complaining about his caviare being served two minutes late. Obviously policy is running the show more than any storytelling instincts--or to put it another way, the show is more bureaucratic machine now than man. Though I am happy to see that policy has been updated to allow for romance and Kanaan (Freddie with a stupid fucking Z Prinze Jr) and Hera (Vanessa the best voice actor on the show Marshall) almost kiss.

Hera is another reason I'll keep watching--I actually like her. I only wish she'd find a better guy than Soul Patch Jedi. In fact, more and more I've been building in my head-canon an impression on Rebels that makes it work with the rest of the franchise. What if the whole series is in fact Rebel propaganda produced during the period between Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi? We know Hera is a real person because she's mentioned in Rogue One. What if the Rebel Alliance PR team decided to put out stories involving the famous heroic general Syndulla of the Rebellion? That would explain why the Rebels constantly win on the show, why the Empire's characters are almost uniformly baffoonish and one dimensional. And then we could say Kanaan and Ezra are totally made up so Luke showing up with a lightsabre isn't robbed of the impact it wouldn't otherwise have if there had already been two Jedi around just a couple years before A New Hope. This way the show would fit into canon while the franchise wouldn't be married to its worst elements.

Which I've barely scratched the surface of, by the way. Monday featured a two part episode with a badly conceived homage to Princess Mononoke. Ezra's previous ability to commune with animals is of course never mentioned when the wolves from Mononoke show up to lead the group out of danger. The writers then introduce a big smoky ore crawler piloted by the episode's stunt casting, Seth Green as a ridiculously stupid lizard man the heroes are too stupid to keep out of audio range from the transmitter when Ezra uses it to try to fool the Empire. This ore crawler is introduced to show us that one of the best parts of Princess Mononoke, the fact that it doesn't demonise people trying to use metal in order to live, will be obnoxiously ignored.

I do like that they aged up Ezra and Sabine. If only they'd taken the opportunity to change Ezra's voice actor. It's amazing how everything he says sounds like a whine, I guess it's almost impressive in its way.

Project Peaks Book

I spent a few days devouring Mark Frost's Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, a short book that any Twin Peaks fan would read in double time. But I haven't read The Secret History of Twin Peaks, also written by Mark Frost, released before the première of season three. Partly I avoided it because of this quote from David Lynch from a press conference:

Q: What did [Lynch] think of Frost’s book, The Secret History of Twin Peaks?
A: I haven’t read it. It’s his history of Twin Peaks.

Lynch's emphasis on "his" made me think the book reflected a perspective on Twin Peaks Lynch didn't share. I was reminded that Lynch and Frost parted ways creatively after the series and that Frost didn't contribute to the screenplay for Fire Walk with Me. I wondered if their reunion for the series return was on the condition that Frost be allowed to put out his version of events in book form while Lynch was the dominant creative control on the show itself.

I can only guess what the differences in perspective might be. When reading the Dossier I tried to spot contradictions and inconsistencies compared to the show. Aside from the fact that Agent Preston is referred to as "Tammy" on the show--even the plaque on her desk says "Tammy"--and in the book she refers to herself as "Tamara", I only caught one real contradiction--on the subject of Judy. The Dossier takes the form of a report from Preston to Gordon Cole and in the section on Judy she makes inferences and deductions based on Phillip Jeffries' statements in Fire Walk with Me and on some info found in Buenos Aires. She doesn't once refer to the great deal of information on Judy supplied by Gordon himself on the show. This made me wonder if I was right in one of my earlier suspicions regarding the disagreement between Lynch and Frost, that Lynch preferred a more spiritual explanation for the strange forces operating in Twin Peaks while Frost preferred an extraterrestrial one. As it is, the show mixes the two together a lot with references to Project Blue Book and Major Briggs monitoring the skies alongside things like Hawk's map or the angel in Fire Walk with Me.

The book also doesn't spend much time talking about new characters. The only new character from the third season who has his own section is Ray Monroe. It's no surprise that characters like the Mitchum Brothers, Candie, or Janey E wouldn't figure in the book since it's supposed to be about the residents of Twin Peaks but I was surprised by the absences of Carl and Miriam. I actually really wanted to know what happened to Miriam.

The urge to find out "what happened" was the main compulsion behind reading the book, of course. The show does an excellent job of piquing your interest and leaving it piqued. A review of The Final Dossier I read yesterday describes the differences between Lynch and Frost as being the differences between "artist" and "storyteller". This isn't accurate enough for me. I'd say the difference is more like the difference between "sensation" and "exposition". I would say both involve art and storytelling. I think Lynch would argue the experience of watching the Fusco brothers grin stupidly at each other conveys a story that couldn't come across in words. Stories are more than words. But words are pretty good too.

The Dossier spends a surprising amount of time catching us up on season two characters--I was particularly interested in learning more about Annie Blackburn. I'd heard there were some intriguing contradictions about her in the Secret History, also related to contradictions involving her relationship with Norma and their mother, played by Jane Greer in season two. Who knows if these were mistakes on Frost's part--given Lynch's love for mistakes, I think he'd likely focus on the strangeness of the discrepancies but Frost endeavours to tie up all lose ends logically as possible. So references to Lana as the winner of the Miss Twin Peaks contest in Secret History are explained by Annie being stuck in a coma requiring the runner up to assume duties. Frost surprisingly spends time delving into Lana's subsequent biography which includes an obliquely referenced affair with Donald Trump. This was both amusing and unpleasant--it's nice to get away from any mention of that asshole but it actually makes perfect sense Lana would seek him out.

Frost's explanation for Norma being an only child and also having a sister is a little more complicated but it results in Frost giving a much bigger back story to Vivian, which, considering she was played by the noir great Jane Greer, I did kind of appreciate.

So the book did satisfy some of my urge to know the scoop. At the same time, if Lynch wants to contradict any of it in the future, I'd be perfectly happy to go on that ride.

Disco Connexion

Thanks to some improbable alien misunderstandings, Klingons and Starfleet came together in several ways in last night's new Star Trek Discovery, "Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum", a Roman saying which translates to "If you want peace, prepare for war." One Klingon seems to espouse the likely meaning of the term in this entertaining episode--that is, conquer everyone and everyone who serves under you will be at peace. But the phrase took on new meaning by the end of this episode from Star Trek novelist Kirsten Beyer.

Spoilers after the screenshot

For those of you who missed it, here's a recap:

Though unlike "This Side of Paradise", it's not a child, foster or otherwise, of Sarek and Amanda who's treated to a new emotional state but Saru (Doug Jones) who discovers what it's like to live without fear for the first time, and he does it without the Partridge Family ambience of "This Side of Paradise" or the hokey faux Native American dressing in "The Paradise Syndrome". It's kind of a surprise the word "Paradise" isn't in the title of this episode.

Instead we have Na'vi-ish blue dots which look like not so distant cousins of the spores which power Discovery's drive. I've been waiting for an episode where Saru isn't just a pain in everyone's side but I guess this wasn't it. Except for saving Lorca (Jason Isaacs) and Voq (Shazad Latif) a few episodes back virtually everything Saru does hampers our heroes in some way.

Meanwhile, the no chemistry attraction between Voq and Michael (Sonequa Martin-Green) gets physical and she ends up kissing the mouth that ate Georgiou. Possibly it's her first kiss. Sometimes I think the writers really hate Michael.

But the big crystal transmitter spike was really pretty. I kind of liked the scenes where Admiral Cornwell (Jayne Brook) is in captivity. Her and L'Rell (Mary Chieffo) trying to read each other was pretty good. Does L'Rell really want to defect? What would that mean for Voq, still improbably undercover as Ash Tyler? It doesn't seem like either one of them would betray the memory of T'Kuvma but T'Kuvma's motivations for going to war with the Federation were never clear so who knows.

Twitter Sonnet #1051

The building shapes disperse in blacker clouds.
The edges soft and dark revert to dust.
But were the rounded fogs but heads in crowds?
A vapour bridge's whisper told in trust.
To-night the sun became but yellow drapes.
Descending flares forgoing dusk for noon.
A shimmered screen the boiled summer apes.
Organic scents've tickled this the moon.
A foil star careens around the tin.
Repeated metal echoes round the night.
An iron world reverts to endless spin.
Somewhere a clog permits but little light.
A silver necklace glimmers through the smoke.
By hollow rusting horns was silence broke.

Recognisable Stranger

Winona Ryder is putting weird shit on the wall again so it must be time for another season of Stranger Things. A better season than the first one, as it happens, and the first one is really good. Stranger Things 2 brings back a lot of plot elements from season 1 but layers over Aliens and Adventures in Babysitting on top of the first season's Twin Peaks, Goonies, and E.T. influences in a really satisfying way, going to new places as well--in some cases even righting the wrongs of certain 80s films. But more than anything I was pleased with how cinematographer Tim Ives stepped up his game this season for some really pretty shots.

Spoilers after the screenshot

This is one of my favourites. It looks like Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Steve (Joe Keery) are on their way to Miller's Crossing except for those brilliant yellow gloves which pop in a charmingly, subtly goofy way that makes the rusty idyllic autumn background even prettier. I like how this season builds sympathy for Steve so much that by the final episode you feel bad for him in exactly the same way you felt bad for Jonathan (Charlie Heaton) in season one. Steve seems to be drawing on James Spader but he's not the easy to hate asshole from Pretty in Pink, a nice way of showing that life isn't so simple.

Even better is poor Dustin, not getting his random courtesy babe like Duckie in the hastily rewritten ending for Pretty in Pink after Molly Ringwald decided she didn't think Jon Cryer was attractive enough. Luckily for Dustin, Nancy (Natalie Dyer) is a lot more sympathetic.

Even for Steve--she has to get really drunk before she delivers her soon to be classic "bullshit" monologue. I don't know if I can think of the word "bullshit" again without picturing her face.

My favourite episode of the season might be episode six from guest director Andrew Stanton (WALL-E, Finding Nemo). The Aliens influence in the government facility, along with shades of Jurassic Park and Lord of the Rings, works like gang-busters, coming to its own life. Sean Astin and Paul Reiser were two perfectly deployed bits of celebrity casting. Reiser shows how much he can add to something just from his creative, natural warmth, here not so false as it turned out to be in Aliens. And poor Astin--as the prototype Mike (Finn Wolfhard) in Goonies, maybe he's showing us Mike's ultimate fate though with all the Bob the Superhero stuff it was easier to think of Samwise the Brave.

Mike was one of the weak links this season. He didn't have much to do besides tag along and complain. I would've recommended having him off with Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) in her Chicago adventure so they could build a relationship. Though it's hard to argue with the exquisite moment where they decide to dance, the lighting seeming to draw on some of the greatest dance scene hits of the 80s.

The other disappointment of the season was episode seven, Eleven's detour into what was probably meant to be a Warriors homage but came across more like City Limits. Still, I would kind of like to have seen the lousy too dark cinematography in City Limits than David Franco's too perfect, even lighting in this episode. I thought I'd accidentally clicked on an episode of Daredevil.

The episode particularly suffers coming after the high water mark of episode 6. That episode not only had the above mentioned siege on the government building but also had Steve's marvellous confrontation with the demi-dogs wielding only his trademark bat with the nails, once his signature bully weapon, now re-purposed for heroism. I thought, "This is so Maniac Mansion right here."

And Dustin gets it, calling it "awesome", disagreeing with Max (Sadie Sink) who diagnoses it as insanity. But Mad Max was another of my favourite additions to this season, her and her belligerent amped up Rob Lowe-ish brother, Billy (Dacre Montgomery). I liked her realisation that her own anger comes from the anger in her home and I really liked that her family troubles weren't neatly resolved in the end. Her relationship with Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) was also nice, especially since it was allowed to build throughout the season as the two of them had a lot of dialogue together.

All in all, a really nice season and I look forward to seeing what comes next.

The Doctor Book

The works of Rudyard Kipling and William Blake find their way into the 2012 Doctor Who audio play The Emerald Tiger, an entertaining adventure for the Fifth Doctor. Most of the twists are pretty obvious but the usual good chemistry between Five and his three companions pairs well with peril in 1920s India.

The audio play features Cherie Lunghi, whom many might remember as Guinevere in John Boorman's Excalibur, here playing Lady Adela who's caught up in some terrible trouble involving tigers who can talk. She and Peter Davison are really good together and I wouldn't have minded hearing her brought on as a regular companion.

Later in the audio play there's a kid who grew up in the woods having learned English from Kipling's The Jungle Book. Despite the obvious fondness the audio play's writer, Barnaby Edwards, has for Kipling, he has the Doctor criticise the arrogance of British colonialism in the person of a Major Haggard played by Neil Stacy, an actor with a deep voice, always nice in a villain.

Trek of the Orville

Last night's new Orville, "Into the Fold", was the most Star Trek-ish episode yet--no surprise considering it was written by Brannon Braga and Andre Bormanis and the episode was directed by Braga. It felt very much like an episode of Voyager where Janeway or someone else, having crash landed on a planet, has to rely more on her wits than technology to survive but "Into the Fold" brings in the element of a single mother in an interesting way coming, I suspect, from the insight of at least one writer who's a parent. It also distinguished Isaac a bit from Data in that, while his business with the children at times felt like Data's awkward interactions with kids in episodes of TNG like "Hero Worship", Isaac seems much more like a parent's wish fulfilment; he's a character who's free to say those things an exasperated parent would love to say to kids but hopefully has too much of a sense of responsibility to actually say.

Spoilers after the screenshot

Braga was a showrunner on Voyager and also worked on Star Trek: The Next Generation and the character interactions, particularly between Dr. Finn (Penny Johnson Jerald) and her kidnapper, felt like something from 90s Trek in a very effective way. The way Finn deduces and acts on the kidnapper's attraction to her when she convinces him to go and get the first aid kit from the shuttle was nicely done. I like how much it trusts the audience to pick up on that subtext without directly explaining it. Mind you, I have seen a few people on the internet criticise Finn for shooting a guy who was just trying to help her, apparently choosing not to consider the significance of the fact that Finn was locked in a cell and not permitted even to use her communicator. It's nice that The Orville, isn't pitching for the lowest common denominator. I still have some hope that if you treat an audience like they're intelligent even the normally less intelligent might be inspired to improve.

I'm still not completely sold on Penny Johnson Jerald and I don't quite understand why I'm the only one who seems to find her a bit flat and unconvincing. Maybe she's a Robert Forster type, I didn't appreciate him at first either, specialising in playing a kind of low key, emotionally walled off person I'm not attuned to. But I loved Forster on Twin Peaks where I kind of got him as a Gary Cooper type, maybe I'll get to that place with Jerald, too. Certainly her character, Finn, shines in the episode being saavy and quick. She is a bit like John Wayne or Gary Cooper in a 50s western, able to draw and shoot on someone when she has to but remembering to teach her children to use stun when they can on principle.

I guess the nearest equivalent on Star Trek to Finn's relationship with her kids would be Benjamin Sisko and his son Jake on Deep Space Nine but never on Star Trek did you get the credibly messy rivalry dynamic you see between Ty and Marcus--not even in "Disaster" when Picard was stuck in a turbolift with a bunch of kids. Finn casually saying that she decided to be a single parent raises eyebrows when considering she has to corral these two and work as the ship's doctor. In a world where no-one has to work for money, such a decision doesn't make a whole lot of sense so it's a lucky thing Isaac (Mark Jackson) seems to have earned a place in the family by the end of the episode. I'm not a parent but I've had enough dealings with kids to get some catharsis when Isaac took Marcus' game and blasted it.

"Into the Fold" was co-written by Andre Bormanis who has serves as a technical consultant on The Orville, a job he also had on Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager. I suspect this is why the suspenseful shuttle crash sequence had a nice feeling of authenticity to it that helped create that tension.

Twitter Sonnet #1050

As wigs'll gallop past a polling steed.
As timeless tungsten clicks a hand.
A gripping cloud's a field of wheatless need.
Beside a river scythe's a deathless land.
The last in patchy jacket boxes smokes.
Above the seat a pack of cards'll plot.
Their newest suits include the wheels and spokes.
Collected stars insert a steward dot.
As stripes define the brown a shoe returns.
In closing, plaids absorb the light beyond.
A mountain claimed a ship's galactic turns.
With cookies lined for age the chips abscond.
Confusing saxophone conditions blurt.
Internal buses can the stomach hurt.

Infinite Thoughts Sparked by a Little Weird

One of the most important things about effective weird fiction is for the prose to give a sense of the visceral experience. Caitlin R. Kiernan excels at this as she shows again with this month's new Sirenia Digest and its story, "Albatross (1994)".

As is often the case with Kiernan's work lately, it's not exactly linear, though the events presented are more or less in sequence. But she takes the sensory impressions of one experience and spreads them out over the rest of the story like a bassline. These impressions involve direct contact with the sea and the effective ruminations on the nature of that experience shade the descriptions of a mysterious, gigantic carcass washed up on the beach in an interesting way.

The influence of Lovecraft is as always very clear in her work and he was very good at understanding this kind of prose too--the necessity of capturing the thought processes of, and sensations experienced by, the central character. It's only in that amber that the specimen of alien creature of supernatural monster is captured, after all. So a few drops of the bizarre blooms into a full flower of really effective fiction.

Lately I've also been reading the first chapters of Dead Shrimp Blues by Kiernan's friend, Billy Martin, which you can read on Martin's Patreon. This is the unfinished sequel to the Liquor novels Martin published when he was going by the name Poppy Z. Brite. I liked Liquor a lot so it was nice catching up with the characters. But my favourite part is in the first chapter concerning a death resulting from a possibly bungled crime that has the kind of macabre irony combined with a sense of life's authentic weirdness that puts me in the mind of the Coen Brothers or Edgar Allan Poe. Become a donor to Martin's Patreon to check it out--his mother's in the hospital so this would be a good time.

The Big Tortoise

The impression I get of Harry Dean Stanton from interviews is that he was a sort of zen nihilist, an atheist who sought and possibly achieved a kind of contentment with the ultimate meaninglessness of life. His last starring role, 2017's Lucky, reminded me I also get the impression he had a lot of friends who loved him and who were gently trying to convince him there really is something more to life. As a character played by David Lynch in the movie puts it, "There are some things in this universe that are bigger than all of us and a tortoise is one of them." But the movie's not pushy or preachy and while director John Carroll Lynch gives the film a rough, inexperienced touch oddly reminiscent of 90s indie film sentimentality, it is genuinely sweet and impossible not to like if you have any fondness for Harry Dean Stanton.

Stanton plays a man basically like himself except he's not a movie star. Known only as Lucky, he's like Stanton in that he served in World War II, has a lot of friends who love and respect him, and he considers spiritual beliefs to be subjective illusions. The film consists mainly of dialogue scenes set in a diner, a bar, and in Lucky's house where discussion between Lucky and other characters explores contrasts between his personal philosophy and his friends'.

My favourite of those locations was the bar. It's only here that David Lynch turns up and, apart from Stanton, he's the best part of the film. He plays a man named Howard, always wearing a panama hat and a half tied flashy bow tie. Also at the bar, though, is James Darren whom some might remember as Vic Fontaine from Deep Space Nine--perhaps this is related to the fact that DS9 showrunner Ira Steven Behr was a producer on Lucky.

Darren's character tries to prove a point to the life long bachelor Lucky (Stanton also never married) by discussing his happy marriage to Elaine (Beth Grant) but Lucky still manages to turn Darren's argument around to make a point about life's meaninglessness. The argument amusingly ends with Lucky lighting up a cigarette next to a no smoking sign.

A lot of familiar faces show up in the movie, including Stanton's co-star from Alien, Tom Skerritt, who makes a cameo in the diner as a fellow World War II veteran. He shares a story about the happiness on the face of a Buddhist child during the war because her beliefs informed her what was going to happen after what she thought was her approaching death. Lucky does confide at one point that he is frightened of death but the film never diminishes the dignity of his convictions. By the end of it, you like him partly because he could be right, and you want him to be wrong because you like him.