Dave Dobson

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Category: Reviews (Page 3 of 4)

SPSFC#4 Quarterfinalist Review: The Ghost Gun by Gareth Lewis

February 24, 2025 / / 0 Comments

This is my second review of a full read for the Peripheral Prospectors judging team for SPSFC#4. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is The Ghost Gun by Gareth Lewis (author site here). The book is available from a wide variety of retailers.

Blurb

The Ghost Gun kills what it hits, its ghost bullets ensnaring the victim’s soul to their killer.

Except that nothing is that simple.

Certainly not an apparently simple theft that leads detectives into a war between secret societies over artifacts which have been around for millennia, their origin unknown, their abilities inexplicable.

Demoted to Vice due to departmental politics, Detective Cassie Kinsala sees an opportunity to restore her career path. But what looks like it might offer a decent arrest soon turns into a quagmire the law might not cover, and might not protect her from.

Jimmy Bancroft used to be a cop. Working for the other side lets him avoid paperwork. Investigating rumours of a competitor moving in on his employer’s interests, he becomes entangled in a war between criminals and a secret society. And someone might be trying to set him up.

My Review

This is an engaging book with a fun central concept, some great buddy-cop dialogue, some hard-core criminal intrigue, and three highly memorable characters.

Plot and Characters

I don’t generally want to spoil stuff when I review, but a lot of the plot setup is in the blurb above, and much of it is revealed in the opening few chapters. There’s a Ghost Gun, a weapon that steals souls. There are shadowy groups – criminals, technologists, cults, splinter cults – all pursuing this gun and the other artifacts like it.

Set against or amongst those shadows, there are three hard-boiled cops, one (Cassie) a battered idealist, one (Harry) who’s mostly given up, and one (Jimmy) who’s come unmoored and switched sides. They each have different approaches to the case of the gun stemming from their own moral codes and from their own history of injury or failure or ambition. As they each learn more about the weird situation they’ve been thrust into, or thrust themselves into, they respond in authentic, logical, deductive ways, as befit detectives.

My Thoughts

This is an exciting book. It is one of our shorter ones in our group, and it is paced well, giving new information into plot, characters, and mysteries in nearly every chapter. The plot feels fresh and follows a central mystery – what this gun is, what it does, how it works, and who the weird groups are who are trying to control and exploit it. There are a LOT of cop-show-style gun battles, some exciting, some tragic, some magic. Even where the book wanders into some tropey places, it maintains a newness and an energy that give life and imagination to those tropes.

The big strength of the book for me is the dialogue between cops (or ex-cops). It’s real, grounded, and a lot of fun. These are characters on various stages of the road toward bitterness and resignation, and they talk with intelligence, sass, and mutual admiration laced with sarcasm. That never stops being fun.

“I’m not dumb enough to shoot a cop.”

“I’m unconvinced as to your level of dumbness.”

For me, the setting was indistinct from the start, despite its familiarity, and it didn’t gel even pretty far into the book. I was imagining a near-future world – not quite Neuromancer, but on the way there. I was wrong, I think. There are mentions of Netflix and Google, which anchor it in the present, and there are cell phones with SIM cards. There’s no technology that seems too far out there (although one character seeming to think something was a complex hologram led me to think such things existed in this world).

The location was fuzzy, too. The cops’ language is often British flavored, with plural verbs for corporations or organizations (e.g. sentences like “Coca-Cola have started a new advertising campaign”) and with some Britishisms, although the police ranks and roles seemed American. The character names were suited to either an American or British setting. For a long time, I knew only that it wasn’t Russia, because there was a reference to a Russian district. I thought it might be some indistinct future city. It wasn’t until 85% of the way through the book that somebody mentions this stuff happening “in an American city.” Still unnamed, but at least I knew it was America for sure for the last few chapters.

There was one big piece of fuzziness in the characters, too. One of the detectives was referred to as Black by another about halfway through the book. Her race is never mentioned before or after, and there’s no discussion of how it’s impacted her life or career. There didn’t need to be such discussion, of course, but it was strange not to know, and I think racism might realistically have been a frame for her troubles at the department – not necessarily one she’d personally put blame on, but one she’d likely consider. I had to reread that part to make sure they were talking about the same person and not a new detective. I guess the surname Kinsala might have been a tip, but not one I picked up on.

There were a small number of editing issues. Nothing major (like, maybe ten instances), and certainly no more than you’d see in a traditionally published book, but my author eye sees these in others’ work while somehow remaining tragically blind to them in my own. The perspective was at times a little floaty. Most of the scenes are squarely in the perspective of a single character, one of the major three, but when they get together, it occasionally pans out to omniscient, and we get inner thoughts from multiple characters in the same scene, sometimes alternating by paragraph. It works here, because we’ve spent time in these characters’ heads and they’re familiar, and it’s a valid choice of construction, but it is something we’re often taught to avoid in writing seminars.

There were a small set of moments that felt info-dumpy, especially a conversation with a lore-rich elder, but that’s hard to avoid in a story where the main characters don’t know how things work. I didn’t have a problem with it even as I saw it happening. There was an experimentation scene that seemed natural, and it had an outcome that was pretty funny and lasted for much of the rest of the book.

There’s a clear story arc here that ends within the book, even though this seems to be a series, with the plucky and intrepid Detective Kinsala carrying on the story in future books. Although the central conflict was resolved, I felt like a lot of things were still in motion, including a not-too-subtle teaser for the next book. That’s the nature of series, I guess, but I might have liked to have more of it nailed down – another scene a week later, maybe, to see how the characters are coping, would have been enough.

This being a sci-fi competition, I should acknowledge that there wasn’t a lot of traditional sci-fi here. It is totally (and gloriously) speculative fiction, but there aren’t many strictly sci-fi parts. That quibble is not at all relevant to the book, which does what it is trying to do very well, but it might be relevant to the competition.

I realize I’ve now done a thing I hate in reviews as an author, where I’ve written two positive paragraphs and then five or six nit-picky ones. I absolutely don’t mean to give an impression I didn’t like this book – I did, and the promise I saw in it in the opening slush read in the competition was paid off in the full book. I really enjoyed the characters – I found them real, flawed, struggling, and entertaining to follow. I’d totally be down to follow Cassie Kinsala through further adventures. The ghostly artifacts were neat, and the rules they followed and the unintended impacts they caused were creative and fun.

Summation

In summary, then, this was a good, creative book that kept me entertained throughout. It has a cynical but realistic-seeming view of the police and what challenges people face during a long and grinding career. It has great, snappy dialogue, both in the banter and in the more serious conversations. It tells you what you need in terms of world-building without wading too deep into it to the point of getting dull or pedantic. Lewis is an imaginative, skilled author. He has a ton of books out, starting over fifteen years ago, so there’s a lot there to dig into.

Movie review: The Gorge

February 17, 2025 / / 0 Comments

The Gorge on Apple TV was OK, maybe a little better than OK, but not great. Let’s give it a B-, graded on a curve for movies about sinister crevasses.

The Good:

— Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy are good, better than this plot deserves. Their growing interactions and relationship is the best part of the movie (until it moves into verse form, which is painful if you pause the video and read it, which I did. She should have just set fire to it and bailed).

— The setup for the plot and the stark sets are suitably weird, with lots of cool little details and events. Then as the action starts taking strides, things stay tense and exciting, although the plausibility takes a huge hit.

— The creepy visual effects were baller, too. Very neat stuff, and a wide variety of it.

The Bad:

— Sigourney Weaver is criminally underused here, given nothing more to do than stock villainhood, playing the Paul Reiser character from the (much better) Aliens movie but with far stupider lines.

— The premise, as eventually didactically explained, is pretty trite and dumber than most movies like this.

— There is occasional painfully clunky dialogue (e.g. an unearned “this place is pure evil”) that you have to kind of shake off like a bad burrito. There are good lines too, but they are frontloaded, and the last half of the movie is less fun and far less well-written than the first half.

— Miles Teller as a bemused, curious, bored guy is fun, while Miles as a guy in love is 100% Anakin Skywalker. Yes, I went there. Yes, it’s accurate.

— There’s also a lot of questionable physics, plans that don’t make sense, and questionable survival of very old equipment, along with a plethora of the kind of poor choices people make in scary movies, augmented by improbable coincidence.

— Those drones couldn’t possibly carry that many bullets, but that doesn’t matter a whit, because they shoot like stormtroopers. I feel like they were maybe designed as soil aerators rather than machine-gun drones. That would explain it.

— There were also probably six better endings they hinted at during the movie than the groan-worthy one they eventually chose.

The Ugly:

— There’s a wretched maybe two solid minutes of solemn spoken-word voice-over exposition explaining why things in the movie are the way they are. The person speaking the words would have no conceivable knowledge of these events, these initiatives, or how it works. The evidence they’ve found is cryptic and very limited. There’s a neat scene with a movie that’s a primary source and quite affecting – they should have just left it there, but the screenwriters seemed to want you to know their full explanation for everything, which would have been more excusable had it been, like, a good explanation, rather than the plot of five thousand video games and B-movies of yore. Let the mystery steep, dude. Show, don’t tell.

SPSFC#4 Quarterfinalist Review: Wakers of the Cryocrypt by Nathan Kuzack

February 9, 2025 / / 2 Comments

This is my first review of a full read for the Peripheral Prospectors judging team for SPSFC#4. For more information about the team and our progress, please go to the team update page here.

The book is Wakers of the Cryocrypt by Nathan Kuzack (author site here). Nathan is offering this book for free through Google Books here. It’s also available on Amazon and Apple Books.

Blurb

A thought-provoking post-apocalyptic story about an unexpected reunion between humankind and the AIs it created.

In a world full of living machines one man may die… again.

The future. The human race is extinct. Earth is ruled by eltecs, descendants of the AIs humans created before their demise.

While searching for prehistoric cave paintings, two eltec explorers discover a hidden cryogenic crypt containing 23 perfectly preserved human bodies frozen inside crystal columns.

As eltec society argues over who might have built the crypt and what to do with it, one of its occupants is restored to life. Human beings are no longer extinct, but, for reasons of their own, not every eltec wants to see them come back. The only living human on Earth is in terrible danger.

My review

I enjoyed my time with this book. It was creative, exciting, featured a richly-imagined future world, and dealt with moral and ethical issues in an interesting way.

Plot and Characters

The story centers on several main characters, adopting their point of view or an omniscient point of view at various points. The human protagonist is a man given the name Lazarus. He awakes from a mysterious tomb (the cryocrypt) into a far-future, post-human world populated by sentient robots called Eltecs.

The Eltecs, descendants of human robotics and AI technology, live in a low-population utopian society goverened by a set of uber-intelligences. Even in their utopian future, they are factionalists. Some are fans of humanity, adopting human-like form and wearing clothes. Others are anti-humanity, adopting odd and unnatural shapes. All are protected from death by a cloning system that recreates and reloads them if they are destroyed, a la Paranoia.

Humanity has been dead for over ten thousand years, so the discovery of Laz and twenty-two other humans in the crypt, perfectly preserved, is a tremendously significant event. The Eltecs frequently cluck their steely tongues at humanity’s base, self-destructive instincts that led humanity to perish in an environmental and political cataclysm leading to a nuclear war long ago.

Thrust into this odd society, like an 18th-century savage brought back by colonialist explorers, Laz struggles to learn and adjust. He is afflicted by a mysterious amnesia, which prevents him from remembering his past life, although he seems well-versed in 21st century society and customs.

All of the above is established quickly, in the first few chapters, and the rest of the book is a tale, sometimes political, sometimes introspective, sometimes high-octane adventure, of Laz struggling to figure out who he is, why and how he was placed in this crypt, and how he will fit into Eltec society. His Eltec allies are often perspective characters, and their musings on Laz and their own society are interesting and robust. I don’t want to spoil the plot, which is fun, so I will leave the plot summary there.

My thoughts

As I was reading this, I was reminded a great deal of the many original-series Star Trek episodes where Kirk and Bones and Spock discover a planet living with very different social rules, often derived from 20th century America. Our brave Starfleet visitors have to figure out how the society works, and often what is wrong with it, before judging them, punching some people, kissing others, and flying away 43 minutes later. This absolutely isn’t a diss – I loved those episodes – but there’s a parallel there.

I was also reminded of fables or parables, stories told to explore moral issues. There’s a lot of judginess in many of the characters, and moral flaws and collective guilt are frequent concerns. The language of the book fits this style as well, with characters often ruminating about the sins of the past (or present), sometimes in bold declarative sentences.

To me, the main character’s amnesia didn’t seem necessary, although it’s explained and justified as the story progresses. It was a little tropey, and I don’t think the story would have been too different had he known he were a blacksmith or a baker or whatever. It did give him a constant sense of not knowing himself, which worked, but it also made him a limited character. There are books and shows where that trope is used better, The Bourne Identity being a big one, where hidden skills and connections are discovered, but Laz didn’t seem to have any of these. A new TV show I like, Doc, has amnesia as a central theme, and even though it’s a cheesy plot device, they’re deploying it well and capitalizing on the main character’s alienation from her past self as she learns more about it.

The book got more action-packed as it went on, which was fine and exciting, but the main human character lacked agency and control throughout the whole thing, leaving him subject to the manipulations and machinations (get it?) of his tormentors. The ending, in particular, seemed like a place where he and his friends were far more spectators than protagonists, and I wasn’t a big fan of that choice. This was the book’s biggest disappointment for me, although as an author, I certainly know it can be hard to stick the landing. I actually thought the Eltec characters, especially Shulvara, were more both more interesting and more capable characters, and I’d have preferred to spend more time in their chrome crania rather than in Laz’s largely empty one.

One quibble for me was the Eltec society and speech. Despite being robots from the future, they spoke very much like 21st-century humans, even to the point of using “gonna” and “wanna” frequently, which grated. They also used 21st-century idioms frequently (e.g. something up my sleeve) which seemed out of place for sentient robots in the 33rd century. Their culture and personalities were also very human-seeming, which added to the Star Trek/parable feel but which seemed a little jarring to me, who would expect the Eltec society to have evolved into something more different in 12,000 years.

There was also some odd fixation on sex, even from the robots, and some repeated male gaze from Laz towards a fellow crypt resident. Even the robots got into ogling people sometimes, apparently totally on board with a 21st-century standard of Hot-or-Not. I’m not a prude at all, but this seemed out of place. It totally wasn’t a big deal, not frequent, and didn’t detract, but the few mentions of orgasms and cocks and lust and such didn’t (for me) fit the nature or tone of the rest of the story, which was closer to classic sci-fi and focused on other, cooler things.

The POV was not quite fixed, sometimes restricted to one character, sometimes omniscient with thoughts from all of them, sometimes party to observing events none of the main characters could see, and it sometimes floated from one to the other within a paragraph or two. It was a little fuzzy – not bad, but as an author who worries about that stuff, I couldn’t help but take note.

Summation

This was a good book, often exciting, thought-provoking, funny, and emotional, with a creative future world to explore and a lot of moral questions to think about. Kuzack should be proud of what he’s done with it. It well-deserves its quarterfinal spot in the SPSFC. Because it’s the first of our quarterfinalists I’ve read, I don’t have a real sense of how it will stack up against those others, but I recommend it, especially if you liked those old Star Trek morality plays.

Notes on the departing books – SPSFC #4

January 14, 2025 / / 1 Comment

This year, I’m on the Peripheral Prospectors team as a judge for SPSFC. We’ve recently announced our six quarterfinalists, as you can see in this post with more information and previous posts available on the team page here.

I’ve been a participant twice before, in 2021-22 (Daros) and 2023-24 (Kenai). I’ve been in SPFBO four times, I’ve done BBNYA twice, and I’ve entered another couple contests. Although I’ve met with success in some of these contests, I have also at times exited (very) early, and I absolutely know how much that stings.

In that spirit, I thought I’d share what I liked about each of the books I read that didn’t progress beyond this stage. Our judging team of five split our 31 submissions into two groups, with each judge assigned to one group or the other. For each of these books, I read the opening chapters, usually 20 percent or so, which is the expectation for the “scout phase” of the competition. So, these comments (and the quarterfinalist status) aren’t based on the whole book in my case, although some of the books below got full reads by the other judges.

I’m not including any critiques or problems I might have had with the books, because that’s not the point of this post. I’m just looking to celebrate and highlight these books and authors as they depart the competition.

309

This had an exciting opening with definite alien invasion vibes. The characters had strong voices and personalities, and the invasion and mysteries were intriguing. The story has a good old-school sci fi vibe – I was reminded of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, with all the tension and horror that scenario provides.

Battle Calm

This book quickly established a world at war with a merciless foe along with a band of rebels fraught with their own internal conflicts. The dialogue was snappy and emotions were high, with a number of mysteries (both past and future) set out for the narrative to unwind. The nature and behavior of the enemy here was creative and interesting, and the hierarchy and mistrust in the human forces was tense and at the breaking point nearly immediately. The desperate situation of the main character at the opening was a good way to introduce all of this.

Chasing Naomi

I really enjoyed my time with this one. It had a fundamental goofiness and high-concept spirit that worked for me. The main character was plucky and appealing, and the ship and ghost-people picking her up were fun and funny. Because of the scout stage partial read, I didn’t get far enough to see where it was all headed, but it had a bunch of tropes I enjoyed – fish out of water human among advanced non-Earthlings, a la Hitchhiker’s Guide, sassy ship’s computer, space battles, negotiations and laws, superhero-ish main character discovering her powers.

Children of the Fall

This was a hyperviolent, breakneck pace view of a future dystopian world. Some very creepy scenes with artificial people gone bad, and some zombie-flick-style action with hapless humans facing killer beings. The main character’s worries about battery life were a great way to add tension. There was also some really interesting use of language here – words, phrases, and images that were used in ways that were unexpected and thought-provoking.

The Dream of the Forest

The opening scenes here are a quick contrast – a loving couple (actively loving, if you know what I mean) with high status, wealth, and privilege, although in a restrictive society with some draconian rules. Immediately, there’s a bitter, awful betrayal, one impacted by those draconian rules and designed to exploit the high status, throwing everything into turmoil. It’s a raw, emotional opening, promising high stakes throughout.

Eye of Destiny

This was a two-sides story, with one side being young humans whose father is caught up in mysterious research, and the other being an alien menace to all of humanity. The human characters had clear, established relationships, and the growing sense of something wrong on Earth, with exploration and discovery, was engaging, promising higher stakes to come. To me, it kind of read like a dystopian future story targeting the young adult market, maybe like Divergent or Maze Runner, although with an Earth much closer to our real Earth than in those stories.

The First Herald

I liked this one and enjoyed my time with it. There was a strongly hierarchical dystopian future, with a strong undercurrent of family politics and conflicts, with people operating at many different levels in society. The future world was interesting and compelling, clearly having a lot of planning and thought behind it. The dialogue and writing were engaging, and the mystery and conspiracy afoot were intriguing, with hints of an equally complex counter-culture full of rebels (and backstabbing too).

Hauler

This book had a ton of charm, with an everyman protagonist constantly struggling with a system that wants to hold him down and exploit him, not always making the best decisions, but aware that he is not, which is fun. The growing danger and entanglement were handled well, and there’s also a lot of humor and colorful characters as this one progresses. I could totally see this as a goofy sci-fi movie, probably starring a pro wrestler.

Horizon

This book opened with a tremendous space battle full of panic, despair, and violence. Really dramatic beginning. The book moved on to the aftermath of that disaster, and you get a better sense of the setting, the conflict, and the characters involved, all of whom are brimming with emotion and tension. Lots of action here, and squarely in the tradition of a future with warring ships and a bigger universe to explore.

Mushroom Blues

This was a really, really interesting book, very well written, with a complex society reminiscent of colonial powers and resistance struggles on Earth, but set somewhere else, an imagined non-Earth but very Earth-like place. Adding to the weirdness is the fact that the subjugated people are fungal organisms, although they have many human (and relatable) characteristics and emotions and desires. The vibe is 20th-century hard-boiled detective, which works well, and the dialogue is real-seeming and the pace taut and exciting while sometimes taking pauses for some neat imagery and reflection on the gritty world. This one was hard to categorize – it’s doing well in SPFBO, although some of the judges there are wrestling with whether it’s fantasy (see here). Similarly, we wrestled with whether it’s sci-fi – there’s a scientific basis for the mushroom people’s biology and weird powers, but (at least in the opening I read) there’s not advanced human tech or spaceships or that kind of sci-fi staple, nor is there a future setting – just an alternate Earthlike world where mushroom people exist along with humans. Regardless of the categorization, it’s undeniably a good book, well-written and tremendously creative.

Non-Conscious

I liked this one. It was definitely quirky and coarse, with a lot of crass humor, sex, and language you’d never use in front of your grandma. The premise of a vibrant computer game world with real-world corporate workers running it is not new, but it’s fresh and intriguing here, milking the computer game scenario (and the power and control the corporate workers have in it) for all those tasty plot bits and also having a desolate, confining, dysfunctional corporate and workplace structure with pissed off people taking shots at each other. A lot of imagination went into this, and if you can abide the rawness of the sex talk (and sex scenes) and profanity, you’ll find something to chew on inside.

Use of Emergency

I liked this one a lot – it had a great set-up with a plucky heroine bucking an unfair system, finding a way through impassable societal and career barriers even if she has to bend the rules. The sleeper-ship scenario was well-described and seemed real and authentic, and (unlike many of these entries) I found the protagonist relatable, fun, and easy to cheer for, and the mystery that was just getting started in the part I read was engaging and juicy.

The Widow’s Tithe

I enjoyed my time with this one too. It had a very high-concept setup, full of future media celebrities, gunfights, megacorps, and bullets-flying action. You’re quickly aware here that everybody is a bit of a caricature, like in 1980’s sci fi movies, but it works (just as it often did in those). The reality-TV military commando squad might not be realistic, but it’s fun, and the catty, egotistical, self-absorbed main character is fun to watch as she navigates a huge setback and a new life full of trials. You’ll know quickly if you’re going to like it, and if you go for this kind of thing, it seems likely to pay off.

A review of Echo (Marvel/Disney+)

January 23, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I often post reviews of stuff I watch on Facebook, and I thought I might share them here as well. Here’s my take on Echo on Disney.

Beware: Spoilers below!


The Good:
— The lead, Alaqua Cox, is a tremendously intriguing actor – I’ve thought so since she showed up on Hawkeye, and this show really lets her go hard. She is up to the challenge. She’s got a tremendously emotive face and great physicality for this role.
— The care they took to include sign language in so many scenes was really neat. It slowed down the show and made each word signed more important, but that is 100% accurate to my experience with working with deaf colleagues, and it gives the show a different and valuable pace, flavor, and feel. Also, there is some great acting and emoting you can do while signing, and many (though not all) of the actors understood that and used it to great advantage.
— A lot of the fight choreography, especially in the first episode, was awesome – snappy, long sequences with cool choices and exciting moves. Later episodes had some similar shining moments but didn’t quite sustain the level of the earlier episodes.
— The setting in the midst of a fictionalized Oklahoma Choctaw community was new and different and intriguing, although Marvel fake history seemed to replace real Indian culture in some key areas, always to the show’s detriment.
— The journey from bad guy to (sort of) good guy can be a really interesting one, and Maya does have some of that cool antihero juice here. It doesn’t quite pay off, but her criminal background is present in her decisions and motivations, her assessment of herself, and in her fractured relationships with her former family and friends, and when it works, that’s strong stuff. It doesn’t always work, and I think it should have been easy to make it work better.


The Meh:
— The story, which seemed like it might be cool initially, devolved into standard superhero stuff, which is stuff that I’m very bored with after so many Marvel and DC movies. This isn’t entirely fair to the show, because the inclusion of Choctaw historical (or historically inspired) and mythological figures added depth. However, the show was still an “I suddenly have magic powers” superhero origin story, and the powers were never well-defined or even used much, except to make the final conflict not very interesting on screen (although an OK payoff for the mystical plotlines that came before).
— The storyline stalled out a bit in the middle episodes, although they all had interesting parts. Mostly this was because the central conflicts (both comic book battles and character interactions) kept getting derailed rather than moving forward, and the stakes and options and motivations weren’t usually well explained. With regard to the central comic book plot conflict, if what Maya was doing was as dangerous as everybody said, then (1) Maya would know this and should have planned better, and (2) we shouldn’t have had time to be dorking around with all these non-super characters in a Choctaw version of Northern Exposure. Instead, it was like the big bad guy threat just got turned off for long stretches so we could show family and community. The tension between Maya and her relatives and friends was at times interesting, but it wasn’t fully defined and then never really resolved, except that everyone easily became friends again when they needed to.
— The final conflict and battle were underwhelming, weirdly constructed from a plot perspective, and short – I was hoping for more badass kung fu action, and I instead got some wonder-twins we-win-because-we’re-magic stuff without even providing satisfying deaths for the main opponents. Most of the guys defeated here were nobodies who just showed up in cargo vans – no characters, no history, no motivation, just default. That doesn’t resolve much of anything, story-wise, and it’s not a satisfying ending. They can just send more vans next week, maybe with people who will actually pull the trigger rather than taking prisoners.

The Bad:
— Kingpin is just a terribly bland character, one with no interesting or redeeming qualities or complexity in terms of motive or desire. He’s such a default bad guy, and such an obvious villain, that everybody working for him has to know that he’s just completely evil and they’ve made a terrible career choice. Anytime you execute your henchmen for no reason in front of other henchmen, you create what should be insurmountable HR problems, but henchmen never seem to deal with this in realistic ways. Definitely not here.
— In this show, Kingpin has somehow survived getting shot in the eye, which itself is ridiculously annoying. I mean, that should kill you, and it was really satisfying in Hawkeye when Maya turned on him and shot him – a real emotional high, worked up to and well-deserved. Having him miraculously survive that is a cheap, bogus reset which is just stupid and stalls out any character or plot development that might otherwise happen in the wake of his death.
— Also, they are trying so hard here to give Kingpin a tortured backstory that makes him soft towards Maya, but it’s all just clunky and weak. Fisk is ruthless. Utterly. They try to show him bonding with Maya, and I suppose that might melt his evil heart some, but not after being shot in the eye. That’s just out of character. The scenes of him acting hurt at her betrayal, yet still giving her multiple chances (sometimes at stupid ultra-convenient plot-breaking moments), were just annoying and painful to watch. It would have been a much better show if he’d just turned cold and ruthless from the start, and Maya was having to actually defend herself and her community against his overwhelming rage rather than refusing his gift of cookies. Sheesh. So weak. Better still, introduce a new, more complex bad guy trying to settle the score after Kingpin’s murder. That would have been great.

The Verdict:
This show has lots of good parts, but I was left a little disappointed at how it came out. If you’re a fan of Marvel stuff, or if you want to see a cool take on a superhero with a (prosthetic) foot grounded in both the native community and the deaf community, this might be the show for you. If you want a satisfying story or complexity that pays off rather than fading away, you can do better in other shows. The Hawkeye show was, I thought, one of the best of this kind of show, in no small part because of Maya (and Ms. Cox) as a villain. The Hawkeye show played a lot of it for laughs, while there was darker subject matter here in Echo. This still tried for some lighthearted comedy, and I appreciate that, but they didn’t quite get the mix right.

Note: I don’t read comics and have no particular attachment to superheroes. Just watching the action shows available to me, and happier when the leave the woo-woo super stuff out. I think that’s why I liked the Hawkeye show so much – he’s just a mostly normal dude. They almost did that here, but not quite, and it would have been (I think) a far better show if the power of the ancestors had manifested in Maya’s character and heart rather than in her glowing wrists.

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor

February 27, 2023 / / 0 Comments

I quite enjoyed this story from Nnedi Okorafor. Structurally, it’s quite similar to the first Harry Potter novel (and many other such stories) – a young outsider with an unstable family situation discovers something special about herself, and a hidden world full of people with magical power, often goofy, and with a cadre of young juju-using friends and a mysterious enemy on the horizon. It also seems to be directed at a younger YA/MG audience, although I found plenty to enjoy.

I found the plot and the inevitable battle engaging but not really original or strategic. In the climactic engagement, the characters did use abilities and followed traits developed earlier, but there wasn’t a really a cycle of defeat, setback, learning, and reengagement which might have made it more than just an unstoppable train towards predetermined destiny. It was still exciting, though. I actually enjoyed the big soccer game more than the battle, even though that was just a pure sports-movie feel-good scene.

What sets this book apart from others are three things – first, a very appealing main character, second, a rich and wonderfully detailed magic system and community and world, and third and perhaps most important for this Iowan, a window into everyday life and culture in Nigeria. All of these elevated the story well above a typical magic school tale and made reading memorable and rewarding.

Book review: The Deeping Well

July 29, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Ian Lehrer’s The Deeping Well is a dense, exciting tale of the subterranean. Set entirely in the caverns, tunnels, passageways, and cities carved in rock below the surface, Lehrer brings to life a richly detailed world, complete with many distinct cultures. There are the underdwarves, portrayed here with a stratified, militaristic religious society, and the dark elves, present at the edges of the world but often deadly and malevolent, and the gnomes, represented here by Flannyrd, a curious, wise, and well-traveled woman who initially seems to be a mere trader.

Each culture comes with a distinct history, lore, and language, sometimes revealed by scholarly articles included in the text, but more often by little details sprinkled into conversations or situations or through discoveries by the characters. The caverns and tunnels are full of danger, whether dangerous falls and climbs, beasts that hunt in the shadows, rushing underground rivers, foul undead scavengers, or nefarious villains. This world, with all its rich detail and differences from the surface, fills the story with a strong, gritty flavor of somewhere wholly different from what we know. Light and food, both in limited supply, are constant concerns, and Lehrer’s imagined societies all have ways of dealing with the harsh darkness that surrounds them.

The most interesting and most central race of deep dwellers in this story is the Ta’tlan, an ancient race of warriors. The main character, Cagtlan, starts the book in training to become one of the elite warrior caste, the Ayengalli, in an enclave of the Ta’tlan. These warriors fight with two swords, one to kill, one with hooks to catch or break weapons, and Lehrer’s descriptions of combat are vivid, exciting, and easy to follow. They also use Litanies – meditations that give them keener perception, the ability to cloak themselves with shadow, or the frenzied passion of fire. The Ta’tlan culture has multiple castes, a long history, and a complex religious and cultural tradition, and figuring out the intricacies of how this all works is one of the real pleasures of the book.

The story feels episodic, with distinct breaks and travel between locations, as Cagtlan and Flannyrd embark on a journey that takes them far across the underworld in pursuit of an ancient mystery and a treacherous enemy. Their quest changes shape and grows in importance as they begin to understand the forces arrayed against them, and as they find companions and villains along the way. Cagtlan is steeped in his culture, but he begins to understand more about its origins in antiquity, and he realizes some of the lessons he’s been taught make him weaker rather than stronger.

There’s a ton here for fantasy fans. Magic, epic battles, victory, loss, poison, schemes, assassins, traps, sneaking (a lot of sneaking), ancient lore and artifacts, and lots of growly dwarves. Surrounding all of it is the rich, living world Lehrer has created below the ground, affecting all of the people and the cultures in ways that feel practical, natural, and ancient. Some books have a bunch of backstory and lore, and you end up bored to tears reading yet another Elvish poem or song of the trees or whatever. Here, Lehrer gives you enough juicy details to spark interest and give context but not so much that it ever feels like didactic showboating or a chore.

A rip-roaring fantasy adventure with all the right trappings and a grimy, grim, and new world to explore. Highly recommended.

Wheel of Time Episode 7 analysis

February 17, 2022 / / 0 Comments

[pretty big spoilers for Episode 7 and previous episodes follow]

Sorry for the gap in my series of cutting edge critiques here. Had holiday plans cancelled, then got COVID, then had some family events, then watched better TV than this. But we’re back, with two episodes to go.

D&D Theme for this episode: I can’t even. No D&D game I’ve ever played has been this bad, not even when I was ten and didn’t understand how to play. Nor have any players wanted to be like these people, ever.

In this episode, one thing happened of consequence, and it was barely of any consequence. This was:

— The party came out of a hole.

Most of the rest of it was taken up with emo whining about petty shit.

Like past episodes, we started in a completely different biome with people we’ve never met. If there were a WOT drinking game, this would have to be a sip of beer, not a shot, because otherwise players would be in the emergency room in no time. I fully expect episode eight to begin in the Sahara with a couple of accountants named Ed and Merle.

However, the start of this episode was totally badass, with well-choreographed fights, really cool action and camera angles, and emotional stakes as a pregnant woman fights off many attackers during labor. If they can make a scene this good, why does the rest of the show suck? This is a tantalizing glimpse of what the show could have been.

Then things go downhill.

There is whining about Mat being gone.
There is whining about Moiraine’s leadership.
There is whining about who cares about Mat more.
There is whining about the other people’s whining.

This accomplishes nothing other than the relentless crushing of my will to live. The group is admonished not to use magic for fear of summoning the Machin Shin, which would be REALLY BAD. Of course, they don’t say what the Machin Shin is, because telling vitally important potential Dragons valuable information about the risks you just described would be, you know, strategic.

Loial talks about how the Ways (or is it Waze?) used to be covered with grass and rather pleasant. I had several problems with this:
(1) they’re underground, where grass isn’t, and it’s dark, which grass can’t hack
(2) the Ways are composed of fresh columnar basalt conveniently and improbably arranged into walking paths, and grass doesn’t grow on that
(3) even if somehow the underground volcanic hellscape did have grass, it would still have the bottomless pits, which would tend to ruin any bucolic charm and make picnicking and frisbee hard, although it might make for an interesting golf course

They’re attacked by a Waze Trolloc, which somebody should have flagged on the app for them, and despite being warned not to use magic, they do, and as promised, the Machin Shin, which is not, in fact, a mechanical tibia, arrives. The way this was played up, I expected some disemboweling or plague of boils or fireballs descending from the sky, but instead the Machin Shin seems only to be a combination of a mild affliction of Mean Girls mixed with Impostor Syndrome. Given that the Dragon candidates are all, themselves, petulant teenagers trapped in 20-something bodies, maybe this is the worst opponent they could face, but it’s a bit anticlimactic.

Despite being told not to use magic so as not to empower the Machin Shin, they use magic to defeat the Machin Shin. Despite being lost in the Ways and needing at least a day to figure out where they are due to Trolloc vandalism, they emerge very close to where they wanted to be and completely unscathed. Someone is seriously overselling the perils of the Ways. I think it might be Loial, given that he’s also hawking his invaluable guide services that apparently nobody actually needs.

They emerge to a weird walled town on a desert ridge with no apparent industry or agriculture. Unlike other cities in this series, though, this place seems to have actual people living there and a variety of places to explore, although it’s a little hallway-heavy, and the throne room has the standard Monarch Brooding Balcony (Basic Model) installed. The people here also have their own custom salute which looks like they are giving themselves the Heimlich maneuver. Culture!

Nothing happens in this town. Nothing that advances the plot even one tiny little bit. The only thing of any interest that might matter later is that somebody comes out of the Ways behind them complete with ominous boot tracking shot, but that is just dropped completely, and we never learn who he was or what he was doing.

Otherwise, we just have a ton of brooding.

There is whining about Mat.
There is whining about the whining about Mat.
There is whining about who loves Mat, and who just like doesn’t get Mat and never gave him a chance, man.
There is whining about Egwene dumping Rand (who is eminently dumpable), even though she’s now actively hooking up with him again.
There is whining about the quest.
There is whining about some heretofore completely unhinted romance between Egwene and Perrin, which is put forward by Nynaeve, who didn’t even live in @&$#&$& Two Rivers at the start of the show and would not have any basis to know, and which there’s been no sign of up to now.
There is whining about not apologizing.
There is whining about the manner of apologizing.
There is whine-apologizing.
There is whining about the Amyrlin Barcalounger and the Aes Sedai.
There is whining about how harrrrd saving the world is.
There is whining about the gift of foresight.

Ugh. So bad. Watching Rand try not to cry while firing emo arrows in the torchlight was about the most pukeworthy this series has ever gotten, and that’s a high bar.

There’s a surprise clumsy and lifeless romance between Nynaeve and Lan, because what this show obviously needs is another passion-free lackluster love storyline. The only thing I kept wondering is if Lan keeps his headband on while getting it on, but the jury is still out on that, because we did a fade to black before anything even happened other than gratuitous Lan pectorals. (Dude is ripped – you go, Lan).

We learn shit that I don’t care about that has no bearing on the plot, and what we learn isn’t even spelled out very well. Lan is some kind of king of a dead land (grumble stolen from Aragorn grumble). There’s a seer here in this weird town who’s in some kind of witness protection program as a bartender. (Note: this is the second bartender-with-a-secret-identity, if you’re working on the drinking game.) We learn that Rand will be holding a baby someday, which is terrifying, because I was really hoping he never reproduces or tries to parent anyone.

We also learn that Rand was the baby born at the beginning of this episode, which is disheartening, because his rancid petulance is so far removed from his mom’s utter badassery. I would so much rather watch his mom do stuff for eight hours. This is the strongest presentation of nurture over nature I think modern media has produced.

Then, despite the seer not telling Rand he’s the dragon, he goes and tells Moiraine he is, and she believes him, and they leave without telling anybody, to the consternation of everybody else, who is now stuck in BFE with the self-Heimlich posse. In their final scene, we see Rand and Moiraine heading into an abandoned lot next to Fal Dora, where the HOA should get the landowner to cut back the weeds already. A little RoundUp would work wonders.

My working hypothesis is that Moiraine knows Rand’s not the dragon, and she’s taking him to the Eye of the World where he will be squeezed to a powder by the forces of nature and magic (that’s close to literally what they said would happen, and it is no small comfort to imagine Rand being popped like an Earth-zit). Then she’ll come back and get the others, and nobody will have to deal with his incel bullshit anymore.

Or, maybe, we can just have more flashbacks of his mom killing people. Please.

To wrap up, rating the would-be Dragons (in order of how much I want them to die):

RAND: Another week as the worst of the worst. I really hate this guy.
EGWENE: Pledged never to dump Rand again, which almost makes her worse than Rand. Except Rand is like the absolute zero of suck, and you can’t suck any more than he does.
PERRIN: He had barely anything to do, other than see stuff in the dark that nobody else could and deny scurrilous accusations that he didn’t love his wife.
MAT: Sir Not-Appearing-In-This-Film, yet gains some points for not accompanying this sorry set of saviors on this trip. Wise move, my evil-dagger-loving friend.
NYNAEVE: Still my favorite, but this was a weird stalkery episode for her, and PlayDoh has more chemistry going on than her love scene.

Wheel of Time Episode 6 analysis:

December 26, 2021 / / 0 Comments

[pretty big spoilers for Episode 6 and previous episodes follow]

D&D Theme for this episode: This feels like the first ten minutes of campaign backstory where you assemble all the characters to go on the quest, except we’ve already somehow blown six hours on that.

Scene 1:
In consistent WoT show fashion, we start off with:
— Two characters we’ve never seen before and have no idea who they are or what their importance is
— Doing this in yet another biome (this time riparian)
They are happy fisherpeople going about fisherperson business. One of them is minus a hand, which is never explained or commented upon, although that level of ambiguity and unremarkableness is actually pretty disability-friendly, and I’m cool with it. The girl has an extensive set of expertly-inked tattoos all over her body, something that my kids definitely would not have sat still for at that age.
We see that the young girl can do magic, which she uses to mend a net. It seems like it might be of more direct benefit to use magic to, you know, just catch a fish, or make food, or short-sell Tar Valonian stocks so that they could afford a better riverside shack.
We are led to believe that the girl would be persecuted for using magic. This is perhaps the shortest-duration foreshadowing ever, because when they get back to the dock, their house is totally burned, and a glowing red symbol is left in the wreckage. This signifies four truths about whoever is persecuting them. This person (or persons):
a) has the time to come and thoroughly burn a riverside shack and then burn a rune into the wreckage
b) has the motivation to come and thoroughly burn a riverside shack and then burn a rune into the wreckage
c) despite (a) and (b), does not stick around to actually kill the people they hate, who are a one-handed dude with a fishing knife and a girl whose magical power is net-mending, i.e., not very fearsome.
d) wildly overestimates the difficulty of rebuilding an open-air riverside shack post-burning
This leads me to believe that perhaps the Westlands bus system has both a limited operating schedule, requiring an early departure by the persecutors, but also a liberal policy on the transport of flammable materials by riders.
The father and daughter seem also to subscribe to (d) above, and he puts her on a boat with a seriously over-the-top number of tearful fishing references, only some of which relate to river fishing rather than coastal fishing (e.g. the tides), suggesting that this guy is not the sharpest fishing knife in the basket. It is not entirely clear whether the reference to “pike” is the fish or Rosamund.

Scene 2:
Next, we fast-forward to Tar Valon and the White Tower, where we see that, when the council is assembled, despite being powerful feminist icons, all of the Aes Sedai get makeovers, have their hair done in new ways, and put on fancy dresses to stand in a very tall CGI room sneering at each other. One of them gets a bronze staff to pound on the floor, which she only does when she thinks there are moments of dramatic tension going on. It would be funny if she blew it once or twice.
The surprise reveal here is that fishing girl is actually the Amyrlin Seat. This title, despite being furniture, is what they call the Chief Executive Officer of the Aes Sedai. This seems remarkably stupid until you realize that our president has a cabinet and oversees bureaucracy. Her Royal Seating is dressed to the nines, including a very cool filigree hair ornament (bonus points) and an unfortunate massive bowtie that looks like an overgrown butterfly (points off).
We also see that there are some other colors of Aes Sedai. We finally meet a Laa Laa Aes Sedai and learn that they are gifted in healing, even though nearly every other color of Aes Sedai has already healed people, and we’ve never seen a yellow one do that. In a problematic development, there are three colors of earth-tone Aes Sedai which don’t match Teletubbies, namely, gray, brown, and white. I submit to you that Teletubby Ajah theory still applies: the White Aes Sedai clearly represent the SunBaby, the Gray the elephantine vacuum Noo Noo, and the Brown the ubiquitous bunnies of the Teletubby ecosystem. There is no description of what liberal arts major is represented by these Earth Toners. I’m guessing accounting, literature, and community justice studies, but I could well be wrong.
We see False Dragon Tim Curry guy again. He starts off on a good rant, claiming that even though he lost, the Aes Sedai still suck, and he gloats about killing one. The penal system in Tar Valon obviously has no freaking idea what they’re doing, because they have the guy in really fancy clothing but also in chains. Can’t a guy get an orange jumpsuit there? They have all the other colors of clothing. The chains are silly, too, because he melts steel things. But then we find out he’s “gentled,” which apparently doesn’t include making him unable to mouth off but does cancel his magic, which means chaining him up doesn’t do anything but stop him from writing “False Dragonz Rool, Bench Lady Droolz” on the walls of the White Tower restrooms.
In further evidence of a penal system gone awry, this dude threatens the court and gleefully confesses to murdering one of its members. They condemn him to execution by being drawn and quartered and fed to dogs in a bloody example of feudal power in the central square of Tar Valon. Ha ha, just kidding. His sentence is to be fed and housed for the rest of his life in the most luxurious setting in all the land and occasionally studied by the Aes Sedai, even though they just took all his magic away, which makes him about as interesting as a roll of paper towels. Despite this non-punishment, False Dragon guy immediately loses his shit at the thought of being a pampered and well-fed research subject and screams KILL ME! repeatedly as he’s hauled away, suggesting that the Aes Sedai do not have a well-functioning Institutional Review Board governing their investigative programs.
A hard-to-follow legal and moral argument follows, the upshot of which is that the Amyrlin Garden Bench then chastizes Liandrin for getting somebody killed and not following protocol. Liandrin, who I am now sure is just biding her time before revealing to nobody’s surprise that she’s actually an evil person working for the Dark Lord, pulls a standard 3rd-grade-bully move and tries to get Moiraine in trouble too, pointing out that Nynaeve is the most powerful weaver in 1,000 years and Moiraine, like, didn’t tell anybody. Everybody accepts this assessment of Nynaeve at face value, which is weird, because Nynaeve basically cast nothing more badass than Cure Moderate Wounds, and everybody else was, like, making the ground explode, launching people into trees, and chemically castrating the False Dragon. Also, Liandrin is maybe 40, so her assessment of the Top 10 Greatest Weavers of the previous millenium is suspect. My kids don’t even know many TV shows from the 90’s, people.
At this point, something weird happens, and it becomes far weirder in retrospect later on. The weird thing is that the Amyrlin Barstool asks Moiraine what she was doing for two years, and Moiraine refuses to tell her. Even though everybody knows there’s a prophecy about the return of the dragon, and everybody’s been out hunting for returned dragons, including the 30+ Aes Sedai who found Tim Curry, and Moiraine has already told lots of people that that is what she was doing. Her refusal to say what she was doing is profoundly stupid, because even though the Aes Sedai “always speak truth,” she’s already pointed out that you can say true stuff without saying all the true stuff, and later on, she basically lies to the five potentially chosen ones about what happens to the four not chosen at the end of the show to get them to walk into a magical subway cave. The Amyrlin Adirondack gets all pissy about this, as you’d expect a monarch to do, but THEN WE FIND OUT THEY’RE SECRETLY LOVERS, which makes this public question-asking and fighting and obstinacy profoundly pointless and easily avoided.
The Amyrlin Davenport then goes on an I-Am-The-State despotic rant about how she cannot be disobeyed and will destroy anybody who challenges her, which is massively inconsistent here because (1) she’s threatening her bae, and (2) she literally just said that the people need to be protected from abuse of Aes Sedai power by laws. Apparently the Amyrlin Sofa did not major in political science or philosophy. Elevating assistant fisherpeople to the presidency has predictable drawbacks.

Scene 3:
We then return to the one street in Tar Valon. I do not know how big the city is supposed to be, but it has only one street where anybody hangs out. In the matte paintings, it looks bigger, but we’ve only ever seen maybe 20 people here, and the White Tower only has maybe four rooms, all of which look like CGI-decorated soundstages. I suspect Tar Valon may be just a glorified strip mall or truck stop.
Moirane demonstrates some very unorthodox tea pouring and then goes to deal with Mat. At this point, Rand is comically idiotic, asserting that Mat has had the death curse for over a month, maybe more, but it’s not serious, and then he gets all whiny and tries to stand in front of the Aes Sedai trying to heal Mat, waving his sword, at which point he gets his ass handed to him by Lan, which was remarkably satisfying.
Moiraine sucks the evil magic out of Mat and puts it back into the dagger. The unexpected and unexplained part is the middle of this process, when the Shattered City Curse Mold swims over to her face and makes a silly beard-looking thing, like those old magnetic toys with the iron filings, and then retreats back to the dagger. Then, in a fit of brilliance, Moiraine drops the dagger on the floor. Note: this dagger is cursed and would twist anyone who touches it to unspeakable evil, but she doesn’t even pick it up, even though she says Mat would succumb if he touched it again, which you know he would do. If he doesn’t, apparently the maid service for the Tar Valon Red Roof Inn is in for a major surprise when they make up the room, not to mention a good deal of hissing and sweating and growling.

Scene 4:
The Blue Tinky Winky Aes Sedai are apparently related to the Russian mob, because they hold their meetings in saunas. Moiraine is castigated for sinking a ferry in the river. Thank you. Finally some accountability. However, Moiraine’s boss says they sent money to compensate. That money must be sitting on the ferry dock, because Moiraine drowned the ferryman, and his son got eaten by Trollocs. Moiraine’s boss says Moirane is now in time out in the White Tower.

Scene 5:
Moiraine puts her clothes back on and goes to see our other two Chosen Ones. Perrin seems to be in need of lots of healing for the seriously half-assed flaying inflicted on him by White Robe dude. Egwene says that this guy is no threat now, even though she stabbed him in the shoulder of his muscle tunic and didn’t at all check to see if he was dead. I would bet a lot of money that White Robe Arsenio Guy is not in the least dead. We find out that apparently werewolves are not popular, which is, like, duh, because they eat people.

Scene 6:
Lan complains that Moiraine has “masked their bond,” which seems like the Aes Sedai version of not responding to my texts. Moiraine has this discussion while wearing what looks like an actual lab coat, which is a super weird costume choice. Then, with a wink and a nod, Moirane goes through the Sex Mirror to visit the Amyrlin La-Z-Boy for some snu snu. They share one of the more awkward kisses I’ve seen in film and then fade to black.
When they return, we learn an unexpected Westlands custom: You go into snu snu wearing white, but you come out of it wearing red. That must make wearing red clothing out and about remarkably awkward, and it puts a whole different spin on the Po Aes Sedai branch. We hear yet another piscine reference from the Chair, when she calls her main squeeze a pufferfish. Note to the potentially romantically oriented: I would recommend extreme caution in using this as a term of endearment.
They reveal their master plan of the Aes Sedai to defeat the Dark Lord, which is basically to throw all the Chosen Ones they have at it until one sticks. Moiraine asks for exile as her punishiment for not answering the question everybody knew the answer to which her girlfriend-slash-royal-recliner should never have asked.

Scene 7:
Liandrin acts out a scene from Mean Girls, and Moiraine threatens her with slut-shaming. The female Chosen Ones have an audience with the Amyrlin Pew which is meant to be cordial but ends up sort of dysfunctional, and then Nynaeve cusses with an awkward late 20th-century idiom derived from smoke enemas. However, we do see developing a significant badassness differential between the male and female chosen ones:
Female (badass):
— Egwene: Defeats White Robe guy, returns rings of the fallen Aes Sedai
— Nynaeve: More powerful than you can imagine (I don’t know, I can imagine quite a bit)
Male (weaselly):
— Perrin: Gets tied to furniture and flayed, lets wolves lick his wounds.
— Mat: Picks up cursed daggers even when everyone tells him the city is cursed and not to touch anything. Predictably contracts evil tongue herpes.
— Rand: Embarassingly forced to suck blanket by Lan after petulant misguided sword move. Will chop wood for food.

Scene 8:
Moiraine gets exiled for no earthly reason. This scene had three standout moments for me:
— Moment 1: Everything in this world has a stupid made-up name. Everything. Yet instead of being the Mighty Token of Zar’eth’al’al’al, the glowstick that Moiraine has to swear on is called… The Sacred Oath Rod. My gratitude for one tiny discordant moment of utilitarian nomenclature.
— Moment 2: Moiraine and the Amyrlin Beanbag have tears rolling down their cheeks. To me, this suggests that everybody knows they go through the Sex Mirror and wear red with each other. Like, everybody. All y’all Aes Sedai are just pretending it’s a secret to be polite, and so as not to be vaporized or exiled or gentled.
— Moment 3: When Moiraine turns around and everybody turns their back on her, she blows a major opportunity to flip off the entire rest of the Aes Sedai sit-in-circles-in-threes Council. I mean, nobody’s watching. She could have hopped from foot to foot displaying the bird to everybody.
Also, the exile lasts until you’re not exiled, which, if the exiler is your red-robe Sex Mirror partner, could reasonably be next Wednesday’s booty call, Glowstick of Truth or no.

Scene 9:
Everybody rides to a well-mown grassland, which is odd, unless the Brown Aes Sedai are the mystical school of landscaping. Rand and Egwene are reunited, at which point my gorge rises and Rand utters the cringeworthy line “It feels good to see you.” Like, what does that mean? Who says that? Ugh. Everybody hugs. They even hug the horses.
Loial the Ogier, who seemed like a minor throw-away character in Tar Valon (albeit one of the very few residents of the strip mall), is now revealed to be incredibly important, because he’s apparently the Uber driver to the Eye of the World, which place name does not make any anatomical sense whatsoever.
They arrive at a set of stairs leading up to a platform with walls, which seems like a misguided 1960’s garden sculpture meant to exemplify the futility of the Cold War. They spend a lot of time explaining what this is, but everybody who’s played a video game knows the players have discovered their first fast-travel point on the map. Why they didn’t use one of these to skip the 30+ days of eastwalking before, I don’t know. Maybe the Uber Ogiers were on peak pricing or something.
Moiraine describes the fate of the world if the Dark Lord wins, which is apparently:
(a) Trollocs and Fade eat everybody, and then
(b) Everything burns.
It seems to me that (b) pretty much makes (a) moot, and that the Dark Lord must be playing up (a) and not be telling the Trollocs and Fade about (b). Messaging is very important when you are Dark Lording.
They then send eight perfectly good horses away to wander the wilderness in full saddle. Apparently, the 20 people in Tar Valon do not include stablehands or ostlers. This seems tremendously wasteful and not that cool to the horses.
Mat asks what happens to the Chosen Ones who get voted off the island. Moirane gives him a weaselly half-answer, even though she knows they die. He sees through her bullshit. The party departs into the Ways, which look basically like the Ogier’s basement. However, Mat stays behind. Without any knowledge or precedent, Rand tells him the portal is closing, before it closes, which he’d have no reason to know, but whatever. Moiraine just watches Mat sit there. Maybe she asked him to deal with the horses after all.

Rating the Chosen Ones:
— Nynaeve gets points for cussing out the Amyrlin Wingback. You go.
— Egwene gets points for not being totally annoying, but loses a couple for being still into Rand. Girl, please. You can do better. Find yourself a mirror and a red robe and leave this dude behind.
— Mat is giving off bad-guy vibes, although not going into a dark hole in the air with random cryptic strangers who don’t answer your questions and are abducting your friends is understandable. Commendable, even.
— Perrin just takes up space in this episode. I don’t think he even had a line.
— Rand, OMG. Everything about this guy is annoying, from his stupid hair, his petulance, his bonehead attempt to stop his friend from getting healed, his terrible high-school romance lines. I so hope he gets washed down the Tearduct of the Upper Mantle when they get to the Eye of the World.

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