My family and friends are crushing me with plans all week, and unfortunately, I also finished reading Firestarter last night. Now I have to churn out this review during breakfast before work today. I really wish life would move more slowly!

Spoiler warning for Firestarter.

This is more of a spy thriller with some science fiction elements, rather than a “classic” horror novel. The scary parts are what the government was willing to do to its own citizens in the name of power “security,” and the strange powers they unlocked in their victims that are so destructive and hard to control. It reminds me quite a bit of Frankenstein, in that way, but at least Victor’s test subjects were already deceased when he did his experiment. The government Shop in this novel intentionally targeted college students with no close family, just to protect themselves if things went wrong. And oh boy, did things go wrong, and the Shop destroyed so many lives. It’s interesting that while the Shop’s experiments are, on paper, about protecting U.S. citizens, they’re also clearly terrified of the overall U.S. populace finding out about what they’re doing. The professor who administered the initial tests even seems to go mad with guilt and shame near the end of his life, and presses for all the surviving test subjects to be executed to wipe out all evidence of what he had done. Funny how the Shop doesn’t want the country to find out what the Shop did on its behalf, huh?

Even though it’s Charlie’s pyrokinesis that got the focus of the government’s research and the title of the book, and even as destructive as it could get, I actually found her father Andy’s mind control power way more terrifying. The weird mental connections he could accidentally forge when giving people suggestions, ones that could eventually spiral out of control and unravel their minds completely if he didn’t undo what he had done, are just dreadful to imagine happening in my own mind. It’s like another facet of the experiments themselves: the human brain is complex and its function, incomprehensible, and mucking around with it can open up mysteries we aren’t ready for. Then there’s the fact that his psychic ability is so strong it can actually affect the real world, like when he made the gunman drop his weapon by convincing him it was too hot to touch, and the man’s hand actually blistered. Finally, the little detail that Andy has been basically punching holes in the nerves of his brain all these years is just so painful to think about. Again, the human brain: complex. Don’t play around.

Maybe I’ve just seen too many Marvel movies this past decade, but I can’t help but look at Charlie’s story in this novel as a botched origin story for a superhero. If the Shop had just left the McGees alone and let Charlie grow up with the support of her parents, she could have grown into a well-adjusted, if cautious, young woman. Then, superhero for sure, yeah? Maybe. But the Shop removed all possibility of that occurring when they panicked and killed Charlie’s mom, set her and Andy on the run, and eventually wound up imprisoning both. They were so focused on seeing her as a weapon, it didn’t occur to them to let her be a person, as well. And they screwed themselves out of getting a bona fide U.S. superhero because of it. Good job, government!

There are a couple of characters that are artifacts of the 1980 publishing date that rather lessened my enjoyment. One is a Shop psychologist who is revealed to be a crossdresser, and that’s portrayed . . . about as positively as you might expect something written in the seventies to be. It’s even used as a facet of his death, though that’s all I’m going to say about that, because it was pretty gruesome. The other is John Rainbird, who . . . honestly bothered me more early on than he did by the end. I actually didn’t notice how much his character changed until I started writing this paragraph; some more proofreading was perhaps in order, Mr. King! Anyway, Rainbird is a Native American, and he starts out the novel being very eccentric and magical in a kind of faux-spiritual kind of way. You know, they way white people tend to write Native Americans? He also has a weird obsession with death, and looking into people’s eyes when he assassinates them, trying to glean the meaning of life from seeing the light fade. Toward the end of the novel, he does come to feel a lot more like a more standard villainous character, partly because he acts normal around Charlie to make her trust him. But that still doesn’t fix the fact that the only character of color in the novel is a death-fetishizing villain. Yay.

I do love the way King structured the novel to have Charlie’s powers ramp up in dramatic effect from the reader’s perspective, even telling some parts as flashbacks to keep them in “order.” It makes it feel like we’re experiencing the same ramp up in power and lack of control as Charlie is, culminating in that big final scene of destruction. It felt like the fire power was surging up in the novel, getting ready to burst out, just as it felt for Charlie.

All right, got that done in about an hour. Time to go get crushed by all the rest of this week!

—doctorlit, understanding spoon theory a little better now

All they could see were SPOILERS, glittering and blinking like some mythical Vegas jackpot. All they could see were SPOILERS, glittering and blinking like some mythical Vegas jackpot. All they could see were SPOILERS, glittering and blinking like some mythical Vegas jackpot.

Saw Captain Marvel with my brother yesterday. Captain Marvel is cool. Also, Captain Marvel is cool.

Spoilers follow for . . . let’s see. Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain Marvel, The Avengers, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season two, Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers: Infinity War.

Starting off with the “Thank you, Stan” version of the opening Marvel logo: adorable, and funny, and sad. What an excellent way to lead off the first movie since his passing!

The mystery of Carol’s backstory is set up and presented so well in this film! I feel like the film starts out with just enough ambiguous information, through the nightmare sequence, to inform the audience that something is missing, without making us too suspicious of any particular party right away. The pieces of Carol’s backstory that are given to us are seeded in just the right amounts at the right frequency, that the final revelation of the truth, and the discovery that the Kree were the real bad guys all along, simultaneously feels surprising and satisfying, because there was definitely something off about Kree society up to that point. (And I’m only talking about in this film; I was wondering how they were going to present the Kree as good guys when we’ve already seen them as villains to various degrees in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Guardians of the Galaxy before this point. I think they did a decent job.)

I loved all the little details that showed how primitive Earth’s technology is compared to the Kree tech Carol: having to hook various parts together into a payphone to get it to make intergalactic calls, her utter difficulty with using a keyboard and mouse, and her bemusement that the parking lot security guard didn’t have immediate contact with higher levels of military authority. (Though that’s more a contrast with Kree culture than technology.)

It was fun seeing Coulson, Fury, the Tesseract and, yes, even Ronan again. I was glad they let Ronan’s actor use a more normal-sounding voice, rather than the comically over-the-top baritone from Guardians of the Galaxy. The CGI making Samuel Jackson look young again was astounding; it never actually looks like a computer trick at any point. It legitimately looks like they pulled Jurassic Park-era Jackson forward in time to play the role. Absolutely amazing! My brother and I couldn’t settle the question of whether Coulson’s actor was also digitally de-aged, but I personally think Clark Gregg still looks young enough that they just needed make-up for him. Maybe I’ll look that up quick: Ah, they actually did use computer effects on his face, as well.

Going back to the Tesseract, my brother and I both got a bit confused, because we were under the impression that the Tesseract had been recovered at the same time as Steve Rogers, just before The Avengers took place. But apparently, Howard Stark went searching for the wreckage of Steve’s plane, and was only able to recover the Tesseract at the time. I can’t remember if that was actually mentioned on screen anywhere or not. But another timeline problem that seems less easy to reconcile is how many people saw Carol blasting energy out of her wrists, or saw Skrull transforming their appearance. Pretty much all the weird sci-fi stuff that took place during World War II could have fairly easily been covered up by S.H.I.E.L.D. (most of the people who saw HYDRA’s laser weapons got incinerated by them, and only Steve himself saw Red Skull’s real face.) So it seemed like the general world populace only became aware of the sci-fi elements of their universe after The Incredible Hulk and Thor took place. But I don’t know how S.H.I.E.L.D. could have convinced all the people on that bus that what they saw was swamp gas, or whatever. Seems like it breaks the timeline.

I like that the Skrull turn out to be good guys in the end, not only because it’s unexpected, not only because it avoids an “always chaotic evil” culture, but also because it appears that they are not involved with Earth in any way after this film, which means the fan theory that anyone who died in Avengers: Infinity War was really just a Skrull is almost definitely wrong.

A couple of errors, courtesy of my brother, who is in college to become an airline pilot, and therefore Knows Planes. Some of the planes used in this film in the 1989-ish flashbacks were wrong for the time period, and also changed between cuts within the same scene. (I’m not going to bother naming specific model numbers, because I’ll get that wrong.) But he chocked this up to the limited time and access the film crew probably had to be using actual military bases for filming. Also, the reason Carol and Maria were acting as test pilots is because they were barred from serving as proper Air Force pilots due to being women. But the U.S. Air Force started allowing women pilots in 1976, so women being barred from flight in the late eighties is anachronistic.

—doctorlit, Marveling

“No, no. This spoiler’s taken.” “No, no. This spoiler’s taken.” “No, no. This spoiler’s taken.” “No, no. This spoiler’s taken.” “No, no. This spoiler’s taken.”

I can only say a three words:

IT IS AWESOME!!!

The Orville is a ongoing science fiction dramedy series from the critically acclaimed creator/co-creator of Family Guy and American Dad Seth Macfarlane. It's a homage to the legendary sci-fi programme Star Trek, specifically Trek before it became Sexually Transmitted Disease Star Turd: Dumbfrakery Star Trek: Discovery. I.e. terrible. The Orville is published by Fox Television Studios (now a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Corporation), and streams in Australia for free on SBS On Demand and airs on free-to-air on SBS Viceland.

It is the 25th century, and humanity is now a founding member of the Planetary Union, a alliance of a multitude of alien species. Ed Mercer (played by Seth Macfarlane himself) is a captain in the Union Fleet, and is rising through the ranks rapidly. That is, until he comes home from work one day to find his wife, Commander Kelly Grayson (played by Andianne Palacki (sp?)), banging a blue-skinned alien called Darulio in his bed.

One year later, Ed's career is in shambles. The affair and subsequent divorce has put him at the bottom of the list for promotion, and has resulted in him drinking his career away. He is given a second chance when he is given command of the USS Orville, a mid-level exploratory vessel that needs a new captain after the last one retired. Ed accepts, and enlists his best friend, Lt. Gordon Malloy (played by Scott Grimes) as the ship's helmsman.

His initial crew consists of CMO Dr. Claire Finn (played by ST:DS9 alumni Penny Johnson Jerald); Science officer Issac, a member of the elusive robotic-species, the Kaylon (played by Mark Jackson); 2nd Officer Bortus, a member of the all-male Moclans (played by Peter Macon); the young security chief Alara Kitan, a member of the high-gravity-dwelling Seleyans (played by Halston Sage); navigator John LeMarr (played by J. Lee)...and his Ex-wife as his first officer. Yes. This goes as well as it sounds, at least initially.

Mid-season, Lamarr gets promoted to Chief Engineer, simular to how Geordi LaForge on TNG started out as the helmsman, and then switched over to the engineering officer. During the second season, Alara leaves, and is replaced with Jessica Szohr as Talla Keyali as the new security chief.

More to come soon.

Went for one of the less popular William Shakespeare plays this time. Sir John Falstaff had a minor appearance in the last Thursday Next novel I read, and the back cover blurb for the next one indicates that Merry Wives itself will be important to the plot. I’m debating whether I want to read through all the Henry plays as well before I continue with Thursday Next; I’ll admit I’m not too interested in the purely historical plays. I like my Shakespeare with a little fantasy.

Spoiler warning for The Merry Wives of Windsor.

It took me quite a while to really get into this play, partly because I had difficulty keeping track of the characters early on. This is probably my fault for, as I mentioned above, not reading the Henry plays first. (Also, my work schedule means I can typically only get reading done in fifteen-minute chunks separated by hours of work time during most of the week.) Either way, I did get into the play and its characters as time went on. I mean, its primary action is about a straight dude getting dumped on by everyone around him for being a horndog, so as an asexual person, it was hard not for me to be amused. I was cheering on the “merry wives” the whole time!

I was surprised at how modern this play felt to me. A lot of the humor—pratfalls, veiled pun-based insults, intentional and unintentional innuendo—are still hallmarks of modern humor, especially in film. In particular, the scene where Mistress Quickly keeps misinterpreting Sir Hugh’s innocent Latin as vulgar English, and the boy learning English is clearly more aware of the dual meanings than the grown Sir Hugh, felt like something out of a modern comedy.

It’s also interesting that the play, written so many centuries ago, very clearly puts female roles in the lead, while showing most of the main male roles to have character failings. We’re still struggling with presenting good female characters in fiction today, yet here’s Shakespeare back around 1600, making them the leads of a play, and the undeniable moral superiors of the story. The one thing Mistress Page is shown to get wrong is her plans for marrying her daughter off to Doctor Caius, but even then, it’s Anne Page’s desire to marry for love that’s cast as the correct decision; again, the smart decision comes from a woman. I also like that Fenton serves as a contrast to Falstaff by initially courting Anne for the same financial reasons as Falstaff was targeting Anne’s mother, but then got to know Anne and fell in true love.

—doctorlit, rooting for Anne to get paired with no one . . . but he guesses that’s just not in the cards, in this time period . . .

“Spoiler? I would I could wash myself of the spoiler. Spoiler, spoiler, spoiler! Ay, spoiler! I warrant you, spoiler, and of the season too, it shall appear.”

My brother tried to convince me not to watch this series, because he said it was too boring. I’m learning to ignore his word when he says he doesn’t like something, because he’s way more critical of fiction than I am. Sometimes, you just have a to let a story unfold over you, know what I mean?

Spoilers for Iron Fist season one. (And there are some major twist reveals about character allegiance this season, so if you’re planning to watch, please don’t read this.)

Like I said in my Luke Cage season one review, I was put off a bit by how dark the Daredevil and Jessica Jones series have been up to this point. While Iron Fist wasn’t quite as light in tone as Luke Cage, it was definitely more enjoyable than the other two. Cage is still my favorite, though.

I was side-eyeing this going in, because it’s essentially got a white character taking on aspects of Asian culture and martial arts, and I wasn’t sure how well it would be handled. I think it did quite well, with the actor who played Danny Rand finding a good balance between reverence for his monastery training, and a bit of childishness at seeing aspects of his old New York life for the first time since age ten. I also liked that the show addressed the failings of K’un-Lun’s training in teaching Danny to ignore his own feelings, preventing him from healing emotionally through the kind of psychiatric treatment he would have received growing up in the States. By the end of the season, Danny really feels like a balance between the eastern and western aspects of his life, not bound too tightly to the rules of K’un-Lun, but not entirely given over to the anger and regret he felt from losing his parents.

Up until this point, I thought that Madame Gao was a Celestial, or another similar being, who got tied up with Wilson Fisk’s criminal enterprises partly out of an ignorance of human culture and biology. Even on the occasions when Daredevil encountered her, she always seemed so calm and aloof, and non-threatening (except when Daredevil tried to grab her), that I rather liked her as a character. This means that I was actually disappointed to learn in this series that she was a member of the Hand. Even though it gave her more screen time to be cool in, it also means she’s a much more dangerous threat than I realized, and considering the fact that she seems to be immortal, her character will inevitably need to be killed off eventually. I am both anticipating that, to see an end of the damage she causes to innocent people, and sad about it, because her voice is cool.

The sheer number of villain factions in this season was a little overwhelming, and it doesn’t help that when we are first introduced to them, we don’t know the real moral standings of the Meachums, Davos, or Bakuto, and that’s saying nothing of the fact that Colleen Wing was secretly Hand all along. (Small side note: I’m terrible at guessing plot reveals before they arrive, partly because I don’t try to, because I love the little feeling of thrill when something unexpected happens in a story I’ve invested in. But I actually guessed Colleen’s real allegiance many episodes in advance, although my one friend who’s also into the MCU managed to convince me I was wrong at the time, for which I am grateful. But I still wish I had been wrong.) By the end of the season, once everyone’s standing was a little more firmly established, it was kind of fun having so many villains going after each other, since it lead to scenes where, no matter who won/died, it was a win for the “good side.” But it also left me feeling like the actual protagonists were often floundering to make any real progress, especially considering how long Danny was manipulated by Harold Meachum.

Putting aside my love of hearing Madame Gao speak, I thought all three actors playing the Meachum family were particularly excellent. Joy Meachum seems so kind and sympathetic whenever she’s alone with Danny or Ward, but her actor turns her into an absolute shark in the board room scenes. Ward’s actor was so good at wearing that mask of straight-laced and uncaring disdain, for so many episodes, it makes it even more disarming when he starts to crack under the pressure later in the season as he comes to realize how dangerous Harold 2.0 and 3.0 are. And Harold’s actor is so good at sounding both sincere and manipulative in a single sentence, I think the only time we’re presented with Harold’s honest self is when he’s in a rage, or right after his second resurrection, when he’s wandering around deliriously piecing his memories back together—and how telling that even in that state of mind, he sees the Rand Enterprises logo, and asks, “Why isn’t it my name?” His ambition, and fury over not getting what he wants, are his defining traits, always hidden under telling others what they want to hear to get them to do what he really wants. It’s also interesting (and kind of sad) that Joy and Ward swap relationships with Danny by the end of the season, with Ward going from having Danny committed to a mental hospital at the start of the season to saving his life at the end, while Joy goes from helping Danny get a foot back in the door of their company at the start to plotting with two other villains to have him killed in the final scene.

—doctorlit is ticked off that he’s eventually going to have to start going after the MCU stuff that’s on networks he isn’t already paying for

“You took a vow of spoilers? “You took a vow of spoilers?” “You took a vow of spoilers?” “You took a vow of spoilers?”