Rough Ride

Frankenstein's Monster. Minus the Subtlety

Black Beauty.
Movie Review by Michaela Calabrese.

Three years before I was born, in 1994, an adaptation of Anna Sewell’s novel Black Beauty was released; it starred Sean Bean, David Thewlis, and Jim Carter, and featured narration by Alan Cumming. The story appeared simple at face value: a horse was born on a small farm, got sold to a wealthy family once he was trained, and developed a close bond with a stable hand named Joe. Black Beauty’s life took him from one owner to another, some kind and some cruel, and all the while he dreamed of reuniting with Joe someday. Through hardships, abuses, and one particularly devastating death (this was not a film to sanitize harsh realities), lessons were learned and Beauty fought to maintain his optimism; even when it seemed he would never see Joe again.

Disney+ just released its adaptation this month.

If you’ve already seen the 1994 version, the movie Flicka, and the Dreamworks film Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, you can skip this movie. It’s all three of those stitched together à la Frankenstein’s Monster minus the subtlety.

Maybe I’m being a little harsh. There are some things to admire here. The shots are beautifully composed, there’s a lovely use of temperature to denote seasons passing, and the performances are fine (for the most part). Iain Glen and Kate Winslet in particular are clearly doing their best to make their characters feel fleshed out. When Kate, acting as the voice of Beauty, needs to sound upset, she does. Most of the time, I felt like I was being read to by a very practiced teacher. Everything comes out smooth and it’s rare to hear a line come out flat. Glen as John Manly doesn’t have much to do, but again I didn’t hate him; he’s the archetypal Wise Old Man to Makenzie Foy’s gender-swapped, wide-eyed dreamer version of Joe—now Jo.

Where they, and the rest of the cast, suffer is when they’re compared to the ’94 film. Winslet sounds like she’s reading a book where Alan Cumming sounded like he was really telling the audience the story of his life. Iain Glen is the standard old mentor where Jim Carter’s John Manly was his own unique character. He’d get frustrated, he’d get scared, he’d snap at Joe when Joe messed up. He had a job he loved to do, even when it broke his heart. Through him, the audience could feel how tightly connected everyone at Birtwick Park was; so when everyone is forced to go their separate ways, it’s genuinely heartbreaking.

And Jo? Oh, Jo…

Simply put: Joe in the 1994 adaptation wasn’t in much of the narrative. He was forced to leave Beauty behind and go on with his life. Though we didn’t see it, we knew this is because he had to work to earn his happy ending. He had to mature.

Jo in the remake? Just kind of…whines until she gets what she wants. She makes a big deal about earning the money to buy Black Beauty, which is great except:

1. Gordon stabs her in the back and sells Black Beauty out from under her even when she does earn enough money.
2. When she does show up in the end, she’s been given everything she ever wanted and we don’t get the sense that she’s matured! She marries rich, buys Birtwick Park, is able to just take Beauty, and it’s clear she’s learned nothing!

At the beginning of the 1994 adaptation, Joe was well-meaning but clumsy. He was trying to help his uncle John and had a lot to learn. He was out of his depth, even accidentally making Beauty sick with cold water and no blankets after Beauty got caught in a storm. He was a harmless, stupid kid. Giving up Beauty was something he had to do. Beauty wasn’t his, he couldn’t afford to buy him, and though they bonded, circumstances couldn’t be avoided. That’s life. Joe took the first stepping stone into adulthood, leaving his best friend in the hands of strangers.

At the beginning of the remake, Jo is a troubled orphan. She bonds with Beauty and instantly becomes an angel with crystal clear morals. Remake Jo is conned out of Black Beauty (hence no real teachable moment) and gets her back in the end not through luck, determination, or a random happy accident, but through marrying rich. Jo’s character development is marrying rich. Solid.

Alright, I’m done complaining about the characters. What about the story? I said at the beginning that this is a Frankenstein’s Monster of other stories, so let me show you how that breaks down. The beginning is a carbon copy of Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. A new baby is born in a herd of mustangs and must take up a leadership role. Spirit is shown running with the herd, learning from his mother, and even talks about how running feels like flying. How did Beauty begin? Well, a new baby is born into a herd of mustangs and must take up a leadership role. Beauty is shown running with the herd and yeah, you get the point.

Then, we get to the Flicka portion of the film. In the original, Flicka is captured and taken into captivity, where she’s seen as spirited and dangerous. She meets the misunderstood Katie, a young woman who seems to be the only person who can understand her feelings. They connect based on their sense of loneliness and that neither of them truly belongs. When financial hardships come, Flicka is leased out and ultimately sold to a rich snob who treats her horribly. Katie vows to get Flicka back however she can. What happens in Beauty? Beauty is captured by farmers and brought into captivity, where she’s seen as spirited and dangerous. She meets the misunderstood Jo—I don’t need to spell it out for you.

Only an hour and ten minutes into this hour and thirty minute film, we finally get to the Black Beauty segment; only instead of being set in the nineteenth century like the original, now it’s set in modern day. Which means half of what’s shown makes no sense and half is shoehorned in simply because it was in the original story. The Terry storyline is just long enough to encompass the Beauty is Sick plot point, the Jerry storyline would have audiences believing a healthy thirtyish man in good shape could still die of a cold in 2020 (because…modern medicine doesn’t…exist in this universe? I don’t know, it takes place in New York. CVS’s here are a dime a dozen!), the film doesn’t know if horse-drawn carriages in Central Park are good or bad so it just shrugs and says they’re both, and there’s a completely nonsensical moment where a dead horse under a sheet is pulled through the streets of New York City IN A WAGON IN 2020!! Not a truck, not an 18-wheeler, a full-on wooden wagon! Exactly how many health and safety violations that would break, I can’t say!

This review is already running long, so I’ll just say don’t watch this movie. The DVD of the 1994 version is $8 on Amazon.

Or hey, just read the original book. There’s a novel idea. This is, after all, Nerds who Read.

Michaela Calabrese was born and raised in Agawam, MA and is now living her dream of making movies in New York City. Her twelve-minute short film, Periculum, has been submitted to the Garden State Film festival. Please give your generous support to Michaela's projects at GoFundMe.com.

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Unapologetically Filthy

The Devil All the Time: A morally gray stand-out in an age of superheroes and monsters.
Movie Review by Michaela Calabrese.

What’s so unique about The Devil All the Time is how unapologetically filthy it is.

I don’t mean it’s written in poor taste, it looks ugly, or it relishes in gratuitous violence or sex, I mean the morals of its characters, all its characters, are completely skewed…and that’s what makes it so genius.

Based on the book by Donald Ray Pollack, and set in Post-WWII southern America, this Netflix original tells the story of a handful of people who, at the beginning, seem to have little to do with each other. A soldier returning home, two waitresses, and a photographer are sitting in a cafe. It seems almost like the beginning of a bad joke. The film tricks its audience into believing we know where the characters stand in terms of good versus bad; only there is no good versus bad here. Bill Skarsgård’s veteran Willard Russell ultimately makes the same decisions as Jason Clarke’s Carl Henderson. Haley Bennett’s Charlotte walks a vastly different path from Riley Keough’s Sandy; but neither one comes to a better ending than the other.

The major narrative of TDATT centers on Willard’s son Arvin. He’s a good kid, polite, takes care of his family, but he often allows his temper to get the better of him. He leaps without looking and pays only a cursory mind to the consequences of his actions. Arvin is especially protective of Lenora Laferty, a plain and pious girl whom the token school bullies love to target. Lenora’s naiveté leads her to cross paths with visiting preacher Preston Teagardin (played by Robert Pattinson, whose range never ceases to amaze *please be a good Batman, pleeeaasse be a good Batman…*).

Also weaving their way through the story are a serial killer couple, a corrupt sheriff (played by a nearly-unrecognizable Sebastian Stan), a well-meaning grandmother, and a young pastor who takes his faith just a little too far. Just a little.

As I said before, there is no good versus bad in this film. Some characters have much better motives than others, but nobody gets away without blood on their hands or a stain on their conscience. Even the grandmother, endearing as she is, shoulders the blame for the way characters’ lives unravel; not through her actions, but simply through her ignorance.

Okay, but how does the film look? Well, the sets are kept simple. The costuming isn’t much more than jeans, t-shirts, and a few dresses, and the cinematography is competently done. It’s not flashy, it’s not particularly grimy, it’s just sort of boring. If you’re looking for stunning landscapes and epic crane shots, you can skip this. TDATT is far from a treat for the eyes.

What makes this film worth its runtime are the performances. I cannot say enough how much I enjoyed watching Robert Pattinson give his all as a preacher who just knows how much power his position holds. His southern accent is high-pitched and bizarre, but his delivery keeps it out of the realm of laughable. Riley Keough and Jason Clarke play off of each other well. They’re not the most interesting couple, and their scenes together drag a bit, but Keough in particular hits her stride when she’s acting alongside Sebastian Stan’s Lee Bodecker. Without spoiling anything you can feel the history between the characters; how they’ve pushed and formed each other into who they are. They’re reprehensible to everyone else, but there’s an underlying affection toward each other that reminds the audience, “Hey, they’re still human. They’re awful people, but they’re not monsters.”

Maybe that’s why I never got into Jason Clarke’s character. He’s not complex, he’s just a jerk.

Will you like this film if you don’t like R-rated content? No. There is brief nudity, plenty of swearing, and gore. The film doesn’t stay in unpleasant scenes for too long, but it doesn’t shy away from harsh realities. If a character would realistically do something horrible, they do. This isn’t the movie for you if you’re looking for a hero to route for.

Will you like this film just because you’re a fan of one of the actors in it? Maybe, depending on how open-minded you are. Ironically, a movie that doesn't believe in heroes is filled with actors known for their hero, and in some cases superhero, roles. But Tom Holland is certainly not Spiderman and Sebastian Stan is ABSOLUTELY not the Winter Soldier. Eliza Scanlen (though she plays a similar character) is a few steps away from Little Women’s Beth.

The writing demands more from its actors than a lot of recent scripts have. They must either be moral but deeply flawed, or corrupt on the surface but still a bit decent underneath. That might sound easy, but think about how many characters nowadays are either plain good or plain bad. Sure, good characters make mistakes, but the audience can usually be certain they’re still good people. By the end of TDATT, I wasn’t sure anyone was a good person. I found myself saying “So-and-so had a reason to do that…right? He/she is gonna do the right thing…wait, they’re not? And that person I was just hating for almost two hours…maybe they weren’t that bad…”

Go into The Devil All the Time with the understanding that it gives no answers. It will not tell you who’s right, who’s wrong, who’s good, who’s bad (except in Jason Clarke’s case). It will hold up a mirror to Society and say “You decide. The characters have made their choices. You decide whether this film has a happy ending or not.”

A refreshing film which depicts gray morality while treating its audience with respect, I certainly recommend The Devil All the Time, especially if you want to see what Sebastian Stan looks like chubby.

Spoiler alert: he’s still pretty darn handsome.

Michaela Calabrese was born and raised in Agawam, MA and is now living her dream of making movies in New York City. Her twelve-minute short film, Periculum, has been submitted to the Garden State Film festival. Please give your generous support to Michaela's projects at GoFundMe.com.

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Lovecraft County Line

Lovecraft Country Episode 1: “Sundown.”
TV Review by Kerey McKenna.

Four years ago I reviewed Matt Ruff’s horror novel Lovecraft Country here on Nerds Who Read in my first year of officially posted reviews to the blog. Despite not generally being a horror aficionado, I was really moved by its novel take on Lovecraftian Horror, using cosmic horror tropes and themes to explore historical racism in America. I have revisited it several times in the past four years, perhaps because as I mentioned in my review, a good portion of the novel is episodic. Although there is a clear narrative arc for the novel, I would revisit individual chapters like I would episodes of an anthology such as Bradbury’s October Country, Netflix’s Black Mirror, or The Twilight Zone. As a result, I was very excited when the novel was fast tracked for an adaptation into a television series by HBO and given the Sunday night timeslot and budget of their other recent science fiction and fantasy hit series and mini-series. I can say, Dear Readers, that based on the strong premiere episode “Sundown,” the rush to adapt seems to be driven by a true passion with everyone involved to get this story out to a wider audience.

For those of you who wish to go into the series with as little knowledge or preconceptions as possible, and have not read the book, I would recommend not reading past this paragraph until you’ve watched the show. I will say that I found the premiere episode to be a compelling work of historical fiction, and as the series ramps up, I expect that the science fiction elements will be used to explore this time in American history from an African-American perspective. Much as I did with my review earlier this year of The Plot Against America, this review will summarize a lot of the events of the first episode and point out (based on my recollections from the novel) some of the foreshadowing that is taking place. Also, just as with my reviews of Plot Against America and Hunters, the real world history concerns relatively recent history but it is still before “my time”, and concerns groups that I cannot speak on behalf of, so as much as genre fiction like this helps build understanding, there may be subtle references, nuances, or errors that I am missing.

Okay. For everyone that is still with me, here is my breakdown of the first episode. Unlike other previous HBO genre shows, there is no elaborate...credits...sequence to set the tone for the series. Instead the viewer is thrown into the chaos of a very confusing battle sequence.

What starts out as a gritty black and white Korean War movie transitions first to color and then into peak 1950s pulp science fiction with flying saucers, Martian tripods, and Greek hoplites. In addition to all these strange spectacles, the central character, an African-American Soldier (Jonathan Majors), seems to be bombarded with not just the sounds of battle, but an odd cacophony of nostalgic Americana and racist accusations. Next from out of the flying saucers beams down Dejah Thoris, the original exotically hued space babe in a bikini and the titular “Princess of Mars” from the John Carter pulp novels. Just as the American soldier and his Barsoomian lover are about to have a “Close Encounter,” H.P. Lovecraft’s breakout star, Cthulhu himself, rears his ugly, tentacle-mawed head. But fortunately the monstrosity is struck down by an American hero, Jackie Robinson, taking to the battlefield in his Brooklyn Dodgers uniform and swinging his mighty bat against the eldritch monster...

And then the soldier wakes up from his dream, and comes to in the segregated section of a bus traveling out of Kentucky in the 1950s…

I have to admit the over the top opening sequence, which does not appear in the book, initially gave me some apprehension about how faithful to the novel this series was going to be. However given the rest of the premiere—and a second viewing—I appreciate the creators opening up with such a spectacular tableau. It works as a great homage to the science fiction of the 1950s where more often than not it seems a novel or comic book would have a salacious and absurd cover to draw the customer’s eye on the news stand.

Perhaps the intro is also needed to assure viewers that yes, there is going to be science fiction fantasy in the coveted HBO science fiction fantasy Sunday night slot, because much of the first episode is played as straight up historical fiction and not science fiction.

That is not to say we do not see science fiction and fantasy at all. Atticus Freeman, the soldier that we met on the bus, is a voracious reader of science fiction fantasy, so it makes sense that his subconscious is a whirling combination of flying saucers and the Korean War that he just left. As he explains to a fellow black traveler as they walk down a country road (their bus broke down and no white motorists have deigned to give them a ride to the next town), when he was growing up on the South Side of Chicago, he was very much in need of escapist fantasy. Upon reflection, some of these stories contain some pretty serious flaws that he has to reconcile with. And reconciling with elements of a troubled past, warts and all, is very much on his mind as he is returning home to Chicago because his estranged and abusive father, Montrose Freeman (Michael Kenneth Williams), has gone missing.

In the novel, the first several chapters are framed solely from the perspective of Atticus, with later chapters changing the point of view to other characters who are his friends and family. The series premiere does a very good job at establishing from the start that while Atticus is a central hero, this is going to be a story with an ensemble cast. We meet Atticus’s Uncle George (Courtney B Vance), Aunt Hyppolyta (Aunjanue Ellis), and young cousin Diana, “Dee” (Jada Harris). In the novel, George and Hyppolyta’s child was a boy named Horace, but the gender swap and name change do set up an allusion to another great character in sci-fi fantasy. Just as in the novel, the youngest Freeman is an avid reader of comic books. With no black comic book heroes at the newsstand, Diana authors and draws her own and bases the heroes on the role models she sees in her life, chiefly her mother and father. Atticus’s Uncle George runs the Safe Negro Travel Agency and publishes a guide that lists businesses throughout the country that will accommodate African-American travelers. In addition to her duties as home maker and editor for the travel guide, Hyppolyta is an amateur astronomer who does as much stargazing as she can from a Chicago apartment. My educated suspicion is that when she asks George to start traveling the country with him for his work, she is hoping to bring her telescope to some wide open spaces with far less light pollution.

We are also introduced to the Atticus’s childhood friends, sisters Letitia “Leti” Lewis (Jurnee Smollett) and Ruby Baptiste (Wunmi Mosaku). The introduction of the sisters is a great example of how changes in adaptations can build upon the source material and strengthen it using the new medium. In this case, not only are both sisters introduced earlier than in the novel, their introduction has an excellent musical component. Throughout the premiere so far the sound track (both diegetic and non-diegetic) has been helping to build the setting. When Atticus wakes from his dream, it’s fittingly enough to the sounds of “Sh-Boom Sh-Boom,” which not only concerns dreams, but is an example of more mainstream, white-directed doo-wop. As Atticus and the story get back to the Chicago Southside, the radio switches to 1950s black artists (and the sound track sneaks in a bit of contemporary Hip Hop in for the audience). When we first meet Ruby, she is center stage at the neighborhood block party doing a Sister Rosetta Tharpe number and very much invoking Rosetta’s style and iconic electric guitar. Then prodigal child Leti comes to the party and joins Ruby in raucous rendition of “Whole Lotta Shaken Goin’ On.”

After their literal sister act, Ruby and Leti leave the stage and have a tense exchange, and we see a bit more about how the two sisters contrast and the tensions between them. Ruby stayed in the neighborhood and works as domestic help for whites, whereas Leti has been away for years traveling. Also Leti seems to take big swings at life. She doesn’t want to work as a maid. If pressed for steady work, she will apply for the uptown department stores, more prestigious work that so far Ruby has not been able to break into. Leti wants to pioneer (own property in a traditionally white neighborhood), a bold statement (made all the more bold by the fact that she is currently short on funds and asking to crash at Ruby’s place). The more grounded Ruby doesn't want to take that risk. As I mentioned, the introduction of the sisters is a bit different here than in the book and I think it’s for the better. In the novel we are only introduced to Ruby as a bit of a wet blanket when compared to the adventurers Leti. Here however, Ruby is shown to be fun and vivacious in her own right but perhaps a bit more grounded and responsible than Leti. Also in the casting of the actresses, there are some visual implications why Leti feels more confident that she can get a job in the fancy uptown department store, a point that I did not quite key into until I listened to an interview with one of the writers on the show’s official podcast.

After the block party, the search for Atticus’ missing father begins in earnest. A somewhat out of character note left by Montrose says that he was tracking down an important part of their lost family history and that he is waiting for his son in Ardham, Massachusetts. Atticus initially mistakes Ardham for Arkham, the fictional town in which many of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories of New England horror were often set. Then again, what scant information they can find about the town does not dissuade them from the notion that this is a locale out of a horror story. Ardham and its surrounding towns in “Devon'' county are isolated, it would seem deliberately, in the Massachusetts backwoods and employ a notoriously sadistic sheriff to keep people out. Those who care to look are noticing a growing pile of missing persons reports, people who may have been passing through Devon, presumably running afoul of this backwoods sheriff and his deputies, or perhaps “wild animals” as the county is so underdeveloped.

An important part of Lovecraft Country is baked into its title as the country in question isn’t just the genre of Lovecraftian horror, but its setting of New England itself. Often discussions of segregation in America focus entirely on the South and omit the formal and informal systems of segregation and white supremacy in the Midwest and New England.

I must admit, before I read the novel I was somewhat familiar with the idea of a “Sundown Town,” where the white population insisted that most blacks working in it be out of the city by sundown...but it was not a shame that I had associated with New England. As Atticus and George Freeman head east, with Leti tagging along, we see tableaus from a segregated America and hear a portion of a speech by James Baldwin on blacks and the “American Dream.” Baldwin describes how systems of oppression create alternate “realities” for the oppressor and the oppressed that are pernicious and difficult to dismantle, because the participants come to see them as natural and not constructed.

 

As the trio get closer to their destination, the dangers and the strangeness grow. When being chased out of a small town by white vigilantes, the heroes are saved by a mysterious Deus ex Machina, a silver car that somehow brings their pursuers to a screeching halt by means Atticus cannot explain.

Almost to their destination, but with the sun hanging low in the sky, the party is lost in the woods and trying to find the country road that will get them into Ardham. Getting out to stretch their legs, Atticus jokes with Leti that maybe some noise that startled her in the underbrush is a “Shoggoth,” one of H.P. Lovecraft’s monsters. And as if summoned by the talk of monsters, a police prowler car drives around the bend and the series crosses the county line from historical fiction into horror.

I am not going to provide a breakdown of the final sequence in the woods of Ardham except to say that it does a great job of building upon what has come before, both thematically and in paying off set ups established earlier, even as it drastically changes the status genre from historical into the horrific and fantastical.

I hope that like other recent adaptations such as the Plot against America and Watchmen, the show runners are going to restrain themselves to making one excellent season of television, instead of drawing things out with potentially diminishing returns. But either way, I eagerly await the next installment of Lovecraft Country this coming Sunday.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival in Waltham, MA. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

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Reopening America

Undiscovered Country: Volume 1: Destiny by Scott Snyder and Charles Soule. Art by Danielle Orlandini, Leonardo Marcello Grassi and Matt Wilson.
Graphic Novel Review by Kerey McKenna.

It has been a while since I posted anything here to Nerds who Read! Well do not worry. I’m right where you left me back in April...and I’m guessing you haven’t gone much of anywhere either.

Current events have left me with plenty of time to take in all kinds of media while I work at home. Or stay at home on my days off. Pretty much anytime I’m at home I can have a podcast, audio book, or streaming video on in the background. However I haven’t felt like filing a review with Nerds Who Read in a while. This has been for a number of reasons: spending time on new creative endeavors (i.e. perfecting my banana bread recipe), taking time to explore genres that do not relate to the usual Nerds Who Read subjects (RPGs, history, true crime, repeated viewings of Tiger King), and finding that when I did try to write a review it soon became ruminations on current events. Even if the text/media itself really didn’t warrant drawing direct analogies to our present state.

So I stepped away from my reviewer state of mind for a bit and just went about my business. Sometimes I would venture out into the new normal and explore my local main street USA that had been newly modified to accommodate pedestrians and cafe style seating. Last month, stopping into the local comic book store (for the first time since lockdown), I saw the new releases rack and was instantly struck by a bold yet simplistic cover. It depicted a map of North America but with a gaping white void where the continental United States should be.

The new comic book series Undiscovered Country premiered in 2019 and its first collected volume just happened to hit stores in July of 2020. Undiscovered Country is a post-apocalyptic action adventure about plagues, refugees, tribalism, national iconography, and big beautiful border walls. So I dare to say I wasn’t projecting anything onto the text as written as I read it cover-to-cover in one sitting.

Set in the mid-to-late 21st century, Undiscovered Country imagines a world without the United States of America. Thirty years prior the United States abruptly closed itself off from the rest of the world. Nobody and nothing going in and nobody and nothing coming out. All outward broadcasting ceased and an energy field preventing electronic and satellite surveillance. A mysterious “air wall” destroys aircraft, even the smallest drone, that try to enter American airspace. Giant fortifications and armaments are built along all borders and coastlines of the contiguous United States (Roughly 3,987 miles if anyone else was curious like I was). The “Sealing,” as it came to be known, was so abrupt that Americans who happened to be traveling abroad were left outside to fend for themselves. No repatriation, no right of return.

What would they even return to? With no outbound broadcasting and no way to look inside, the world is left to wonder what is happening inside Fortress America. Eventually the nations of the world institute their own quarantine of the lost section of North America to prevent the curious from being struck down by America’s border armaments and perhaps out of fear that the Americans will retaliate brutally to stay isolated.

Over the decades the world trundles along towards apocalypse and whatever happens inside the former US becomes a matter of academic speculation. The new political poles of geopolitics are the rival super coalitions of The Alliance Euro-Afrique and The Pan Asian Prosperity Zone. Both blocks are being ravaged by increasingly hostile environmental changes and the mysterious “Sky Virus” that has no cure or vaccine.

Just as the world powers are resigning themselves to the collapse of civilization they receive a message from inside the new dark continent. Sam Elgin (a man sporting a dapper soul patch reminiscent of Uncle Sam), known as a figure within a mysterious US government think tank in Colorado, invites the great powers on a diplomatic mission deep into American territory with the promise of a cure for the Sky Virus, and perhaps, the reopening of America. He provides instructions on how a small diplomatic mission, composed of members of his choosing, may enter America to negotiate. They are…

The Graves Siblings: American expats who as children were sent out of the country just before the Sealing. As their parents were colleagues of Sam Elgin, perhaps they had some forewarning about what was to come? One became a doctor on the front lines of the fight against the Sky Virus. The other became a mercenary and had previously made attempts to breach the mysterious American border.

Dr. Ace Kennyatta: A Canadian wunderkind expert on American History and unsanctioned researcher into the American self-quarantine.

Colonel Bukowski: A Polish soldier whose time as a POW left him both with the praise of his nation and with the burden of survivor’s guilt.

Valentina Sandoval: A crusading journalist, whose pursuit of the truth above all else soon threatens to put her on a blacklist as far as corporate and government news agencies are concerned.

Janet Worthington and Chang Enlou: Envoys to represent the interests of their respective rival super nations. While officially it is a joint mission it is soon made clear that either one of these diplomats would take any opportunity to gain an edge over each other.

Per instructions this small band takes a single helicopter and goes where no outsiders have ventured in 30 years, over America’s border wall where no lamp is lifted beside the golden door.

Almost immediately things go sideways. Flying in the southwest (presumably somewhere over the California and Nevada desert), the copter is shot down by denizens of the new American West who do not take kindly to outsiders.

It seems a sizable chunk of territory is now ruled by the warlord “The Destiny Man.” The Destiny Man commands a nomadic horde based out of a Walmart/Amazon superstore now made mobile with giant treads like something out of Mad Max or Mortal Engines. They love their big beautiful walls, their flag, and defending what they have against all enemies foreign and domestic, but somewhere along the line they seem to have forgotten about freedom and the pursuit of happiness. Perhaps they need a rousing reading of the Preamble of the US Constitution by William Shatner?

The Destiny Man is opposed by a rag tag group of rebels (perhaps the truer inheritors of the American Spirit?) called the Silent Minority. The rebels are led by “Uncle Sam” who much to the confusion of the diplomatic envoys looks like Sam Elgin but has no recollection of inviting them.

Now so far my description of a post-apocalyptic tale of tribes descending into caricatures of their former nations may sound like well-trod ground narratively and visually. But just as things might be seeming overly familiar, the book starts to play some more cards. Firstly, the Destiny Man and his marauders are visually bizarre. Beyond the standard issue post-apocalyptic punk culture costumes, many of their faces are obscured by astronaut helmets, and those parts that aren’t covered by patched up NASA leftovers reveal strange mutations like claws and tentacles. They ride strange beasts like giant spiders, or sea creatures like sharks and octopuses that shouldn’t be able to “swim” through the desert sand. Even the page composition and coloring when they are around is uncanny and psychedelic, whereas previously the aesthetics of the book had been gritty and realistic. Laying more cards on the table to build a straight, the authors begin to reveal the back stories of the heroes. They are not all who they appear to be.

Completing the winning hand, it is revealed that the American interior has become more bizarre then the heroes, and the reader, would have ever imagined. An America divided not just by ideology and geography, but by the warping of the laws of space and time.

As I implied, post-apocalyptic tales are not hard to find and nothing new. Given current events you may be seeking them out or avoiding them on any given day. While this comic doesn’t completely reinvent the genre, the debut run signals that its creators are excited to put their own spin on things and I would like to see where they go with this.

Now for one of those personal ruminations I had been avoiding shoehorning into a review where it would not belong. In early January of this year I was lucky to go on an American adventure of my own, driving cross country with a friend from Seattle to Boston. From sea to shining sea as it were. It was a cross country marathon, we only stopped in hotels twice in the course of the trip; otherwise we slept in shifts in the car. It was the middle of winter and my companion was on a tight time schedule so we didn’t get to stop to see much of anything besides rest stops and diners. Yet driving along we saw amazing natural vistas, remarkable feats of engineering, and glimpses of how other people live in different parts of the country. Just the other night I was joking with my friend, “Hey the way things are going now, in the future when we tell our descendants we drove cross country in 2020, they will assume we did it dodging plague epicenters and crossing through either lawless fiefdoms or a series of independent red or blue nation states.”

God, I hope in a year's time that remark and this comic will be dark whimsy...and not prophetic.

Kerey McKenna is a contributing reviewer to Nerds who Read and SMOF for the annual Watch City Steampunk Festival in Waltham, MA. Check it out at www.watchcityfestival.com.

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Buffy the Patriarchy Slayer

How to write social justice fiction that doesn’t suck.
By Michael Isenberg.

Girl Power. Lesbianism. Patriarchy.

There’s no doubt that Buffy the Vampire Slayer was one of the most forward thinking shows in television history from a feminist/Progressive/social justice point of view. So how is it that it was one of the best shows ever, instead of goddamn awful like practically every other feminist/Progressive/social justice-y piece of fiction out there?

Over the course of seven seasons Buffy took on such misogynistic villains as Warren, Caleb, and Mayor Wilkins. She faced off against men who didn’t take powerful women seriously, like the werewolf hunter Cain. And she faced off against men who took powerful women so seriously that they lied and schemed to keep them in line, like the Watchers' Council and Tara’s father and brother. Indeed, we learn in the last season that one such group, the Shadow Men, started the whole Slayer line—by chaining a girl and knocking her up with demon dust. The symbolism is palpable.

Of course, by that point in the series, Buffy had long since broken free of the controlling paternalism of the Watchers’ Council; the episode where she finally tells them where to go is one of my favorites. A couple episodes that are less enjoyable, but no less significant, take on the horrific issue of violence against women. BTVS is also one of the first network shows to have major characters who are lesbians (although not the first—Willow and Tara didn’t fall in love until three years after Ellen Degeneres came out of the closet on her own show).

Buffy certainly wasn’t perfect in the SJW department. There was a noticeable absence of minority characters, although this was addressed in Season 7 with the introduction of Principal Wood and the potential slayer Rona. Better late than never. The Thanksgiving episode “Pangs” attempted to be sensitive to the plight of Native Americans at the hands of European settlers. But Buffy ends up fighting a pitched battle against the avenging Chumash spirits anyway, and Spike makes a pretty convincing speech about how he just can’t take “all this mamby-pamby boo-hooing about the bloody Indians.” And the World Culture Dance in the episode “Inca Mummy Girl,” in which the students of Sunnydale High are costumed as their favorite culture—Eskimo, Geisha, Spaghetti Western, and so on—though considered a thoughtful exercise in diversity at the time, would be a cringe-worthy exercise in cultural appropriation by today's standards. Well, both episodes meant well.

Furthermore, since the series completed its run, there have been some unsettling accusations that creator Joss Whedon isn’t quite the feminist in real life that he’d like us to believe, especially with regard to his treatment of actress Charisma Carpenter when she got pregnant during her run on Angel. Still, you’d never know it from watching Buffy.

And yet, despite its social justice cred, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is so much better than Captain Marvel, Batwoman, the Disney Star Wars trilogy, Star Trek:Discovery, and all the other recent SJW dumpster fires out there. To paraphrase Max Bialystock, where did it go right?

To answer that, here then are,

6 Lessons from BTVS on how to write social justice fiction that doesn’t suck

6. No Mary Sues. There seems to be an idea in Hollywood recently that it is somehow sexist for a female protagonist to be anything less than perfect. And so, from Rey, to Captain Marvel, to Maeve on Westworld, we’ve been treated to an interminable parade of Mary Sues. The term comes from Lieutenant Mary Sue, the heroine of a 1973 Star Trek parody, "A Trekkie's Tale". TV Tropes explains the concept as follows:

The prototypical Mary Sue is an original female character in a fanfic who obviously serves as an idealized version of the author mainly for the purpose of Wish Fulfillment. She's exotically beautiful, often having an unusual hair or eye color, and has a similarly cool and exotic name. She's exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas, and may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon setting. She also lacks any realistic, or at least story-relevant, character flaws — either that or her "flaws" are obviously meant to be endearing.

The irony of all this is that many real-life women complain about the excessively high expectations that society has of them—they need to be the perfect career woman, the perfect wife, the perfect mother, always keeping their homes looking perfectly beautiful and themselves perfectly coiffed. The Mary Sue is the exact opposite of the role model they want.

Then there’s Buffy. Yes, exceptional talent comes with the Slayer package. But it doesn’t come for free—she has to train constantly to “hone her skills,” as Giles likes to say. Even when she doesn’t want to—a common occurrence in the early episodes. She’s not always a great student. On rare occasions, she even loses a fight. Win or lose, fighting takes its toll on the coif.

More significantly, Buffy never wanted this Destiny that's been thrust upon her. Many of the early episodes involve the conflict within her, and between her and Giles, as she tries to evade her responsibility to destroy unspeakable evil, in favor of her natural bent for "girly things," often lying to Giles or her mom in the process. Inevitably, the responsibilities always catch up with her.

On top of that, Buffy makes mistakes. Like the time in the Doublemeat Palace, when she becomes convinced (incorrectly) that the burgers were made out of people, and she runs amok through the restaurant, knocking hamburgers out of the hands of stunned diners.

As Buffy gains experience, and her challenges became bigger, so do her mistakes. In one of the last episodes of the series, she leads her army of potential Slayers into a battle they weren't ready for. Several of them get killed and Xander loses an eye.

Not only is Buffy not a Mary Sue, but the series even makes fun of the concept. Or to be precise, it makes fun of the male equivalent, variously called a Gary Sue or a Mary Stu. In the episode “Superstar,” the nerdy, hapless Jonathan cast a spell to make himself the best at everything. It was an entertaining takedown of the trope.

Regardless whether your character is a Mary Sue or a Mary Stu, the problem is the same—the Superman problem. The Man of Steel is so powerful that he can overcome nearly any obstacle without struggling. And that’s bad fiction; it’s boring to watch. Far better to give your character some flaws which not only raise the stakes in the conflict, but give your viewers an emotional investment in watching her overcome them.

5. Create characters who are characters, not political statements. Today’s books, movies, and TV are filled with same-sex couples. But I can’t think of any who are as endearing as Willow and Tara in BTVS. There are two reasons for this. One is the wonderful chemistry between the two actresses, Alyson Hannigan and Amber Benson. The other is that they were brought together by the internal logic of the characters, and not some social justice imperative.

The writers started laying the groundwork almost a year before Tara even appeared:

In addition to this longstanding latent homosexuality, Willow knew she needed help to take her magic abilities to the next level, so she sought out other witches. Which is how she met Tara, whose family had conditioned her to think of herself as a freak. That left her shy, withdrawn, a bit frumpy. As she sang in the Season 6 musical episode,

I saw a world enchanted,
Spirits and charms in the air.
I always took for granted
I was the only one there.

So it was normal that when she found there was someone else there, she’d be drawn to her.

Suddenly I knew
Everything I dreamed was true.

It felt completely natural, not something that was forced on the viewers merely to be progressive.

After Tara died, Willow was asked how long she had been drawn to women. Her reply captures exactly what made that love story work so well. “It wasn’t women. It was woman. Just one…My mom was all proud, like I was making some political statement. And then the statement mojo wore off, and I was just gay.”

4. Don’t build up your female characters by tearing down your male characters. Buffy and Willow may have “put the grr in grrl,” but not at the expense of the men in their lives. Giles, Angel, Spike, and, in his own goofy way, Xander, are strong characters in their own right, and even when they are in conflict with Buffy, there is no question that they all care about and love each other.

The relationship between Buffy and Giles stands out in this regard. His role as mentor is a traditionally patriarchal one, a father figure for Buffy, a substitute for her actual father, who grows increasingly distant as the series progresses. And yet, contrary to the usual left-wing narrative about patriarchy, as Buffy's skills and independence grow, Giles doesn’t try to hold her back in order to maintain his control of her. Just the opposite. “It’s becoming quite obvious that Buffy doesn’t need me anymore,” he says in Season 5. “I don’t say that in a self-pitying way; I’m quite proud actually.” By Season 6 he worries that he’s become a crutch to her, and is holding her back; he returns to England in order to allow her to reach her full potential.

What a contrast to more recent movies and TV shows—Captain Marvel and Maleficent for example—where every male character is either a villain, a buffoon, or a servant to the superior female heroine.

3. Don’t preach. At least not overtly.

A lot of the social justice themes I talked about above weren’t apparent to me the first time I watched the series. Or the second or the third. I only became aware of them later on, thanks in part to The Passion of the Nerd’s excellent series of Buffy episode guides, which points them out explicitly. Nevertheless, I was absorbing them on a subconscious level. And there’s a lesson in that. If you got a message you want to get across, get your viewers so invested in your story and your characters that they don’t even notice they’re being preached to.

Besides, overt preaching violates the first rule of storytelling that we all learned in English class: Show, don’t tell.

2. Humor. No one likes the stereotype of the humorless liberal. Captain Marvel and Rey in particular have about as many laughs in them as a case of syphilis. Which is ironic because one episode of BTVS actually got laughs out of a case of syphilis. In Joss’s immortal words, “Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.”

1. A good social justice story must be, first and foremost, a good story. It might seem strange to cite Rush Limbaugh in post about social justice fiction, but bear with me. From time to time, Rush has been asked how come there’s no liberal Rush Limbaugh. His answer is that it's because everyone who tried went about it the wrong way. They were more interested in pushing a message than in crafting good radio. Which is backwards.

What’s true for radio is also true for television.

Lord knows there have been few TV shows as well-crafted as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Great characters, clever dialog (the writers are incredibly proud of that), well-choreographed violence, and in the end, good vanquishes evil. Besides, as editor-in-chief of Nerds who Read, I gotta love any show where the heroes, when they face a problem, go to the library and look stuff up in books.

And that's one final lesson that our left-of-center friends can learn from Buffy if they want their fiction not to suck. The library—not to mention Hollywood—is full of great stories and memorable characters. Rather than decolonizing our bookshelves, as a recent article on NPR called for, draw on the best that every culture, race, and religion has to offer. Including a certain blonde high school girl who "alone will stand against the vampires the demons and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer."

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read.

5 More Reasons Star Trek: Discovery is a Total Dumpster Fire

And the Two Characters who Totally Kick A$$.
By Michael Isenberg.

CONTAINS SPOILERS

In my previous post, I spelled out 5 reasons that Star Trek: Discovery is a total dumpster fire. Sadly, that is not enough to adequately show what a pathetic joke, what a sad excuse for a series STD really is. Here then are…

5 More Reasons Star Trek: Discovery is a Total Dumpster Fire

5. Plagiarizing The Original Series (TOS). Badly. STD takes place about ten years before Kirk and Spock set out on their five year mission in the original Star Trek, and so we run into numerous younger versions of TOS characters. Alas, they’re not the same people we know and love. Which is guaranteed to piss off fans of the original. Mr. Spock (Ethan Peck), so cool and rational in the original, believes himself to be insane and checks into an asylum. His father Sarek (James Frain), whose whole thing in the original was that he objected to his son serving in the human-led Starfleet, rather than the Vulcan Science Academy on their home planet, has now made it his mission in life to more closely integrate human and Vulcan institutions. The original Captain Pike was a rugged-looking, buck-stops-here kind of guy. There’s a key scene in the original Star Trek pilot, “The Cage” where the ship's doctor makes Pike a drink to get him talking, and Pike confesses how stressful it is to be the one who always has to make the life and death decisions. But he makes them anyway, despite the stress, and that’s what makes him an intriguing and heroic character. But the new and improved Chris Pike (Anson Mount) is spared any stress over decisions, thanks to his habit of almost always just doing whatever his crew suggests. He looks pretty in the uniform though. As for Harry Mudd, who was a comical character in the original, now he’s a psychopathic killer, despite being played by a talented comedian, Rainn Wilson.

I’m not sure if the problem is that the writers don’t understand these characters, or just don’t care. Either way, they want to have their cake and eat it to—to profit from the warm feelings that audiences have toward them (Spock and Pike feature prominently in Discovery’s advertising), without having to be faithful to what makes them tick. They remind me of the hack architects in The Fountainhead whose excuse for taking over the work of a better architect and ruining it is “We want to express our individuality too.”

4. Lens Flares. An aspect of recent Star Trek cinematography which is utterly moronic. Lens flares serve no purpose whatsoever. They don’t evoke any particular emotional response in the viewer other than annoyance. They make it look like the cameraman was a complete incompetent. The only reason they appear is because J.J. Abrams—noted killer of the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises—“fell in love with how it looked” and thought it would be “fun” to put 721 of them into the 2009 Star Trek movie reboot (someone counted). There are numerous Star Trek lens flare montages available on YouTube, but the one near the end of the Honest Trailers video has the absolutely best music.

The heinous practice has now carried over from movies to TV. Seriously. Just stop.

3. Ensign Tilly. There was a discipline and professionalism about the original Star Trek. Coming as it did during the Apollo era, it was a product of a time when serious-looking engineers in white shirts were glued to the monitors at Mission Control. The Enterprise crew spent years getting to where they were. They drilled for battle, and when they didn’t perform well enough, they drilled again. When on duty, they were focused on their tasks. Those who couldn’t hack it were immediately relieved from their stations, and someone else was standing by to step in. Sure, there was small talk on the bridge, but it was usually confined to the quiet moments, part of the pacing, the calm before the storm. And characters had personal crises, but these were integral to the plot, not a distraction while some necessary question of the episode be then to be considered. The chain of command was respected. There were exceptions, of course. Sometimes orders were disobeyed. But when they were, it was a big deal, not just another Friday. The offenders, especially when it was Spock, had thought things through and expected there to be consequences for their insubordination.

Then The Next Generation came along, put a child on the bridge, and installed a holodeck so that the crew could get in touch with their feelings before facing the enemy, and Star Trek was never the same again.

With Star Trek: Discovery, professionalism in the Federation continues its downward spiral (mirroring real life). And the poster child for lack of professionalism is without a doubt, the Wesley of the Discovery, Ens. Sylvia Tilly (Mary Wiseman). A brilliant engineer, to be sure, Tilly is very young (she’s still a cadet when we first meet her), out of shape (despite that one time she was made to do some PT by Commander Burnham, the central character in the series, played by Sonequa Martin-Green), and possessed of a bubbly personality which no doubt made her the delight of her middle school, but is sadly out of place in the engineering section of a starship. She always enters a room talking, usually about something irrelevant, usually herself. She can’t even set up a date between her colleagues without digressing into the kind of guys she likes. She always tells us what she’s feeling. Which brings me to…

2. Feelings. Everybody tells us what they’re feeling all the time. Seriously, I lost count of the number of instances where crew members are in the middle of some life and death crisis, the clock is ticking, and they just stop to discuss their feelings and relationships, ignoring the increasingly desperate pleas over the PA system for them to report to the bridge. There’s that lack of professionalism again. One time they even stop in the middle of a ticking clock scenario to have a dance lesson while they talk about their feelings and relationships. C’mon guys—Harry Mudd is getting closer to take control of the ship with each passing minute. You might want to stop talking about your feelings and get on that.

Seriously though, I don’t like these people well enough to be that invested in their feelings, or who’s dating whom. Especially when they cram it down my throat like this.

Actually that’s not completely true. Some members of the crew I don’t know well enough to like or dislike. For example the cyborg Lt. Cdr. Airiam (Sara Mitch/Hannah Cheesman. Did anyone even notice they changed actresses midstream?). Sure she looked cool, but that was the extent of her character development. Mostly she was just sort of there. Until the episode “Project Daedalus,” in which she sacrifices herself to prevent an evil A.I. from getting access to a strategic database that is essential to its plans to destroy mankind. It’s a heroic and beautiful ending for the character. Or at least, it would have been if we knew anything about her. The attempt to cram in a back story for her in her final episode was too little, too late. The bond between character and viewer has to develop over time.

Part of the reason the supporting cast is so criminally underused is that the main character, Cdr. Burnham, sucks all the air out of the room. Which brings me to...

The Number One Reason Star Trek Discovery is a Total Dumpster Fire…Commander Michael Burnham. Cdr. Burnham is like a stereotype of a millennial, except that no real millennial quite comes up to her insufferable level of entitlement, virtue signaling, and general sense that, because she’s special, she’s above the rules made for lesser humans. Her range of emotions varies from indignant that someone isn’t bowing to her specialness to disappointment that they’re not as virtuous as she is. She's so special that she perpetually demands to be the One who saves the Discovery by getting assigned to the Away Team, piloting the thruster suit through that particularly dangerous asteroid field, and being told all the secrets. The last one, while common with entitled characters in movies and on TV, is a pet peeve of mine: anyone cleared to handle secrets in real life is trained to understand concepts like compartmentalization and need to know.

Cdr. Burnham thinks so highly of herself that in one episode, as the Klingons are about to capture the Discovery, with its cutting-edge war-winning mushroom drive, she seriously suggests offering them her instead.

In the pilot episode, which takes place on the USS Shenzhou, Cdr. Burnham and Capt. Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) have a dispute as to how to respond to the presence of Klingons in Federation Space. When Burnham doesn’t get her way, she physically attacks her commanding officer and attempts a mutiny. The mutiny is short-lived thanks to Georgiou’s quick recovery, and Burnham is court martialed and sentenced to life in prison at the end of Episode 2.

Of course you know what happens next. She beats the rap because of some bulls--t. Starfleet realizes that Burnham was right all along and far too special to allow her amazing skills to remain untapped during wartime. Her release is engineered by Capt. Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs) who basically conscripts Burnham back into Starfleet. IMHO, he should have left her to rot in the slammer. Not only is her sentence richly deserved—mutiny is a pretty damn serious offense—but this dumpster fire of a series would have been extinguished after two episodes. It would have been a merciful ending to the thing.

*        *       *

Despite everything I’ve said, Star Trek: Discovery is not completely without merit. The settings and visuals have a realism to them that goes far beyond anything we’ve seen previously in a Star Trek series. There’s the occasional clever plot twist, and some of the minor characters seem intriguing. Or at least they would be if they could get out of Cdr. Burnham’s shadow. Lt. Detmer (Emily Coutts) stands out in this regard. And Rebecca Romijn admirably fills Majel Barret’s space boots as the hyper-competent “Number One” from the original Star Trek pilot. There are even a couple major characters worth mentioning. Which, as promised, brings me to…

The Two Characters who Totally Kick A$$

Captain Lorca and Captain Georgiou.

Despite their inexplicable attachment to Michael Burnham, they’re both consummate professionals and hardened warriors. They know their business, are able to make the tough decisions, and expect their subordinates to respect the chain of command.

Capt. Lorca’s familiarity with the service records of the people under his command is truly impressive, and he is so dedicated to his profession of warrior that it spills over to his hobby—he has a secret stash of not entirely legal weapons on board the Discovery.

As for Capt. Georgiou, it’s Michelle Yeoh. Need I say more?

They’re also the only two characters who have a halfway decent sense of humor. My favorite Lorca line: “I was just thinking about everyone who's ever said that victory felt empty when it was attained. What a bunch of idiots they were.” Well, that and the time he told Burnham, “You think I care what your preferences are?”

Georgiou doesn’t need quite so many words to make me laugh. During a fluffy bonding scene between two other characters over how special their mothers were, Georgiou merely rolls her eyes and says “Yech.” Hey, we were all thinking it.

But here’s the twist: they’re both imposters. The real Lorca and Georgiou are dead and they’ve been replaced by their doppelgangers from the evil parallel universe that first appeared in the TOS episode “Mirror, Mirror.”

When the only main characters I respect are, in the minds of the writers, supposed to be evil, I think that speaks for itself.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read. Photo credit(s): YouTube, CBS, Memory Alpha, TrekMovie.com, Vanity Fair, Tumblr, Twitter/@Zydebs, NCC 1031.com

5 Reasons Star Trek: Discovery is a Total Dumpster Fire

It's every bit as bad as you heard.
by Michael Isenberg.

CONTAINS SPOILERS

In his first appearance on Star Trek: Discovery, Capt. Christopher Pike (Anson Mount) says, “Sometimes it's wise to keep our expectations low, Commander. That way we're never disappointed.” It’s a philosophy to which I’ve long subscribed. When we have low expectations, not only are we never disappointed, but we’re usually pleasantly surprised. Usually.

Not always though. Every once in a while something comes along which is so goddamn awful that all the negative things we heard about it turn out to be true, and then some. Star Trek: Discovery is a case in point.

I had little interest in watching the series when it premiered. Audiences rated it significantly lower than critics did (it’s currently 42% vs. 83%) on Rotten Tomatoes, never a good sign. The buzz I was getting from people who had seen the early episodes was that it was “dreck” which, like so much of what comes out of Hollywood these days, puts more effort into being politically correct and diverse than into telling a good story. “STD” was one of the nicer things they called it. Above all, it just wasn’t Star Trek. If I wanted to see Star Trek, they said, go watch The Orville.

In short, Discovery didn’t seem worth the price of a subscription to CBS All Access.

But Picard did, so this January I finally signed up. I thought Picard started strong, but fell apart around episode seven—right when Riker and Troi showed up. In any case, having completed the series, I still had some time on my subscription, not to mention time on my hands thanks to the Apocalypse. So I gave Discovery a whirl.

It was crap.

To detail everything wrong with the series would take a lot more space than a blog entry, but to scratch surface at least, here are…

5 Reasons Star Trek: Discovery is a Total Dumpster Fire

5. Mushroom Power. Putting the science in science fiction is an art. The technology has to be far enough beyond our present capability to capture the imagination, yet sufficiently rooted in existing scientific theory to be believable. The classic Star Trek warp drive is a beautiful example of doing it right. Faster than light travel is impossible in our current understanding of physics. But by grounding this fictional technology on warping space around the starship, a notion derived from the curved space-time of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, the writers of the original series enabled the USS Enterprise to sail among the stars in a way that permitted the suspension of disbelief.

The USS Discovery runs on fungus.

You heard right. The USS Discovery runs on the same power source as the Super Mario Brothers.

The Season One captain, Gabriel Lorca, (Jason Isaacs) explains it in an early episode. “Mycelium spores,” he says. “Harmless. Harvested from the fungal species prototaxites stellaviatori, which we grow in our cultivation bay…Imagine a microscopic web that spans the entire cosmos. An intergalactic ecosystem. An infinite number of roads leading everywhere.”

Or as the inventor of the spore drive Lt. Stamets (Anthony Rapp; the character was named after real-life fungus scientist Paul Stamets) described it, the mycelium network is “the veins and muscles that hold our galaxy together.”

It might seem difficult to navigate a network of fungus spores that apparently exist in another dimension, but like they say on Pitch Meeting, super-easy, barely an inconvenience. Turns out a map is encoded in the DNA of tardigrades, those microscopic “water bears” that are all the rage, judging from their recent appearances on Family Guy, Ant Man and the Wasp, and now STD. So imagine the good fortune of the Discovery to come across a macroscopic tardigrade, roughly the size of a Sherman tank. Once they had that, it was a simple matter to inject some of its DNA into Lt. Stamets, so he could navigate the system.

Even the characters recognize how ridiculous this is. As Pike put it upon taking over as captain in Season Two, “If you're telling me that this ship can skip across the universe on a highway made of mushrooms, I kinda have to go on faith.”

4. Regular Science. Making futuristic science believable is only part of the job. A science fiction writer needs to get the regular science right as well. For obvious reasons, a disproportionate number of science nerds fill the audience, and they will notice if you get it wrong. Which suspends the suspension of disbelief.

Even the best of science fiction series slips up occasionally. The first time I ever watched Star Trek: TOS—it was the episode “Court Martial”—I suspected this series might be overrated when Kirk arranged a demonstration that involved amplifying the Enterprise’s audio sensors by a factor of “one to the fourth power.”

But I kept watching and eventually learned that this was just a rare miss where science was concerened. STD, in contrast routinely spits on science, tears it up, stomps on it with muddy shoes, and flushes it down the toilet. Stars are the wrong color for the type we’re told they are. Astronauts doing EVAs don’t follow the laws of motion. There seems to be no sense at all of the distances involved in space.

But perhaps most ridiculous of all is the Season 2 finale. The Discovery crew needs to open a wormhole to a point 950 years in the future. But they don’t know how to charge their “time crystal.” So they bring in a 17-year-old girl genius with an ice cream fetish to build a contraption that will get the job done. “I will need energy though,” she says. “Like Planck level.” Enough energy to “replicate the power of a supernova.” But that’s okay, because they have their magical spore drive, which, in addition to instantly transporting the ship instantaneously across the galaxy can also be used as a cell phone charger via “E equals m c squared stuff.” “I get to make a supernova!” Girl Genius exults. “Today rocks.”

Sigh. Where to start.

The writers seem to have no sense at all for the spectacular magnitude of power produced by a supernova. The phenomenon outshines all the other stars in the galaxy combined, putting out about 10³⁸ watts. The Discovery crew needs it for around an hour, which works out to 3.6x10⁴¹ joules. The Planck energy, in contrast, is 2.0x10⁹ joules. Not that much really—about the amount of energy the average American household consumes in two weeks. So Girl Genius is off by a factor of about 10³². That’s a one with 32 zeroes after it.

So how do you get that much energy by “E equals m c squared stuff?” If you were to convert the entire mass of a starship to energy, about 3 million metric tons, consuming every deck plate, every bulkhead, and every square centimeter of the hull with 100% efficiency, you’d still only get 3x10²⁶ joules. You’d have to repeat that with a quadrillion more starships to get the 10⁴¹ joules you need. Ordinarily that much energy would completely obliterate any equipment you use to channel it—but I guess that’s not a problem when the equipment is designed by Girl Genius. Because diversity, or something.

I got to wondering whether Star Trek: Discovery even had science consultants. IMDB only has one listed—the geophysicist Mika McKinnon—and only for a single episode. Not this one. Rather it was the episode in which Captain Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh) plants a “hydro bomb” in a volcano on the Klingon home world of Q’onoS. If detonated, the bomb would entirely destroy the planet. Which brings me to…

3. The Season One Finale. The arc of Season One involves a war between the Klingons and the United Federation of Planets. Heading into the season finale, the Klingons are on the verge of victory. They have destroyed most of the Federation military capability, and their invasion fleet has entered our solar system and is poised to attack Earth.

The plan to destroy Q’onoS is a Hail Mary pass to shock the Klingons into believing that the price of continuing is just too high. But in the end, the insufferable do-gooders of the Federation don’t have the cojones to go through with it. “That’s not who we are,” says the show’s central character, CDR Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green), channeling one of President Obama’s most preachy and nauseating expressions. Instead they give the detonator to a Klingon prisoner, L’Rell (Mary Chieffo), and let her go. Using the threat of destroying Q’onos, she stages a coup, makes herself Klingon chancellor, and ends hostilities.

There is no way in hell that plan would ever work.

The first problem is L’Rell herself. She’s a Klingon idealist, a disciple of the visionary T'Kuvma (Chris Obi) who started the war in the first place. Regarding the Federation, he taught,

They are coming. Atom by atom... They will coil around us. And take all that we are... There is one way to confront this threat. By reuniting the twenty-four warring houses of our own Empire. We have forgotten the unforgettable. The last to unify our tribes—Kahless. Together under one creed, remain Klingon. That is why we light our beacon this day. To assemble our people. To lock arms against those whose fatal greeting is "We come in peace."

L’Rell is a True Believer. The notion that she would turn her back on the ideology she holds dear, right when victory is all but assured, staggers the imagination. In her own words, a mere episode earlier, “Klingons have tasted your blood. Conquer us, or we will never relent.” Do the writers have any insight at all into their own characters?

But suppose L’Rell really would have a change of heart and do a 180, thanks to some incompetently written character arc. The rest of the Klingon Empire would never go along with it and abandon a war in which so much blood had been spilled. She’s obviously bluffing about destroying Q’onoS and killing billions of her fellow Klingons. Her opponents would inevitably call her bluff. If they don’t just assassinate her.

2. The Season 2 Finale. The main villain of Season 2 is “Control,” a military strategy A.I. that went rogue and set out to destroy mankind. In the finale, after fourteen episodes, considerable loss of life—and did I mention reproducing the power of supernova?—the combined Discovery and Enterprise crews finally defeat Control. Seriously? Fourteen episodes? Pathetic amateurs! You know how long it took Kirk to destroy an evil computer? Ninety seconds.

1. The Red Angel. Much of Season 2 revolves around the mysterious “Red Angel,” a time traveler with advanced technology who keeps showing up in critical moments to help out Discovery and its crew, especially Cdr. Burnham. About two thirds of the way through the season, the Big Reveal comes, and Burnham learns the true identity of the temporal seraph. So after we sat through ten entire episodes, we finally learn that the Red Angel is…her mom.

Now where have I seen something like that before?

There's more, but I've used up today's allotted space. So stay tuned for my next installment: 5 More Reasons Star Trek: Discovery is a Total Dumpster Fire.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read. Photo credit(s): Alien Tower, imgflip.com, Twitter/@DFowlerDesigner, VPUniverse