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.

Subscribe to Nerds who Read.

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

When you *don't* play the game of thrones...

...you win and you fly.
The GoT Finale—One Year Later.

By Michael Isenberg.

This week marks one year since the controversial series finale of Game of Thrones. It’s a good time to look back and ask whether the final episode, or for that matter, the final two seasons, were really as bad as everyone said.

The short answer: yes. The widespread criticisms were richly deserved—with one big exception.

For eight years, well, six, anyway, we were hooked. Not since the original Star Wars trilogy were we so immersed and united in a shared pop culture experience. We were thrilled by the triumphs of our favorite characters—and we all had our favorites. We shared their frustration in defeat. We laughed at their jokes. We mourned at their deaths—and there were too many of those; it’s been said that author George R. R. Martin was the greatest serial killer in history. We couldn’t believe it when Ned Stark wasn’t rescued from the executioner at the last minute. We admired Olenna Tyrell for facing death with resignation and defiance, the Queen of Thorns’ acid tongue not failing her, even as the poison went to work in her veins. She made a good end.

We delighted in the wonderful one-liners and catch phrases. Some were merely good writing. “I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples, bastards, and broken things.” Some were insightful. “Everything before the word 'but' is horses—t.” “When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.” Many became part of our daily speech. “You know nothing, Jon Snow.” “Winter is coming.” “Hodor.”

In between seasons, we theorized endlessly. Whatever happened to Rickon Stark? What about Gendry? How will Jon Snow be brought back from the dead, and will it have something to do with the Red Lady showing up at Castle Black? Who are Jon’s real parents? Will he and Dany end up together? And most important of all: who will sit on the Iron Throne in the end?

We nagged our friends who weren’t into it to give it a try for just one episode. And then, when they finally relented, we fretted during the slow and confusing opening scene—surely we were going to lose them. We needn’t have worried. The moment they saw Bran Stark shoved from the tower window, they were as stunned and horrified as we were the first time…and hooked for the duration.

And so it went for six seasons.

Then came Season 7. The source material of the published novels had been exhausted. As George R. R. Martin struggled to finish the next installment (he’s still struggling), the writers of the series ran on ahead. It was an okay season. We had the warm glow of the reunion of the surviving Stark children—not really children anymore after so many long years of separation, adventure, and character arc. And there was the “oh, s—t” moment when the White Walkers started dragging chains into the lake where a dead dragon lay at the bottom, and it became clear what they were going to do.

But something was off. Characters acted out of character. The honorable Brienne of Tarth, for whom the code of chivalry—the code of battle, honor, and loyalty—was everything, turned her back on that for a throwaway joke, “Oh, f—k loyalty.” The brilliant Tyrion “I drink and I know things” Lannister, advisor to kings and queens, was suddenly not so brilliant as his advice repeatedly proved disastrous. And the writers seemed to have lost sight of the geography of the Land of Westeros. Where once a character might spend an entire season traveling from one part of the country to another, now entire armies crossed the land as easily as if they were just popping over to the neighboring castle for a quick siege and some looting.

The downward spiral accelerated in Season 8. Armies practically teleported, and miraculously repopulated their ranks after being decimated in battle. The trickle of out of character incidents became a flood. Arya goes off to discover America for absolutely no reason. The cunning spymaster Varys, so often compared to a spider lying in wait, attempts a coup against Daenerys that is so clumsy, it's hard to believe this is the same guy who knew absolutely everything going on in Westeros and beyond, and patiently waited decades for revenge on the man who castrated him. Jaime Lannister, who tried to murder a child in the series premiere to cover up his incestuous and toxic love for his sister Cersei, was inspired by the noble Brienne to embark on an eight-year journey of redemption. He was taken prisoner, lost a hand, and mourned the deaths of every one of his children. And just when he finally reached the pinnacle of love and honor, he was like, “Sorry. Changed my mind. I’m going back to Cersei.” A painstakingly well-developed character arc wiped out in an instant.

And speaking of character arcs, there’s the dragon in the room: Daenerys Targaryan. She came a long way from the mousy teenage girl who submitted to an arranged marriage in order to further the ambitions of her brother, a brother who routinely quashed any attempt she made to assert herself by threatening to unleash his temper. “You don't want to wake the dragon, do you?”

From those inauspicious beginnings, she pulled herself up by her bootstraps, overcame every obstacle, and transformed herself into a ruler and a liberator. Her whole story is captured in her string of titles: “Daenerys of the House Targaryen, the First of Her Name, The Unburnt, Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar, and the First Men, Queen of Meereen, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Protector of the Realm, Lady Regent of the Seven Kingdoms, Breaker of Chains, and Mother of Dragons.” She was so beloved, and her story so captured our imaginations, that hundreds of parents in the United States named their daughters Daenerys and Khaleesi.

A choice which they regretted when, with one episode to go, Daenerys turned irredeemably evil. Using the firepower of her dragon, she set King’s Landing aflame—after the city had already surrendered to her. Thousands died a horrific and painful death. Burning is a bad way to go. For Daenerys, there was no coming back.

Viewers hated it.

And this is where I part company with most viewers. I thought it was a brilliant arc for the character, one that was well-developed over the course of the series. We knew from the beginning that insanity ran in Daenerys’s family. Her father, the “Mad King,” was assassinated when he was on the verge of incinerating King’s Landing himself. There were signs of Dani’s ruthlessness as early as Season 3, when she bought the slave army, the Unsullied, from the “Good Master” Kraznyz. The price she agreed to in exchange was Drogon, one of her dragons. The transaction complete and the Unsullied under her command, she reneged on the bargain and ordered Drogon to burn Kraznys alive. Kraznys was an evil man, a slave trader after all, and couldn’t control Drogon anyway, which is perhaps why we didn’t notice the evil that was growing inside Dani. But evil it was and by Season 7 it couldn’t be ignored. “Bend the knee” became her new catchphrase as she demanded submission from everyone she encountered. Season 8 brought her slow burn over Jon’s growing popularity; she couldn't stand it that he was better liked than she was. Unlike Jaime Lannister, Daenerys didn’t subvert her character arc in the final episodes. She fulfilled it.

Not only is it a well-crafted storyline, it’s profoundly philosophical. As Lord Acton warned us, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Dani was a sweet girl at first, and when she first tasted power, she used it for good—she postponed her own ambition of taking the Iron Throne in order to liberate slaves across the Narrow Sea. But as her armies swelled, and her enemies fell before the might of her dragons, the power went to her head. As it inevitably will when even those with the best of motives—which she had—are able to act with impunity. It’s a valuable lesson. To those of you who say that it's only a TV show, that the burning of King's Landing was a fictional atrocity, I remind you that recent history is littered with real ones: the Armenian Genocide, the Nazi Holocaust, the Gulags of Soviet Russia and Red China, the ISIS Caliphate, to name but a few. A hundred million people and then some were murdered by dictatorships of one form or another. Not in some distant, less enlightened past, but as recently as the lifetimes of our grandparents, if not our own. If we learn anything from Game of Thrones, it should be to keep a close eye on our public servants and stand up against any effort on their parts to accumulate power. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

In the end, with Daenerys dead and the Iron Throne melted, the nobles of Westeros were wise to make Bran Stark their new king. Not for the reason that Tyrion gave, “There’s nothing in the world more powerful than a good story…Who has a better story than Bran the Broken?” That was pathetic. It reminded me of the bookmobile guy from South Park. “Hello kids! I see you’re discovering the maaaaaagic of reeeeeeading.” Rather, Bran is the best choice because he has no interest in power. There’s something to be said for a king who tells his Small Council to “carry on” and leaves to incarnate the three-eye raven.

When you don't play the game of thrones, you win and you fly.

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): nme.com

Dreams of the Purple Buffalo

The Neverending Story by Michael Ende.
Book Review by Michael Isenberg.

Every once in a while at Nerds who Read, we like to revisit one of the classics.

The Neverending Story was written by German author Michael Ende and initially published in Germany in 1979, where it became an instant bestseller. Its audience expanded worldwide thanks to the 1984 film starring Barret Oliver and Noah Hathaway. To use a phrase which I think came from Cinema Sins, the theme song is so aggressively ‘80s it’ll make you spit out your Tab. And while the special effects seem cheesy and dated in this CGI age, they were groundbreaking at the time.

I loved it.

1980s me couldn’t get enough. Went out to Waldenbooks at the mall and bought a special edition of the novel; I think it had extra pages with glossy stills from the movie (I wonder what ever happened to it). But upon reading it, I had decidedly mixed feelings. It was one of those rare cases where the movie was better than the book. That was because the movie kept what was good about the book, and left what was not so good behind.

On the opening page, we meet Bastian Balthazar Bux (three B’s), “a fat little boy of ten or twelve. His wet, dark-brown hair hung down over his face, his coat was soaked and dripping.” We learn he is neither athletic, nor bright, nor popular. On the run from bullies, Bastian takes refuge in a used bookstore where he encounters the crusty old proprietor, Carl Conrad Coreander (three C’s). But it’s the book that Coreander is reading that has Bastian mesmerized. “It seemed to have a kind of magnetic power that attracted him irresistibly…It was bound in copper-colored silk that shimmered when he moved it about…in strangely intricate letters, he saw the title: The Neverending Story.”

Yes, like The Tennessee Waltz, or a drawing by M. C. Escher, The Neverending Story is a work of art which contains itself. Which probably accounts for the double uroborus device on the spine—two snakes, intertwined, biting each other’s tails.

Anyway, the one thing Bastian loves is books and, thrilled by the prospect of one that never ends, he steals it when Mr. Coreander steps away to take a phone call (or in the case of the movie, borrows it without permission). Blowing off classes, Bastian locks himself in the school attic, stretches out on a pile of old gym mats, and begins to read.

He reads that the Land of Fantastica (Fantasia in the movie) is in danger. Piece by piece, it’s being devoured by—nothing. A conversation between Blubb, the will-o’-the-wisp and Gluckuk the rock chewer explains:

“Something has happened in Moldymoor,” said the will-o’-the wisp haltingly, “something impossible to understand. Actually, it’s still happening. It’s hard to describe—the way it began was—well, in the east of our country there’s a lake—that is there was a lake—Lake Foamingbroth we called it. Well, the way it began was like this. One day Lake Foamingbroth wasn’t there anymore. It was gone. See?” “You mean it dried up?” Gluckuk inquired. “No,” said the will-o’-the-wisp. “Then there’d be a dried up lake. But there isn’t. Where the lake used to be there’s nothing—absolutely nothing. Now do you see?” “A hole?” the rock chewer grunted. “No, not a hole,” said the will-o’-the-wisp despairingly. “A hole, after all, is something. This is nothing at all.”

We later learn that the pieces of Fantastica that are swallowed by the nothing reemerge in our own universe—as lies.

But the people of Fantastica know nothing of that. They send petitioners from all over the land to the Ivory Tower to warn the Childlike Empress of similar occurrences, and beseech her for help. It turns out that the Childlike Empress herself is suffering from a mysterious illness, somehow linked to the destruction of Fantastica. Still, she takes action. She orders that a hero, a savior, be sent on a quest to save the land: Atreyu, who lives in the Grassy Ocean beyond the Silver Mountains and hunts the purple buffalo. Her emissaries travel to the Grassy Ocean and find him. And to their amazement, he is a ten-year-old boy.

Then the adventure begins in earnest.

This movie follows the first half of the book very closely, and I love this part of the book for the same reason I loved the movie: Atreyu’s heroism. He even looks like a hero:

His long trousers and shoes were of soft buffalo leather. His body was bare from the waist up, but a long purple-red cloak, evidently woven from buffalo hair, hung from his shoulders. His long blue-black hair was gathered together and held with leather thongs. A few simple white designs were painted on the olive-green skin of his cheeks and forehead.

But it’s not his looks, or even his skill with a bow that make Atreyu heroic. It’s his persistence, that he keeps going despite cold, despite hardship, despite nightmares. Each night he dreams that “he got closer and closer to the same purple buffalo—he recognized him by a white spot on his horsehead—but for some reason he was never able to shoot the deadly arrow.” He even goes on despite loss. Early in the quest, in the Swamps of Sadness, his beloved horse Atrax succumbs to hopelessness and sinks into the muck, meeting his death. But Atreyu masters his sorrow and plods on.

Of course we see Atreyu as a hero because we see him through Bastian’s eyes, and Bastian sees him as a hero. As Atreyu overcomes one obstacle after another, Bastian’s admiration and compassion for him draws him ever more deeply into the story, until he is literally transported into the Land of Fantastica. Which, it turns out, was Atreyu's real mission all along.

The 1984 movie pretty much ends at this point. A brief montage shows us that Bastian has a whole series of fantasy adventures of his own in Fantasia, and then the credits roll. These adventures constitute the second half of the book, the part I didn’t like as much. Some of them found their way to the big screen in The Neverending Story II: The Next Chapter (1990), which was such a critical and box office flop that, despite being a fan of the original, I didn’t even know it existed until I started putting this review together. As for The Neverending Story III: Bastian goes to High School (that’s not what it’s really called), the less said the better.

Atreyu is still around in the second half, and he and Bastian become friends. But it’s really Bastian’s story now.

Much like Butters in the “Imaginationland” episodes of South Park (which were no doubt partly inspired by The Neverending Story), Bastian is human, and unlike the natives of Fantastica has the power of imagination: whatever he wishes, comes to pass.

This power proves extremely useful, as—once again similar to Imaginationland—much of Fantastica needs to be reconstituted out of the devastation left by the nothing. Indeed, Bastian’s imagination is quite fertile, and the Fantastica of the second part of the book is far more…fantastic. There’s a forest of gigantic night-blooming flowers in phosphorescent colors, which crumble into sand dunes under the heat of the sun, each one a different color. “The nearest was cobalt blue, another was saffron yellow, then came crimson red, then indigo, apple green, sky blue, orange, peach, mauve…” The list goes on for some time. The Desert of Colors. Then the sun sets and the night forest grows again.

But things take a dark turn as Bastian uses his power on himself: to make himself handsome, strong, brilliant, athletic, adored. All the things that he’s not in the real world.

That power comes with a price. Each time he wishes for something, he forgets a little bit of his real life. He forgets who he is. He becomes greedy for power. He creates enemies for himself to defeat, such as the evil witch Xayide. But unlike the obstacles that Atreyu faced in the first half of the book, there is no challenge for Bastian. The power of his wish predictably carries the day every time. He drifts apart from Atreyu as he puts his confidence in Xayide, who unlike Atreyu, doesn’t have his best interests at heart. She convinces him that Atreyu is conspiring against him, setting up a final conflict between the two. In short, Bastian becomes a dick.

Lies are nothing. Imagination is forgetting. It seems to me that, in addition to creating a spectacular fantasy world that is home to some memorable characters and exciting adventures, Michael Ende was trying to say something profound. But I’ll be damned if I can figure out what. Like Atreyu’s dream of the purple buffalo, I keep getting closer and closer, but never seem to be able to hit the target. If you got an idea, please leave a comment.

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.

The Same S—t All Over Again

Jay and Silent Bob Reboot.
Movie Review by Michael Isenberg.

"Well, a reboot, boys, is when Hollywood wants to make a lot of money without the hassle of creating a new movie. So they take an old movie and change just enough to make you pay for the same s—t all over again…Oh, it’s insidious. They take a flick you loved as a kid and add 'youth' and 'diversity' to it."

That's the exposition dump we get near the beginning of Jay and Silent Bob Reboot (2019) and that’s exactly what the movie delivers. It takes 2001’s Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, adds a dose of youth and diversity, and changes it just enough to make us pay for the same s—t all over again.

And it’s a riot.

As in the 2001 original, the duo of Jay (Jason Mewes) and his "hetero life mate" Silent Bob (Kevin Smith)—Jersey boys, stoners extraordinaire, and inspiration for the Bluntman and Chronic comic book—are pissed. They've learned that there are plans for a Bluntman and Chronic movie again and they're determined to put a stop to it again. And so they set off on a wacky cross country journey—Destination: Hollywood. AGAIN.

Along the way they cross paths with numerous celebrities making cameo appearances, as well as four young women who aren’t what they seem. But here are the important differences: In Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back the four young women are all white. In Jay and Silent Bob Reboot they are each a different ethnicity—and one is also differently-abled. And although the actresses involved are in the same general age range in both movies, the 2019 quartet don't have quite as ambitious a scheme in the works as their 2001 counterparts. The four women in Strikes Back are plotting to rob a high tech diamond warehouse. The four women in Reboot are plotting to go to Comic Con—which makes them seem more youthful. But perhaps most significant of all, in this era of #MeToo, only one of them is wearing a leather catsuit under her clothes.

You've probably grasped by now that, as with Strike Back, the basis for the humor in Reboot is self-reference. The film is chock full of pop culture references in general and Kevin Smith references in particular. For the ultimate in self-reference, in addition to reprising his role as Silent Bob, Smith also plays himself as the director of the Bluntman and Chronic reboot, prompting one of the four women to comment “I hate this guy. He forces his kid to be in everything he makes.” The self-referential joke is that she is played by Smith's IRL kid, Harley Quinn Smith.

Of course, there are differences between the two movies beyond diversity and youth. Nearly twenty years have passed since Strike Back, which means nearly twenty more years of cultural phenomena to make fun of. Comic Cons, Uber, white nationalism, emojis, Marvel movies, Cop Out, No Fly Lists, the Bechdel Test, and Russian plots to steal elections are all grist for the satire mill.

Also in contrast to the original, Reboot has a serious side. Since 2001, Kevin Smith has lost a father and raised a child. He has channeled his reflections on these experiences into Jay and Silent Bob Reboot via a heartwarming subplot in which Jay discovers he has a long lost daughter, for whom growing up without a dad has left an awful hole. Ben Affleck, reprising his Chasing Amy role as Holden McNeil, sums it up: “I used to think life was all about me. I was the hero of my own story, a Bruce Wayne of one lifelong issue of Detective Comics, so to speak. And then that kid came along and suddenly you realize you're not Bruce Wayne anymore. You're Thomas Wayne.”

Even when being serious, Reboot can’t avoid self-referential humor. Affleck’s next joke is the funniest in the movie. But in the interest of avoiding spoilers, I won’t quote it for you. You'll just have to watch the thing.

Which I recommend you do. You can catch it streaming on Amazon Prime. Watch the 2001 original first (or re-watch it as the case may be) to be sure you catch all the references. If it’s not enough that Jay and Silent Bob Reboot is wickedly funny and actually has some things to say, it does have one more thing going for it: stay through the end credits to see what may very well be the absolutely last Stan Lee cameo ever.

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His pop culture satire, Full Asylum, pokes fun at corporate life, James Bond films, political correctness in Hollywood, and professional wrestling. It's available on Amazon.com Please follow Mike on Facebook and Twitter. Subscribe to Nerds who Read. Photo credit(s): Lionsgate, YouTube, Augusta Chronicle