This Is How You Lose the Time War

Title: This Is How You Lose the Time War

Authors: Max Gladstone, Amal El-Mohtar

Publisher: Saga Press

I’ve pined and pined for a new science fiction and fantasy prose stylist, a writer like William Gibson, Cormac McCarthy, Kurt Vonnegut or Iain Banks, someone whose books are not filled with dry, dead ideas, but instead with words in all their vivid, chaotic glory.

Well, I’ve found two, and what a hollow victory it is.

“This Is How You Lose the Time War” is a slim novelette, a hair under 200 pages in my edition, and that’s even when they’ve done the sophomore thing and fiddled with the margins. It is a celebration of words, the language of love, an epistolary tale told in messages exchanged between “Red” and “Blue,” two agents on opposite sides of the “Time War” of the title.

I love it and hate it.

Love it that here is a novel that cares what words mean and how they sound and feel when lined up next to one another. Much of the modern SF&F genre seems taken up either with sterile “thought experiments” where the only thing that matters is the magic system, or else grimdark adventures that are an exercise in shoehorning as many expletives and disembowelments as possible into the least amount of text.

Instead, there’s a wonderful inventiveness to the scenes and descriptions, a sense of playfulness with words, puns, rhymes and near-rhymes. Whatever else I’ll say about the book, some of these bits are just plain fun to read.

There's also a kind of giddy inventiveness to the ways the two agents come up with to leave each other their secret missives--encoded in the growth-rings of ancient trees or engraved in the long-buried bones of pilgrims, for example. 

Last but not least it avoids the trap other overexcited stylists often fall into—I’m thinking of Yoon Ha Lee mainly, to be honest, though I’ll have to delete this if I ever get an agent—of regurgitating their Book of Obscure Terminology all over the page and calling it art. It is flowery without being baroque, descriptive without being a chore. 

I’m also happy to see that this is one of those rare books the literary awards and I can agree on. It won a BFSA Award and a Nebula Award just recently. No, I won’t link to the page. We’re in a backwater of an eddy of a distributary of that great river of data that is the world wide web, nobody cares about my sources. Just take my word for it.

So, what’s the problem?

Well, having escaped the clunk, it’s gone too far in the other direction, if you take my meaning.

Hate is perhaps too strong a word, but I can’t help but be disappointed how hollow the whole exercise is. The two protagonists spill lyrical rivers of ink describing their surroundings, their mission, their admiration for one another, but it’s not really in the service of anything other than the authorial-patting-self-on-the-back of “Hey, aren’t these words great?”

The two sides in this battle, the technological Agency and the Gaia-esque Garden, are hinted at, but what they’re trying to achieve and how is left rather vague so it’s not clear what the stakes are—indeed, there are none for about the first chunk of the book, until the two agents commit the transgression of falling in love with one another.

Give your audience somebody to root for, experts say, and sorry but I don’t. Red is introduced to us as a mass-murderer. I could care less if these two soulless automata manipulating entire civilizations for their own benefit find love or not. These aren’t relatable people. I wonder if making them both ostensibly women (though it’s clear they can change shape and gender at will) is supposed to make them more sympathetic. Sorry though, a romance between killers isn’t any more palatable just because they are, in some abstract way, lesbians. 

I don't entirely buy the love story at the center of the tale, either. It might be the nature of a romance told in letters, but both characters seem far more in love with themselves and their own cleverness than one another. It takes a certain kind of narcissism to believe that others should be intimately interested in your every thought and feeling, much like dedicated diarists, for example, there has to be some unshakable belief that your experience is uniquely worth sharing. (He said, on a blog, yes I know) 

The format imposes a kind of monotonous repetition as well. Red describes a scene. Discovers that they have been thwarted by Blue—but lo! Blue has left a message. Red reads the message. Next chapter, the roles of writer and reader are reversed. Next chapter, same deal, reversed. Next chapter.

You see? A bit mind-numbing.

And it reinforces the fact that all the beautiful text is mere window-dressing, a lead into the actual heart of the story, the letters being exchanged. None of the places or people being described in these vignettes matter, either to the two main characters or to the narrative, so really, why bother, you won’t miss anything if you skip ahead.

Finally, some of it is just a bit smug and lazy. There’s a crack about Ontario being awful. Really? Screw you, too. This is how you lost an otherwise sympathetic reader.

Much as it pains me to admit, great prose in the service of nothing but its own greatness is not a satisfying read, and in the end the book just comes across as entertaining but a bit self-indulgent, two writers deciding their letters to one another are terribly clever and should be worth $20 for anyone else to read. 

The numbers, Mason. What do they mean?

This one’s a little tricky. I set up an argument, then halfway through I flip it and argue the opposite. I’m talking about what things mean in fiction, and how fair it is to expect your audience to know what they mean when that meaning isn’t found anywhere in the story itself. It’s about in- and out-of-text references, basically.

Got it? Right.

At the end of the eleventh theatrical Star Wars movie and ninth in the main series of trilogies, “The Rise of Skywalker,” the heroine Rey “Skywalker” Palpatine return’s to Luke’s childhood home, buries his and Leia’s lightsabers in the ground, then pulls out her own newly-made one and briefly ignites it. Revealing, dun dun DUN, that the blade is … yellow! Wow.

So the capstone, the culmination and the climax of nine movies, forty years, thousands of special effects shots, a centillion toys and one young boy’s rather unhealthy fixation with Carrie Fisher was: A lemon-flavored lightsaber.

So what?

Well, that’s a good question. What does it mean? It’s a new color, after the blue, green and red ones we’ve seen in the movies (and Samuel L. Jackson’s purple one), so, symbolic of new beginnings maybe? As a kid who grew up with the toys, the only thing it calls to mind is that one of the Luke action figures had a yellow lightsaber. The movie is packed to the hyperdrives with callbacks, so maybe it’s just another blast of pointless nostalgia?

What I’m saying is, it’s not calling back to anything we’ve been shown earlier in the movie, or even in any of the earlier movies. There’s no reference in the “text” (the story or action of the movie, or book, or play, or game, or whatever) to lightsabers of any color having any meaning.

Some people get really mad when you say that, though (and they have, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered to write this post). Of course a Star Wars nerd immersed in, sigh, lore, will tell you all about the 2003 video game “Knights of the Old Republic” and how a game mechanic designed to allow for character and playstyle customization means X Y not to mention Z, but come on, to your average audience member, the scene meant precisely jack shit. The meaning, to the extent there is one (and I think the gamers are giving JJ Abrams far too much credit), is found out-of-text.

“The Rise of Skywalker” does this a lot, not just about the color filter of its lightsaber effects. What the heck is Exegol, who lives there, where did they get a huge fleet and the people to crew it? Ah, read the Visual Dictionary. Finn's putative Force-sensitivity was explained in an interview with Hollywood Reporter. And so on.

Star Wars isn’t the only franchise doing it either. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling apparently spends most of her post-Potter years tweeting new facts that never appeared in the books, such as Dumbledore’s sexual proclivities.

This gets into the more interesting question of semiotics—what do things mean—and more specifically, in- and out-of-text references in constructing meaning.

Let’s set the ground rules first. If you want an action or thing in a movie to have some meaning beyond the thing itself—such as Cobb’s spinning top in “Inception” being symbolic of his obsession with the past, or the idea that only those ‘worthy’ can pick up Thor’s hammer in “Age of Ultron”—then that meaning has to be established in the story itself. It has to be in the text. It can’t be buried in some 20-year-old video game. You can’t just stick it in the Visual Dictionary or mention it casually in a tweet. Stories don’t work that way. The meaning has to be in the story. It can’t be out-of-text.

This isn’t some special law of movie-making or book-writing, this is just, like, “if you want people to know what you’re talking about you have to explain what you’re talking about.” You know? “The message of the story has to be in the story.” It’s common sense.

OR IS IT?

Told you I was going to flip this halfway through.

There are plainly things you can reference and allude to without spelling it out for the audience, or even hinting at within your book or movie, yet you can still fairly expect them to understand. If someone finds a sword in a stone, you’ll automatically know that pulling out that sword is a sign of worthiness. The writer doesn’t have to remind you of the whole King Arthur mythos, they can expect you to know it. If some dude gets shot or stabbed and flails his arms to the side in, you know, the shape of a cross, we don’t have to be told this is an allusion to Jesus. You don’t need an establishing conversation where characters talk about what a nice bloke Jesus was and how sad it was that he got crucified. We just get it.

Let’s go back to Thor’s hammer. Later on in the movie series, in “End Game,” Captain America picks up and uses the hammer. The movie doesn’t explain the whole worthiness thing all over again. It assumes you know, even though it’s a reference to an earlier movie, not within “End Game” itself.

In other words, I think the concept of what is “in-text” and “out-of-text” is elastic. For some things, we can expand it, based on a shared culture and understanding. In the introduction up there, I tossed around the names Luke and Leia and just expected you to follow along, because anybody who knows about Star Wars will also know who they are. In the Marvel movies, there’s a whole freight train of characters, relationships, abilities and other universe-building you’re just expected to be on board with from the get-go.

To a certain extent, then, I think it’s fair to expect audiences especially of these larger, longer-running and more popular franchises, to get not only the surface meaning but also the connotation of it without signposting back to earlier works in the series.

The question then becomes, how far does the concept stretch? If older Star Wars movies are fair game, then what about the video games? The comic books? The, sigh, Visual Dictionary? If it’s reasonable to expect audiences to be familiar with other Marvel movies, how about the comics? Where do you draw the line?

I think the only honest answer is ‘depends,’ and I think it depends both on the audience, how engaged they are with the property, and on the thing being referenced. The broader the audience, the less in-depth knowledge they’re going to have. More cultish fanbases are probably more accepting of obscure references.

Similarly, the more popular the thing being referenced, the more you can get away with. You can reference the Bible without too much preamble.

Though this has to be of secondary importance, because the purpose of all communication is to have the thing you are trying to communicate be understood by someone else. If you’re just pontificating for your own gratification, jeez, write a blog or something. Oh.

Star Wars, at least in its original incarnation, had the broadest audience imaginable. Everyone saw it. You can certainly still put winks and callbacks from games or comics into the stories for the uber-fans, just don’t make them part of the climactic finale. More targeted offerings like the Disney+ shows can get away with more because they’ll have a narrower audience. Hence, literally every character who has ever appeared will now be appearing in season 2 of “The Mandalorian.”

Marvel movies, similarly, have huge, huge audiences, the Avengers ones in particular the hugest, so you can safely refer to other movies, but probably not the comics. Even Captain America needed a first movie to establish who he was. Again, a costume, a line of dialog, sure, throw the die-hards a bone, but you can’t have a key plot point depend on reading Uncanny X-Men #129 (Jan. 1963, “Save us from the Knights of Hellfire!”)

Back to Rey’s lightsaber then. The KotR game came out in 2003, and Wikipedia tells me it sold 3 million copies, making it pretty popular. Ah. But. “Rise of Skywalker” made $1 billion internationally, so assuming a generous $20 per head, that works out to 50 million people (“The Force Awakens” made twice as much, FWIW). The problem is then that you had a climactic scene which slightly less than 10% of the audience had even a chance of understanding, even assuming every single person who bought the game also saw the movie.

So I’m not saying movies and books or whatever can’t do it, but come on, let’s be reasonable. We know the fannest of fans have read every tie-in novel, comic book and Wookiepedia entry, played every game, watched every episode of every show. That cannot and should not be the baseline for any product hoping to have a mass appeal.

Yes to the idea that the ‘text’ of popular movies should include a basic understanding of the way these universes work or who the people are, but no to the idea that this extends to cover every single scrap of minutiae.

The one about canon

I’m in a spouting nonsense mood, and the target of today’s spout is the concept of canon. Particularly as the term applies to the concept of the fictional ‘facts’ of a fictional universe, as portrayed in various works of fiction.

The facts of fiction. Right. It’s fundamentally an oxymoron.

Canon in its modern meaning didn’t really matter until properties like Star Wars and Star Trek expanded beyond their home bases in movies and TV respectively, into books, comics, video games and tabletop games. The idea was to ensure consistency in plot and world details, even as you had dozens, scores, if not hundreds of different writers working on different stories in different media more or less at the same time.

The hardcore fans of pretty much anything love it. Love it, love it, absolutely love it. Lap that stuff up like it’s liquid ketamine. Can’t get enough of it. Canon makes the whole phenomenon of gatekeeping fictional properties possible. There are few things that warm their hearts more than telling each other they’re wrong about the canon. Few things they cherish more than pointing out errors and inconsistencies in canon, or endlessly fan theorizing about it, constructing great cathedrals of meaning out of throwaway lines published in, like, a children’s picture book.

And they shouldn’t. By god, they shouldn’t. If you really love Star Wars, or Star Trek, or, lawd, I don’t know, My Little Pony, you should absolutely be against the idea of canon. Reboots, remakes, retellings, alternate and parallel universes, mashups, all of the things that destroy canon mean you get more of the property you love. You get more and more varied stories. You get to experience it more, fresh and new again. You should love it when content creators throw canon to the wind.

Yet we don’t, and I’m not sure why. I don’t think there’s anything inevitable about canon. In fact, it’s a little weird that people cared.

There’s no obvious reason why they would—after all, the one modern entertainment medium where multiple writers had long worked on a shared universe was comic books, where characters live, die, appear to die but don’t, are reborn, reincarnated, rescued from alternate dimensions or future timelines as a matter of course. Spider-Man has been through more incarnations than a Hindu with a death wish, there have been more Batmans in history than there have been presidents of the United States of America and the X-Men’s Jean Grey has been killed and resurrected at least twice a decade since the 70’s.

Looking back at history, there too we find the concept of fictional canon is notable mainly for its total nonexistence. Disney’s efforts to the contrary, there is no one single, canonical version of any of the fairy tales, nor of Achilles, nor King Arthur. There’s evidently nothing inherent in fiction that requires or demands that there be a canon.

Plenty of modern properties also ignore the whole concept altogether—there’s no Mad Max canon, although some have tried to write one, Doctor Who’s time-traveling shenanigans make mincemeat of the very concept at anything but the most basic level, Dungeons and Dragons novels largely get around the concept by having enough alternate worlds to give Schrodinger’s cat an anxiety attack.

While there are sound storytelling, narrative objectives in ensuring consistency among your various story lines, it’s not hard to see there are less pure motives at work, too.

There are obvious commercial reasons for the property holders’ love of promoting the idea canon. Together with copyright, it is one more lever that ensures they maintain control of, and can profit from, the shared universe. Property holders alone get to determine what counts and what doesn’t, giving their own products a seal of legitimacy and banishing all others to the despised realm of fan fiction.

Gatekeeping is another obvious motive. Collecting, memorizing and categorizing facts makes a lot of people comfortable, gives them a sense of order and control that is otherwise often missing from our lives. Knowledge of canon can be used to browbeat other fans and make yourself feel smarter, more important in whatever fan community you’re a part of. So it’s rooted in insecurity and fear, too.

The good news is, I think the idea of canon is going to wither away slowly but surely. The most popular franchises at the moment, Marvel and Star Wars and Star Trek, are all reaching the limits of what they can do within a single, supposedly internally consistent continuity. Star Trek has already rebooted both its movies and streaming properties (calling it a TV show sounds anachronistic now, doesn’t it?) New Star Wars properties sound like they’ll be set in different time periods, precisely to get away from problems with canon. The original actors in Marvel movies are reaching the ends of their contracts.

You see long-term, canon is simply unsustainable. I’m a fan of the BattleTech games that have been around since the 80s, and my God, the canon is a useless mess. It just accretes, gathers more and more mass, weighing down everything about the property until you can’t write anything new about anything in this universe. It calcifies everything, ossifies it, fossilizes it. Nothing new can be done, nothing can grow. It kills the property.

As we move more and more into more oral styles of storytelling, I think this will accelerate the trend. We’ll want the same stories retold over and over, which will kill the whole purpose of canon.

It’s time for canon to end.

Wickensian Action: Extraction

Title: Extraction

Directed by: Sam Hargrave

Screenplay by: Joe Russo

Network: Netflix

About a third of the way into this movie, there’s a non-stop 12-minute car chase action scene that is easily the most enjoyable vehicular mayhem on screen since Mad Max. The camera gets into and then swoops out of cars on the move, taking us this way, then that way, zipping like a bullet across the battle scene, never resting for an instant. It’s glorious, simply glorious.

We are now in the Wickensian era of the action movie. The balletic bullet moves of Keanu Reeves’ John Wick movies are all on display here—twisting and flipping opponents around like rag dolls before putting two bullets into their faces at point-blank range.

The plot is Mad Max simple, though without all that extraneous “set up” and “payoff” bullshit that Max indulged in. Mercenary Chris Hemsworth has to rescue the son of a kidnapped drug lord from the clutches of a rival in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and get him across the border into India. The rival conveniently has complete control over the police and special tactics forces, giving him unlimited numbers of cannon fodder to hurl at Chris, leading to a body count that would make even Wick blink a bit. Chris and the boy walk across Dhaka, pursued at all times by baddies who unerringly find the two regardless of where they hide. There’s a half-hearted attempt at bonding between Chris and his charge, but seriously, who cares? Get back to chasing cars.

It’s a shame the movie blows its load at the start, for the rest of it never quite measures up. The law of diminishing returns sets in, and the later gunfights feel a bit dull by comparison. The climactic showdown on a bridge feels almost tame, being conducted at merely walking speeds, constrained by the bridge’s structure into purely linear movement.

I see grumbling about this being another ‘white savior’ tale where our milky-white hero swoops in to rescue the noble coloreds from other savage, dark-skinned people, but frankly any movie starts to sound ridiculous once you oversimplify it. Mad Max: Fury Road is a long drive with a U-Turn in the middle, Lord of the Rings a nine-hour hike to return some jewelry, Star Wars is about a young man with daddy issues. Extraction at least makes an attempt to humanize the other players—notably Randeep Hoopa as a henchman working for the boy’s dad and Golshifteh Farahani as the agent who recruits Chris—though yes, it’s a pretty weak attempt, as the movie is far more interesting in kicking as much ass as cinematically possible.

It’s interesting that many action movies seem to be increasingly specializing, bit by bit paring away all those other humanizing elements that aren’t the core of their appeal—the love interest, and so on—and throwing more and more of their weight into pure adrenaline: Mad Max and John Wick I’ve mentioned, Atomic Blonde may be another. I wonder if audiences are fragmenting with the growth of streaming and other entertainment options, giving action movies more freedom to focus and less need to appeal to a wider audience, especially with a direct-to-Netflix release like Extraction.

If it’s a trend that gives us more sequences like this, buddy, no need for the rescue team. I’m quite happy here.

Star Trek: Picard

Title: Star Trek: Picard

Directed by: Hanelle Culpepper (3 episodes), Johnathan Frakes, Maja Vrvilo, Akiva Goldsman (2 episodes each), Doug Aarniokoski (1 episode)

Showrunner: Michael Chabon

Executive producers: Eugene Roddenberry, Trevor Roth, James Duff, Patrick Stewart, Heather Kadin, Akiva Goldsman, Alex Kurtzman

Network: Amazon Prime (CBS All Access)

 

OK, now it’s personal.

Patrick Stewart is 79. My father is 77. Dad is, I hope, enjoying his retirement, busy with his books and movies and horribly complicated jigsaws of railway trains. I hope he is comfortable and loved, and that if he has regrets, they do not trouble his sleep overmuch. I would hate to think he is wracked by guilt, shame, or feel he had failed us in some way.

We watched “Star Trek: The Next Generation” together, the way families still did back in 1987. The show became a part of the ritual of family life, Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard a comforting and reliable presence in our home throughout the show’s seven-year run. I suppose it’s inevitable that, much like choosing your favorite Doctor Who or Star Wars movie, your first encounter with a series always holds a special place in your heart, so Jean-Luc Picard and his crew have always been synonymous with Star Trek for me ever since. It’s not like Picard was ever any kind of father-figure to me, but still, he’s embedded in that period in my life when I still lived with my dad and we did stuff together.

Later series never quite measured up, to me. “Deep Space 9” had some great characters but replaced the sense of wonder with angsty dark stories. “Voyager” had some great stories but angsty dark characters. “Enterprise” was just bad (I hear it got better, towards the end). I finished university, moved out, moved halfway across the world. Life moved on.

I missed most of the movies that followed, catching them only on the back of airplane seats in hauls back and forth across the Pacific. I still haven’t seen the last one—“Nemesis”—when Patrick Stewart swore he was done with the series. I did see the first of J. J. Abrams’ new-Trek movies, but found it a fairly brainless SFX spectacle that did nothing to scratch the nostalgia itch. The “Discovery” series and its evident antipathy for its own legacy cemented that whatever was being produced under the Star Trek name now, it wasn’t for me.

In the meantime, there’s been a rush of nostalgiapunk movies and shows resurrecting decades-old properties and giving the original actors one last hurrah. Sylvester Stallone did with Rambo and Rocky, Harrison Ford with Han Solo and Indiana Jones and Deckard of “Blade Runner” fame, Schwarzenegger did it with the Terminator, they are even getting Bill Murray to do another Ghostbusters.

And now Patrick Stewart has done it with “Star Trek: Picard.”

And you know, it was painful to watch, because this Jean-Luc Picard starts out as a lonely, dying old man eaten away by his regrets and failures, angry at everything, feeling betrayed by everyone. And I look at Patrick Stewart and I see my dad, and it’s hard, man. It’s really hard. Again, I’m not projecting too much but damn, here’s a guy the same age as my dad, who I used to watch regularly when I lived with my dad, and now here he is again, and he’s fucking miserable.

I was pretty happy with Picard warping off into the star-set and that was that. If you have to bring him back, couldn’t he at least be happy? I was hoping for more nostalgiapunk, I’ll admit. However, much like “Discovery,” “Picard” keeps only the surface of Star Trek—the technobabble names, some of the characters, a touch of the visual aesthetic—and dumps everything else. Jean-Luc Picard, the Federation he served, the tone, the mood, that’s all gone. Everyone is broken and traumatized and sick and awful.

As we open the new series, Jean-Luc Picard is heartbroken about the death of android Data in “Nemesis” (didn’t see it, so, idk), about a group of rogue androids who blew up a shipyard on Mars, and about a failed rescue mission to the planet Romulus, based on the events of the Abrams movie. He’s angry at Starfleet and the Federation. Oh, and he’s dying of brain cancer.

He sets off on a mission to rescue an android (Isa Briones) created from a part of Data—Data’s daughter, essentially—along with a crew of quirky and lovable characters, such as the alcoholic drug addict (Michelle Hurd), a neurotic doctor who murders her lover (Alison Pill), an ex-Starfleet pilot traumatized by his former captain’s suicide (Santiago Cabrera), a revenge-crazed killer (Voyager’s Jeri Ryan) and sword guy (Evan Evagora).

The plot that follows is, as others have pointed out, a bit of a rip-off of the “Mass Effect” video game series: Protheans um, ancient aliens leave a warning against creating artificial life. Fanatics decide that means they have to kill all “synthetics” (they even copied the term from the games). The androids learn they can contact the Reapers some kind of creepy-crawly super-space-robot thing to come and kill everybody else. People spend a lot of time crying, throwing up or bleeding to death.

The original Star Trek famously invented the “Vulcan nerve pinch” because actor Leonard Nimoy thought an advanced civilization should have a better way of taking people out that smacking them. In “Star Trek: Picard,” Seven-of-Nine goes on a one-woman, two-fisted rampage with a phaser rifle that looks exactly like an assault rifle in each hand and she totally slaughters all the bad guys who ripped her friend’s eyeball out of its socket and left him so badly hurt she had to kill him out of mercy. Yeah! Kick-ass!

I won’t go further into the plot, which as already been raked over the coals at greater length and depth by commentators like Red Letter Media than I have stomach to. The back story is excessively convoluted and contradictory, returning characters feel unconnected to their previous incarnations, the new ones are all as fucked up as the putative hero, and the show is frequently tone-deaf to its own text. The above-mentioned homicidal doctor feels guilty for about one episode, and then everyone forgets that she brutally murdered her ex-lover. In another scene, an android talks about the necessity of death if one is to be considered truly alive, and immediately afterwards a character who has died has their brain transferred into an android body, thereby cheating death. Also, that beat is a rip-off of the Asimov story, Bicentennial Man. But whatever.

Pretty much the only non-depressing episode is when Johnathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis reprise their roles as William Riker and Dianna Troi, and make pizza.

It’s wonderful. It’s the high point of the whole damn series. You get to see people who genuinely like and care about each other sit down, talk instead of punch and shoot things, figure out what they’re going to do, express their fondness and admiration for each other. Fuck, yes. This is what I signed on for. Patrick Stewart and his old buddies hanging out and having a good time. Thank you. That’s the nostalgiapunk I needed. Make a show of nothing but Pat Stew and a string of cameos by old Star Trek hands.

Properties that trade on nostalgia want to have it both ways. They want all us old fans to come back, and they want to bring in the new crowd. In both Star Wars and Star Trek, the way they’ve chosen to do that is to make the central character old and miserable. Missing, of course, the fact that the whole point of nostalgia is to be comforting and familiar.

The idea that grim is somehow deeper, smarter, more meaningful or realistic than bright and hopeful certainly isn’t new, and Star Trek has been sliding towards this since at least “Deep Space 9,” albeit with fewer vivisection scenes. I get it. Deconstruction can feel bold, daring and creative, like “Unforgiven” did for Westerns or “Game of Thrones” tried to do for high fantasy. I also get that actors and writers don’t want to keep doing the same thing over and over again.

Great news: They don’t have to. They can do other things. Unforgiven and Game of Thrones worked because they were fresh, original and creative. George R.R. Martin wanted to write about a world in which Aragorn became king and then found out ruling wasn’t quite so easy. So he made up his own world. With his own characters. And everyone loved him for it.

If you want to do nostalgia, fine: THEN DO NOSTALGIA. That one episode (number 7, “Nepenthe”) shows it doesn’t have to be that way. There is conflict, even sadness, but within the framework of people who actually like each other and get along. It’s gentle, it’s fun, it’s a blanket and a cup of cocoa by the fire. Maybe challenging old tropes feels more “necessary” or whatever, but this episode shows you can achieve much the same affect without all the blood and guts. Remind people of what they had. Remind them of what was good. We can figure out for ourselves if we’ve lost something along the way, and want to recover it or not. There’s nothing inherently creatively barren about nostalgia anymore than there’s anything inherently creative about yet another band of merry misfits turning in their badges and going rogue. Stories like this can have value.

I talk to my dad every week. He seems okay. Happy, I hope. Disappointed with the way some things worked out, I guess, but on balance satisfied. I take solace and comfort from the trajectory of his life. I have hope that things will turn out, if not great, then okay in the end.

This post is full of spoilers!

On an online discussion forum, someone recently asked about Joe Abercrombie’s “Last Wish” series (I reviewed the first two books here and here), to which I replied they were an inversion of common fantasy tropes. Right? Right. Pretty basic stuff.

 

Oh, but no. That’s a spoiler, you see.

 

Not five minutes later I had two users passive-aggressively bitching at me for spoiling the series. Yes, I know, boo-hoo, woe is me. I’ll live, I’ll survive. But for fuck’s sake, can we knock this shit off?

 

(The girl in The Crying Game is transgender.)

 

The spoiler crusade probably grew out of a sympathetic impulse—to prevent online assholes (“trolls,” sorry) from deliberately trying to ruin books and movies for other people—and like all our good impulses it was immediately taken up and wielded by the worst sort of literal-minded, unimaginative, killjoy people on the planet to stifle virtually any media discussion that doesn’t cater to their fragile paleo-diet sensitivities. Spoiler warnings are the emotional support dogs of Internet Karens constantly screaming for forum managers. They are the “Do Not Iron While Wearing Shirt” product warning labels of people too stupid to take care of themselves.

 

(Kylo Ren kills Han Solo.)

 

If you haven’t guessed, I’m not too keen on spoiler warnings.

 

(Kevin Spacey is Keyser Soze.)

 

Partly, I think the structure of a lot of modern media is to blame, and partly it’s part of an online outrage culture that rewards vigilantism over actual discussion and thought.

 

(Bruce Willis was dead the whole time.)

 

Now there are some stories in which the big reveal at the ending is the point. The mystery genre is an obvious example—the whole story revolves around unraveling whodunit. Revealing the end in that case would, of course, lessen your enjoyment of the story. No question there.

 

(Jesus comes back from the dead.)

 

The problem is, with the popularity of shows like “Lost” and “Battlestar Galactica,” the rise of the “mystery box” and “subverting expectations” approaches to storytelling have exported these techniques to genres where the whodunit isn’t, or rather shouldn’t be the point at all. In the bid to ensure every property is must-see “appointment television” that you have to watch as soon as it is released or miss out on the zeitgeist forever, more and more entertainment is being drained of repeat value, turned into a pump-and-dump one night stand that’s forgotten the next morning.

 

(Oedipus kills his dad and marries his mom.)

 

Take the Star Wars franchise: “The Force Awakens” is a prime example of mystery box storytelling, but for fucks' sake why? Star Wars is space opera, not Agatha Christie. Sure, the movies have always had surprises … just, that was never the point of the movies. The twist that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s father is a surprise, but your enjoyment of the franchise doesn’t hinge on not knowing this fact. Hell, the entire prequel trilogy depends on you knowing this fact, otherwise its relationship to the original three movies would be utterly baffling.

 

(Oldboy is her dad.)

 

Another example would be Game of Thrones, which did a lot to popularize the use of shocking twists: Ned's execution or the murder of the Starks at the Red Wedding are also surprising, but let me tell you I and thousands of other book readers knew exactly what was coming and loved every minute of it.

 

(Beowulf kills Grendel.)

 

Those aren’t spoilers, you see, they’re just plot points. Those are things that happen in the course of the story, not the central point of the story itself. If you call those spoilers, then literally every fact about the book or movie, the names of the characters, the genre, the gist of the plot, they’re all spoilers. Every trailer, poster, announcement or review is a spoiler. "I liked it," is a spoiler. If you want to wander in into a movie theater and plump your whining arse down completely unspoiled, you’d have to be blindfolded and led inside without even knowing the title.

 

(Soylent green is people.)

 

Even overlooking that point, any narrative that is only enjoyable once and never again because now you know the details is shit. Worthless. Insulting, condescending entertainment that has nothing of value to offer and nothing to say other than “Fooled you!” It’s an admission that there is nothing but plot—no characters, no setting, no mood, no drama, no tension. Just plot. And that’s a shallow, shallow way to approach entertainment.

 

(Tyler Durden doesn’t exist.)

 

For an example of the opposite approach, let’s look at Chris Nolan’s movie, “Memento.” There’s a fairly complicated plot. Like almost all Nolan movies, it screws around with time, this time by putting you into the amnesiac main character’s head by having events play out in reverse chronological order, so you don’t know what’s happening, either. At the end, turns out the amnesiac is responsible for his own wife’s death and keeps cynically hunting for people to get revenge on as a way of giving himself a reason to live. Now you can go back and watch the movie, and see how that all gets set up. THERE IS MORE THAN JUST PLOT. You can still enjoy every single moment of it. Because the point is the nature and malleability of memory, not whether or not this loony bastard has killed anyone or not.

 

Journey, not the destination, people.

 

(Macbeth did it.)

 

The other aspect of this narrative nannying is that it plays into social media’s tendency to reward grandstanding and style over substance. People are upvoted for reposting a funny picture, not for making one. They are praised for making posts like “Can we all appreciate X…” rather than, you know, everyone actually appreciating the person directly. Spoiler-whinging is part of this, too. The finger-wagging for mentioning spoilers means, of course, that the finger-wagger has already consumed the media in question and is thus being outraged on some theoretical other’s behalf.

 

(Achilles dies at the end.)

 

It’s white-knighting, only for the supposed lambs wandering innocently into movie or book discussions blissfully unaware that a movie or book discussion might contain details of the movie or book in question. They aren’t actually defending or protecting anyone, they’re just performatively demonstrating how pure and noble they are, in return for watching a small digit on their screen display a slightly larger number.

Listen: I saw an online book discussion in which the plot of the Iliad was deemed a spoiler. The Iliad. A three thousand year old poem. A tale in the oral tradition whose impact relies on the audience being familiar with the plot.

Listen: People want to spoiler tag the plot of Dune. A 60 year-old novel that has already been adapted to the screen twice, and (as of this writing) is scheduled for a third trip to the silver screen. 

 

(This isn’t a spoiler. Aha, made you look.)

 

Arguing or attempting to publicly shame someone online is designed to draw more attention to the point in question, to get more people to see the spoiler, not less (Otherwise, how else will everyone see how brave the spoiler defender is being).

 

In this sense, it’s part of the same trend towards worshipping lore over story, the desire for exclusive control over how media is consumed and enjoyed. Just as lord nerds insist that fictional facts fit their stores of hoarded trivia, so spoiler queens insist that experiences with fiction fit their ideals. Everyone must watch or read in the spoiler purist’s approved way—no others are allowed.

 

(This post ends after the next paragraph.)

 

So what perhaps once began as a genuine attempt to improve everyone’s online experience has now been cynically twisted into a self-serving attempt to show what a great guy you are. It isn’t for anyone’s benefit but the complainer. It’s petty, it’s childish, and it’s time for this shit to stop.

Kingdom (Netflix Series)

Title: Kingdom (Seasons 1 & 2)

Directed by: Kim Seong-hun (S1, S2E1), Park In-je (S2E2-S2E6)

Screenplay by: Kim Eun-hee

Network: Netflix

 

Given the current quarantined state of the coronavirus world and the way modern horror uses zombies as a stand-in for disease, there were probably better things I could have done for my mental health than watch Kingdom, a South Korean mashup of historical drama and zombie horror.

When season 1 came out in 2018, the story probably felt more socio-economic than epidemiological: The king of Joseon (17^th century Korea) has fallen ill and rumors circulate he may be dead—but access to the king is fiercely guarded by Cho Hak-ju, his chief advisor, and by Cho’s daughter, who also happens to be the king’s pregnant wife. The king’s older son by a concubine, Lee Chang, stands to inherit the throne if the king dies before the wife gives birth to a son.

Cho accuses Lee of treason and he is forced to flee to the south in search of clues to his father’s illness, accompanied only by his personal bodyguard. He finds the southern provinces ravaged by poverty and starvation, and by a strange plague has begun to turn the inhabitants into crazed, flesh-eating monsters. The wealthy and isolated scholars and aristocrats in the capital remain blind to the danger until it is literally on their doorstep.

Put it that way and it sounds like a companion piece to “Parasite,” the Korean Oscar-winning movie about income inequality and class conflict. However, the show has kind of been overtaken by recent events. Referring to the zombies as “the infected” takes on new resonance now. In the show’s tale of corruption and lust for power, we can perhaps now see the danger these leaders pose to society in a health crisis: They either ignore all danger signs, or are interested only to the extent that they can use the crisis to their own advantage. They remain assured of their own invulnerability until it is far, far too late.

It’s also worth noting that South Korea is emerging from the current crisis as one of the few countries in the world that has managed the virus with anything even remotely approaching success. All that zombie-fighting did them some good, eh?

Each season is composed of six one-hour episodes, making it a quick watch, though I find it kind of falls between two stools—too long for a feature film, too short for subplots or character development.

On the plus side, there’s a kind of streamlined simplicity to the narrative in that all conflict ultimately comes down to the power struggle between the Cho Clan and Crown Prince Lee Chang, but that does leave the world feeling a little thin and the characters as interchangeable as the ridiculous hats everybody wears. (I don’t think any culture’s 17^th century dress comes out looking too cool, lace ruffs I’m looking at you, but Joseon Korea’s penchant for mumu-ish silk robes and a pheasant-feathered top hat just strikes me as impractical for a horror actioner).

Both the action and the acting are very melodramatic and Acting-y. The show’s zombies are nocturnal, so tension often requires the sun to drop like Wall Street in a pandemic. Hah, that’s a joke that’ll age like milk. Anyway. Mortally wounded heroes suddenly sprout more arrows than Boromir yet they always find time for five-minute death speeches, while the Queen Consort does little but stare eerily straight at the camera, but it’s serviceable—not Game of Thrones, but not Shannara Chronicles, either. Ryu Seung-ryong as Cho Hak-ju is excellent though, full of ruthless menace, vividly portraying a man to whom a devastating plague is just one more tool to be wielded in his bid to hold on to power.

Netflix continues its tradition of having the dialog and subtitles translated by two different people which can be aurally confusing at times, but the story is so straightforward you could probably get the gist of it even if you watched it in Korean.

 
Ordinarily, I’d recommend this as a refreshing take on the zombie genre, both in terms of setting and style, but through no fault of its own the show gave me stomach cramps, heart palpitations and a sudden need to watch something a little more lighthearted. Though I understand “Contagion” is seeing a resurgence in popularity now, so this is probably exactly what you all want to see. You loonies.

Altered Carbon: Resleeved

Title: Altered Carbon—Resleeved

Directed by: Takeru Nakajima & Yoshiyuki Okuda

Screenplay: Dai Sato & Tsukasa Kondo

Network: Netflix

 

Cyberpunk is a wonderful genre, so fun, so full of cool gadgetry, bass-ass mofos, gangsters, mercs, techno-blitzkrieg action, neon, rain and bare buttocks gyrating to electronica. I love it, really I do. But damn is it a limited, self-referential genre.

 

Show me a cyberpunk cityscape and I won’t be able to tell you if it’s from Altered Carbon, Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell or Johnny Mnemonic. Every megacorp in every neon-lit sprawl is owned by a megarich oligarch using technology to oppress, rather than free the average chummer. Every anonymous hacker is fighting against this oppression (rather than doxxing feminists on Facebook or posting neo-Nazi diatribes on Reddit). We get it, cyberpunk: Money, technology and corporations bad, ex-military cyborg mercenaries good!

 

The Japanese have become one of the standard-bearers of the genre, probably because their vending-machine mediated society is already more than halfway there. Akira and Ghost in the Shell in all their branching, self-replicating swarms of comic books, feature films and serialized formats form one of the kernels of Cyberpunk’s programming.

 

Like most works in this narrow (and honestly, creatively spent) genre, the Altered Carbon series by Richard K. Morgan owed more than a little debt to the Japanese, as witnessed by the name of the main character, Takeshi Kovacs.

 

In the spirit of self-recursion then, hot on the heels of season 2 in Netflix’s Altered Carbon adaptation, the property pays homage to its roots with “Resleeved,” an original one-off feature-length prequel to season 1, done in CGIed anime style. (Note: To clarify, it’s a prequel to the series, not the books, as it features elements absent from the books, such as Takeshi’s sister and the idea that Envoys were freedom fighters rather than government stormtroops).

 

In “Resleeved,” Kovacs is hired by the yakuza to protect a tattoo artist who has been targeted by assassins, just as the yakuza syndicate prepares for a ceremony to transfer leadership from one generation to the next. He’s joined by a pink-haired government agent, and a holographic hotel AI (in a blatant and unnecessary copy of a story element from the Altered Carbon series).

 

The story, by screenwriters who’ve worked on Ghost in the Shell’s serialized sibling, the Stand Alone Complex, as well as other oddities like Halo Legends, is … not smart. While the basic concept is sound, the execution is pure edgy teenager trying to impress. The whole movie is essentially five or six fight scenes loosely strung together, with the knots tying each string striving to outdo one another in stupidity: Kovacs is downloaded into a naked body in the middle of an S&M dance club. A yakuza guard gets murdered and his security key stolen—and two days later his key still works just fine. Nobody bothered tracing or cancelling it. A horde of dozens of assassins just wander into a yakuza stronghold, and nobody asks how they gained entry.

 

There’s nothing new here, either conceptually or visually.

 

While exactly how the big bad executes his nefarious plan is different in its colorful details, involving a tattoo and Altered Carbon's concept of digitized consciousness and the ability to switch bodies, we’ve done yakuza to death, the city is pure Blade Runner: 2049 and they’ve even reused the hotel AI idea from the Netflix show.

 

Visually, the action is pure manga, with blood splattering across walls, floors, ceilings and the “camera” lens as samurai swords gleefully bisect bodies at every angle like something straight out of Ninja Scrolls. There’s an energy and exuberance to the shot composition, I’ll grant you, reminiscent of “The Witness” segment from “Love, Death and Robots” but for the most part it’s nothing we haven’t been seeing in the genre for the last 20 years, just CGed up a bit.

 

I don’t expect every pop culture product to deliver a grand statement on the Way Life Is and the Nature of the Human Condition, but I just found this a little too derivative, a little too gore-passing-for-cool, a little too I’ve-seen-this-before.

 

One last thing: Oddly, the English voice acting and the English subtitles appear to have been created by people working from two different versions of the script—or the original Japanese script was translated by two different people, one for the voice actors, one for the subtitles. Anyway, the two frequently don’t match up, which can be a little disorienting if you’re listening with the subtitles on.

Altered Carbon (Season 2)

Title: Altered Carbon (Season 2)
Showrunners: Laeta Kalogridis, Alison Schapker
Writers: Laeta Kalogridis, Sarah Nicole Jones, Michael R. Perry, Sang Kyu Kim, Cortney Norris, Adam Lash, Cori Uchida, Nevin Densham, Alison Schapker, Elizabeth Padden
Network: Netflix

While the very word “Adaptation” implies change, I wish more adapters would err on the side of changing too little rather than too much. This Carbon would have been better if they’d altered it a bit less.

The Altered Carbon series on Netflix is an adaptation of a three-book series about super-soldier turned lone gun for hire Takeshi Kovacs, by author Richard K. Morgan. Series 1, released in 2018, covered the first book in the series, which I wrote about here and here. If you’re lazy, and hey we’re on the Internet so yeah, the gee-whiz SF premise is that human consciousness can be digitized, stored in a “stack” implanted in the spine, and downloaded into any available “sleeve” (what people in far future land call bodies).

This second incarnation of the Altered Carbon series is a bit of a mashup—in the messiest sense of the word—of elements from books 2 and 3 of the Takeshi Kovacs series, Broken Angels and Woken Furies, altered to the point of almost unrecognizability.

Carrera and Kemp from Broken Angels show up, though their motivations and characters are completely altered. The setting has been moved to Harlan’s World, as in Woken Furies, and it follows book 3’s hunt for legendary rebel leader Quellcrist Falconer plot line, though of course they had to make this literal by turning it into a hunt for the actual person rather than a copy of her consciousness. As I said before, we are in the age of incredibly literal SF. Oshima from book 3 is transformed into a black lesbian woman named Trepp (Simone Missick), though amazingly without raising the kind of outcry that casting white actor Joel Kinnaman to play a white character with a half-Japanese half-Czech name did in season 1.

Can’t imagine why not.

If you’ve never read the books that’s going to make as much sense as alien hieroglyphs, so here’s the plot: Kovacs (played by Anthony Mackie this time) is convinced his long-vanished lover Quellcrist Falconer (Renee Elise Goldsberry) is still alive. He is lured back to his home world of Harlan’s World by the prospect of finding her, only to discover he is suspected of murdering a cabal of super-rich “Meths” (short for methuselah because of their money-fueled longevity). He enlists the aid of Trepp and Poe (Chris Conner), the holographic hotel AI from season 1, and is hunted by Colonel Carrera (Torben Liebrecht), who creates a clone of Kovacs based on a stored copy of Kovac’s consciousness (Will Yun Lee) to help track down the fugitives.  

None of these details actually matter much. Here’s what the show is like to watch: Bam! Aaah! Watch out! [Voiceover] Memories, are, like, ghosts, you know? Nanoswarm! The construct is destabilizing! Smash! Waaugh! Gyaaa! The End.

The first two episodes in particular are written by idiots for idiots.

Two examples from the first couple of episodes may illustrate:

Kovacs is stabbed in the shoulder and knocked unconscious. He awakes with no memory of what happened. To make himself remember, he stabs himself in the shoulder. Thank god his assailant didn’t kick him in the testicles.

In another scene, Colonel Carrera and four of his men (despite being a Colonel, Carrera only seems to have about four—alas for streaming TV budgets) investigate the scene of a murder. The police allow them in, but confiscate their weapons (why, I have no idea). Carrera and his men kill the cops anyway: Carrera takes one cop’s gun, shoots the cop, then tosses it to one of his men, who does a pirouette and then shoots another cop, the ballet guy then tosses the gun to yet another solider, who does a backflip, then shoots a third cop, backflippy tosses the gun YET AGAIN … Anyway, at the end of it all Carrera reports everything he found at the crime scene without covering anything up, so. What. The. Fuck. Was that all in aid of?

The dialog is enjoyable in its schlocky cheesiness. Colonel Carrera gets most of the best (worst) lines: “If we’re talking wolves, I’m the alpha and you’re nothing but my bitch.” Though frankly this is slightly let down by the fact that as the big bad, Carrera looks like a middle-aged metrosexual with about as much menace as Mark Ruffalo.

There are attempts at a serious tone, with laboring weighty voiceovers about the way we are are haunted by memories and vainly attempt to recreate our pasts, but the seriousness is undercut by the nonsensical action. The treatment of the virtual and digital is especially silly: Poe, the holographic AI, carries a shotgun, drinks whiskey and manipulates other programs by waving his hands around in midair.

To be honest, the show doesn’t seem that interested in its own themes, anyway. Character motivations are impossible to follow and don’t matter, as every problem is resolved by punching or shooting things. Carrera is working against the planet’s governor, no he’s working for her, Quellcrist is a murderer, no she’s a victim, no she’s a willing accomplice. Clone Kovacs is a ruthless killer who murders Trepp’s father, no he’s a caring, sensitive guy you’d like if you got to know him personally. Maybe if given enough time these changes would sit better, but with a season of just eight episodes character arcs get rushed in the mad dash to get through the convoluted plot involving about four double-crosses and a lot of unconvincing technobabble.

I get that streaming TV is not words on paper, and each medium imposes different needs. However, as I argued with Star Trek Discovery, if all you keep is the surface level stuff—the names and places, some of the technology, one or two lines—then why not go all the way and make something totally new? Using original works of fiction for little more than name recognition feels an uncomfortable combination of both horribly cynical and terribly hubristic—assuming you as the TV writer know better how to craft a story than the bestselling author whose works you’re plundering for your story line.

Think back to the Lord of the Rings movies, probably the best-loved and most widely acclaimed SF/Fantasy adaptations in recent memory (Game of Thrones had a shot at the title before that last season, sigh). Now, what do people remember about those movies? Was it Legolas surfing down an elephant’s trunk while no-scoping orcs with his bow? Was it Aragorn somehow grabbing a green ghost by the neck and threatening it with his sword? Was it the incredibly literal interpretation of the all-seeing eye of Sauron as a gigantic searchlight? Or—or were these dismissed as risible additions by the writers to an otherwise vivid portrayal of one of the classics of modern English literature?

The Takeshi Kovacs books are certainly no Lord of the Rings, but there was a core to them, a bitter suspicion of the corrosive effects that the convergence of money and technology into the hands of a few can have, but also a deep wariness of fanatics and extremists of any stripe—people who believe deeply in a cause often don’t care too much about the people who follow it. That gets thrown out the window—season 2 ends with Quellcrist vowing to travel to some other planet to continue her bloody revolution.

It’s a light, mildly diverting, disposable time-filler, something Netflix can dump on the service to keep you busy for a week or two until the next show comes around, but that’s pretty much the only mileage I got out of it.

Breath of the Wild

Yes, we’re here today to review a game that came out in 2017 because that’s the kind of timely, breaking, up-to-the-decade content our reader (Hi, Tom) has come to expect from this blog.

We got a Switch, for the exercise games really, but it gave me the excuse to buy a game for myself. I picked up this one, and three weeks later emerged, pastel-shaded but happier, thoroughly happy with my purchase.

After a string of gritty, bloody open-world games like “Skyrim” and “Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt” it was nice to play something almost innocent like Breath of the Wild for a change.

I say it’s innocent, and overall it is, though the setup is a little dark. You see, the backstory is an ancient evil returned to the world (they way they inevitably do, as foretold by the prophecy) and … the good guys lost. Your four closest friends were all killed, the princess you swore to protect is now locked in an eternal, stalemated battle with the ancient evil, and you were so badly injured you had to spend 100 years in a bacta tank recovering. The five races of the kingdom were brutally slaughtered by an army of relentless, soulless, pitiless robots. Also, you can get your inventory space increased by a fat green fairy who plays the maracas. The whimsy sometimes jives oddly with the post-apocalyptic setting, is all I’m saying.

As Link, the princess’s champion, your task is to visit the four non-human races and free their “Divine Beasts”—giant animal-shaped war machines—before the final confrontation with the Big Bad, called “Calamity Ganon.” In parallel, you can also try to restore Link’s memories by visiting 12 places of special importance to him. It being an open world you can, of course, just piss about the whole time or attempt to kill the big bad while still completely amnesiac and armed only with a pointed stick. It’s really up to you.

The four races are the birdlike Rito, the boulder-shaped Goron, a bunch of fish with heads shaped like porpoises, and a desert-dwelling tribe of redheaded Amazons with washboard abs and ski jump noses. The four thus neatly map onto the four ancient elements, namely wind, earth, water and gingers. 

Getting them onto your side requires you board one of the Divine Beasts (a bird, a salamander, an elephant and a camel) and solve a series of puzzles before fighting a mini-boss. These were fun to figure out, but by the time you get to the fourth one, the near carbon-copy nature gets a little wearying.

The RPG mechanics are fairly limited. You only have two stats: health and stamina. Instead of being raised through experience, you need to collect tokens from a series of hidden shrines, each of which requires you to solve a puzzle. These puzzles generally hit the sweet spot of being engaging without being frustrating—fairly straightforward, but you still feel like a bloody genius when you figure them out. The only thing that was a little annoying was that each shrine involved about three identical cutscenes every single time you entered one.

Combat I found a lot less satisfactory. On the plus side you have complete freedom to approach any encounter the way you want. The game gives you a set of potentially useful abilities, including remote-detonated bombs, a magnet, an ice-maker and the ability to freeze time, and these allow some creative solutions like knocking enemies off cliffs with levitating metal boxes or firing boulders at them. You can also find melee weapons—one handed, two-handed and spears—as well as bows, but melee combat in particular was dependent on split-second timing which, at 45, I can do about once in every five attempts.

Your conversation choices are about as limited as the RPG elements. The people encounter along the way are mostly bland NPCs there only to give out quests, mixed with some very idiosyncratic personalities, such as a scientist who has regressed to childhood and another who (in the Japanese version of the game) speaks English, but the English of a Japanese person who doesn’t speak English very well. These NPCs offer you dozens of side quests you can take or leave, but frankly I left most of them, as they tended to be rather long and involved, frustratingly hard to understand what you were supposed to be doing, and rewarded you with little more than a pat on the head. Balance wasn’t quite so well done there.

The other major task you'll find yourself doing is finding and activating a series of Towers, each of which reveals a portion of the map of the world to you. All the towers look almost identical and you go through an identical cutscene to activate them and after the Divine Beasts and the shrines I think you can probably guess what I'm going to complain about at the end of this review.

But let's talk about the good stuff first. The area where the game really shines is the art design and the world itself. Breath of the Wild has a wonderfully stylized sort of comic-book look to it, neither too childish nor too realistic, that is unique, distinctive, and genuinely lovely to look at. The map covers a range of terrain, from rolling grasslands to a lava-spewing volcano, from blistering desert to snow-capped mountains. Traveling about them is sped up by giving you access to horses and a kind of parachute/hang glider that lets you swoop down from cliffs or mountains. At the beginning, at least, there’s a lot of fun to be had just peacefully wandering about and looking at things. There’s a lot of empty space, but that serves to space out the action and gives you the chance to appreciate this world.

Of course, even that can wear thin after a bit, so it’s time to face that nasty old Calamity Ganon and give him a jolly good thrashing.

The final climactic showdown is a little bizarre, in that there are two phases. Phase One is a floaty spider thing which combines elements from the four Divine Beast mini-bosses. Sure, you think, okay, builds up nicely. Once you beat that, Phase Two begins. In Phase Two, the big bad transforms into a giant pig that. Um. Kind of stands there. You shoot it full of arrows and win! Yay!

You are then reunited with Princess Zelda in a very sweet yet chaste scene (c’mon, she’s 17 guys—well, 117 I suppose, which is also kind of weird). Fade to black.

It’s a glorious, gorgeous, light-hearted game, that suffers only in some of the samey locations and the repetitive nature of the four main quests. Still, after so much grim darkness, it’s a breath of fresh air. Ha!