Good Omens (Amazon 2019)

The Good Omens miniseries from Amazon navigates the tricky waters of book-to-video adaptation in a largely successful fashion.

I first read Good Omens 20+ years ago, and several times since. Considering the authors, it's unsurprising that I liked it so much. Both Pratchett and Gaiman have written plenty of good stuff, most of which I've read. Their collaboration is as good as one might expect, and from all accounts they enjoyed writing it as much as we've enjoyed reading it.

I have no complaints with the production quality or the casting of the video series. The visuals are beautiful, and the costumes and special effects bring some of the more exotic descriptions in the book to life. Both Michael Sheen and David Tennant are excellent as the two leads, and I thought the kids playing the Them did a great job also. (OK, maybe one minor complaint, I wasn't terribly impressed with the special effects of the Bentley-on-fire-across-M25 scene. So much more potential there.)

Film adaptation has to strike a balance between getting the details right for fans of the original book, and keeping things simple enough for those unfamiliar with it to understand. Good Omens is somewhat heavy on the side of the details, in my opinion. I think it's difficult to get the very understated humor of the book to come across on screen or in narration without leaving unfamiliar viewers feeling confused or even bored. Plus it would simply take up a whole lot of screen time to fully explain everything so a viewer can reach the same level of understanding that one gets from the book. So the creators of the series decided to stay largely faithful to the book, even if it meant that those who hadn't read the book would be a bit lost at time.

That's not to say that everything is exactly like the book, of course. There are quite a few minor characters and plot points left out. Slightly disappointing to some of us who read the book, but not surprising and not a major problem. I would have loved to see the Other Four Horsemen, for instance, but I can certainly understand why that bit was left out. Not essential to the storyline and would have taken a good amount of screen time.

All told, I loved the Good Omens series as a long-time fan of the book. I'd recommend reading the book first for anyone planning to watch the series, or at least give it a second watch after you've had a chance to get through the book. You'll likely pick up on quite a few things that weren't completely clear to a non-reader viewer.

A Very English Scandal (TV series)

Amazon's algorithms have been recommending A Very English Scandal to me for a while now to watch on Prime Video. This seemed like a good time to check it out, after my recent reading of The Ivy Crown rekindled my interest in historical fiction.

A Very English Scandal is a three-part miniseries about the Jeremy Thorpe scandal in the 1970s. Thorpe was a British MP who had a homosexual relationship with a man called Normal Scott. It was secret, as homosexuality was still illegal at the time, and over the years Thorpe made quite an effort to cover it up. Eventually that led to a murder attempt on Scott, and a public trial. The series covers the better part of 20 years, from the affair in the early 1960s until Thorpe's trial in the late 1970s.

The series spends a good amount of time following the lives of both Thorpe, living the life of the rich and powerful; and of Scott, who was neither. I appreciated the background, since I had zero knowledge of the events around the scandal. From a quick web search, it looks like the series was fairly accurate to the real events.

Of course, historical fiction is only as good as the ability to make the events come to life. I was impressed with A Very English Scandal on this front, and much of the credit for that goes to the actors. Hugh Grant and Ben Whishaw were great as the two leads, and several of the supporting characters gave memorable performances as well. I particularly liked Alex Jennings as Peter Bessell. Judging from all the awards that the series won, it appears I'm not alone in enjoying the performance.

An easy theme to identify in this series is how the criminalization of homosexuality caused major problems in people's lives as they were forced to hide their true selves. While the criminal aspect is gone in most places these days, there are still significant social issues for LGBT people that can have a significant impact. I think a deeper theme here is that living a lie, whether it's hiding from the law or your neighbors, rarely stops with just the lie. It leads to more extreme measures to cover yourself; most people won't go as far as conspiracy to murder, but there's still an impact. Whether you approve of a person's lifestyle or not, they're still human beings and deserve the chance to be themselves.

A Very English Scandal is entertaining, teaches a bit of history, and is short enough that it won't take much of your time. Recommended.

Captain Marvel (2019 movie)

Captain Marvel is a fun watch, like most of the MCU movies before it. Not the best, not the worst, but well executed. Certainly not worthy of the hate coming from the more misogynistic corners of the Internet.

If you've seen any of the promotional material for the movie, you already know pretty much what Captain Marvel is about. Just in this trailer alone you see that there's a woman with military background who somehow gets superpowers and hooks up with Nick Fury (beloved from lots of previous MCU movies) in the 1990s to do some kind of superheroing. And that's what happens - you will not be surprised by anything important in this movie. No "Infinity War" style twists in this one.

I'm a DC comics nerd at the detail level, but for Marvel I'm more at the "general knowledge" nerd level. She was one of my favorite characters in the Marvel Heroes MMO action RPG (may it rest in peace). So I know who Captain Marvel is, and some general stuff about her origin, but not chapter and verse of every little detail. Between that general knowledge and promo material like the trailer, I found the movie to move somewhat slowly as it went through lots of setup about the character. Par for the course with an origin movie, so I was prepared, but still a little boring.

The good news is that even knowing what's coming, Captain Marvel is still entertaining. I liked Brie Larson's performance, they did a good job cutting 25 years off Samuel L. Jackson's look, and the supporting cast does a fine job. (Particularly Ben Mendelsohn as the Skrull leader.) I loved the costume they came up with for her, except that silly mohawk helmet thing, but I suppose you have to give something to the traditionalist comics people. Lots of special effects eye candy, especially near the end. Which is only what I've come to expect from the MCU.

You're not going to miss the big themes of this movie. A determined woman overcoming "a girl can't do that" prejudice: not only do we see tons of this from the main character, you've also got her best friend, honorary niece, and even one of the top enemy fighters pounding that theme home. The fact that the timeframe is 20 years ago: if Blockbuster and Radio Shack isn't enough, there's all kinds of music and culture references scattered about. People aren't what they may first seem - spoiler territory, but it's everywhere. I have no problem with any of it, but be warned, don't expect subtlety.

There was a lot of hate for this movie across the Internet before it even came out, and that continued through the opening weekend. I'm happy to say those idiots were wrong; a female lead is just fine for a superhero movie (not that anyone who's seen Wonder Woman is surprised by that). I kinda wish the creators had gone further - imagine if they'd swapped roles for Larson and Lashana Lynch (who plays her black best friend). I bet the movie would be just as good, and would have caused even more coronaries among the kind of morons who hate on movies for who they feature.

I'd put Captain Marvel firmly in the middle of the MCU movie universe...solid effort that's better than some and worse than others. For an origin movie, it's hard to complain. And I really look forward to seeing Carol Danvers kicking some serious tail in future films.

Marshall (movie) and Young Thurgood (book)

Young Thurgood: The Making of a Supreme Court Justice by Larry S. Gibson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I didn't know much about Thurgood Marshall outside what everyone learns in history class: civil rights hero, argued Brown v. Board of Education, later Supreme Court justice. At the local library, I came across a couple of ways to rectify my ignorance: the 2017 movie Marshall, and the book Young Thurgood by Larry Gibson. The book fills in much of the backstory that led to those great things, covering the first 35 or so years of his life. The movie is a dramatization of a rape case that took place in 1940, pretty much right after the time covered by the book. I read the book first, then watched the movie.

There's a lot packed into Young Thurgood about Marshall's early life, but two major themes stood out for me. First, Thurgood Marshall had an incredible work ethic. He was constantly busy with activities, whether those took the form of work or education or community service. Second, Marshall had a true belief in the importance of civil rights activism and put that above his own welfare. This is most clearly demonstrated in the way that he repeatedly took civil rights cases over more lucrative law practice options, despite his own tenuous financial position.

Beyond the details of Marshall's life, the other theme that struck me in reading Young Thurgood was just how pervasive racism was in the early 20th century. Everything from lesser pay to school restrictions to lynchings...reading example after example really drives home how bad things were only a century ago. We've still got plenty of work to do on this front, but it's also striking how much things have changed. And Thurgood Marshall had a large role in making those changes.

Young Thurgood isn't a novel; there's a lot of fairly dry recounting of history to get through. There's not a lot of excitement in the documentation of individual incidents, but taken as a whole, the book does a fine job of painting a picture of Marshall and the early 20th century.

The movie Marshall, on the other hand, struck me as very much the opposite - very entertaining, but light on the historical accuracy. It strikes me as extremely unlikely that Marshall would have been quite so high-handed with Sam Friedman as is shown in the film, for instance. Making Friedman carry his bags, really? Being cavalier about little things like changing radio stations or sending Friedman into the mud? It works for setting the Marshall-in-charge dynamic for the film, but I highly doubt the accuracy. But that's not surprising, in a film that's largely about showing Thurgood Marshall as a civil rights superhero. He deserves the acclaim, exaggerated or not. And I enjoyed catching references to many of the people that I'd just read about in the book.

I'm never going to be a Thurgood Marshall expert, but I feel like I know a little more now about the man and his work. Time well spent.

The Librarians (TNT TV show)

For a good long while, Hulu has been recommending The Librarians to me. I finally decided to take it up on the offer.

The premise of The Librarians is that magic is real but hidden, and there's a secret Library that holds powerful magic apart from the world so it can't cause havoc. A Librarian is chosen to watch over the collection, go out and retrieve magical artifacts from the wild, and generally stop Bad Things from happening. Magic was on the decline for a long time, allowing technology to come to the fore, but recently has made a resurgence. The Library has multiple Librarians for the first time in centuries, and a Guardian chosen to keep watch over all of them. Weekly adventures ensue!

That all sounds fairly generic and derivative, and this is fact the case. Hidden practitioners of magic in the modern world can be found all over fantasy literature/media. A team of heroes having to learn to work together while saving the world is even more common. But those are familiar tropes for a reason...do them well, and the result is really entertaining. And The Librarians pulls it off.

Mostly this is a adventure-of-the-week series. Each of the four seasons has a Big Bad villain to defeat, but they don't show up every week, and outside the start and end of the season they play a minor role. There's all the usual magical plot suspects - hauntings, regular people gone power-mad, evil masterminds taking towns captive, etc. Villains are often literary or mythical figures, playing off stories we're all familiar with. Again, we see this stuff all the time for a reason...it works when it's implemented well. There were a few episodes where even I had a hard time suspending belief, but for the most part things held together well enough.

Where The Librarians really shines, in my opinion, is the characters (and the actors who portray them, all excellent performances). Initially, the Librarian Flynn and his newly appointed (and very skeptical) Guardian Eve Baird are chasing down an evil mastermind. They're rapidly joined by three other Librarians, each of which have both significant abilities and character flaws, and the immortal Library caretaker Jenkins. Before long, Flynn goes off on his own - he reminds me of The Doctor from Doctor Who, incredibly clever and capable but ridiculously flighty - and the core team of Baird with three inexperienced Librarians and Jenkins is formed.

Every formulaic weekly episode is made entertaining largely by the way that those five characters (six on the occasions that Flynn comes back for a while) interact with each other and the villains. Stone finding historical clues, Jones circumventing security systems, Cassandra doing some crazy math in her head, and Baird keeping them all in line. There's a lot of character growth over the seasons and more than a few surprises along the way. Not too crazy with the surprises, though...it's a family show, after all, and nothing too terribly upsetting happens.

I had a lot of fun watching The Librarians, though I'm glad it ended when it did. By the time the finale rolled around, I felt the characters had changed enough that they were having trouble maintaining the team dynamic that made it so entertaining. The show wrapped up before that key component could degenerate too far, and in my opinion that worked out very well.

The Orville on Fox

Seth MacFarlane has been involved in a lot of television production in his career, the most well-known being Family Guy. But it looks like what he really wanted to do is captain a starship...thus, The Orville.

If you've ever watched Star Trek, you'll feel right at home with The Orville. The colors are modified, the starship design slightly different, there's a "Planetary Union" instead of "The Federation," the alien races have different names, and so on. But it's basically Star Trek: The Next Generation by another name, plus sitcom humor.

I'll admit, I was skeptical when I first heard about The Orville. I loved Star Trek: The Next Generation as a teenager, and I laugh at Family Guy as much as the next person, but MacFarlane was going to need to do more than just throw around jokes in space to make the show work. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I enjoyed the result...mostly.

When The Orville is being a spiritual successor to Star Trek, it's really good. Anyone who has watched much Star Trek is going to recognize a lot of the plotlines, some of which feel like they were lifted wholesale from episodes of one or the other of the Star Trek series. Not to mention the characters, who feel like the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew, right down to alien officers and an android. But whether lifting old plots or doing something original, The Orville does space exploration opera well.

Where The Orville falls short, in my opinion, is when it forgets that it's about the future. For instance, the first two episodes of the second season, which as far as I'm concerned could have happened in any generic suburb instead of on a futuristic spaceship. Outside of a few minutes on a shuttle performing a planetary rescue mission, both episodes were all about relationship drama and personal failings. Those things are important, but should be secondary to the futuristic space heroics, not the other way around.

As long as The Orville continues to stick to space exploration and dealing with alien races, I'll keep watching. Hopefully the ratings are such that Fox keeps it around for a while.

Future Man (on Hulu)

Hulu's Future Man is a great example of niche television getting a chance in today's expansive landscape of entertainment production. And I am exactly the target audience.

The plot of Future Man revolves around time travelers going into the past to recruit a video game expert to help them save their future. Which is ridiculous and rapidly becomes more so, jumping around multiple times and places with barely a stop. Not that it really matters, because what Future Man is really about is hilarious pop culture references, insanity that seemed like a good idea at the time, and a whole lot of crude jokes.

I really like the performance by all three of the main actors: Josh Hutcherson, Eliza Coupe, and Derek Wilson. Each really sells the role they're playing, which I think is essential in this kind of comedy. It doesn't work if the characters don't seem truly invested in the events, not to mention often being confused by what's going on. All three of these folks do an outstanding job.

There are a lot of people who shouldn't watch Future Man. Anyone who's been offended by South Park, for instance. Or has issues with jokes about bodily functions. Or isn't steeped in pop culture time travel sci-fi, like Back to the Future and Terminator. Although I guess you could do without that last part, if you don't mind missing a good number of references.

Twenty years ago...maybe even ten...I'm not sure Future Man would have found a home. It's got a narrow target audience and wouldn't make it past the censors for broadcast TV. But these days, with all kinds of cable channels and streaming services producing a ton of content, there's a lot of room for all sorts of ideas. And I'm glad this one got a chance, because it's hilarious.

12 Monkeys (TV)

The Syfy time-traveling show 12 Monkeys wrapped up its four-season run earlier this year, so I decided now was a good time to check it out.

When it begins, 12 Monkeys is about a time traveler trying to stop a massive plague that kills the vast majority of humanity in the mid 21st century, and the 20th century actions that led to it. After about a season and a half, the scope expands to cover larger sections of history and the destruction of all time. It's all a bit over-the-top in terms of dramatics, but I thought it worked well for the most part, keeping the viewer interested as the stakes went higher.

The TV show is loosely based on the 12 Monkeys movie from 1995, but most of that relationship is in the initial setup and character names. Once the series gets going, and particularly after the first season, it bears little resemblance to what was in the movie. Not surprising, since they had a lot more hours to fill.

Time travel is always a difficult beast to pull off, but 12 Monkeys did a fine job of it. The ability to travel was limited by technical issues and potential for paradox, so the viewer could believe the difficulties that the characters were having couldn't simply be solved by going back a little further in time. And the limited information available after the plague made it more believable that it wasn't possible to easily eliminate the source of the problem. Later on, some of those limitations were removed, but by then the problems were greater and the enemy more capable. On the whole, I think 12 Monkeys pulls off the time-travel theme about as well as can be expected.

I enjoyed most of the characters in the show as well, although the leads were far from the best in my opinion. Both James Cole - handsome rogue from the future - and Cassandra Reilly - implausibly beautiful and brilliant doctor - felt too "TV perfect" for me to really have much empathy for them. Sure, they were in some crummy situations, but of course they always found a way out. But several of the supporting cast were great, in part because the characters actually had some believable flaws. By far the best character as far as I'm concerned, both in terms of acting and writing, was Jennifer Goines played by Emily Hampshire. She played the driven-insane-by-warped-time character perfectly, and the writers gave her some of the most hilarious and memorable moments in the series.

One of the most difficult things to do with any multi-season series is a really satisfying ending. On this score, I give 12 Monkeys high marks. The way that they wrapped up the plot was excellent, covering pretty much every major question that had been raised along the way. I'm sure there were a few minor things that didn't fit, but there wasn't anything that bothered me enough to matter. The ending for the characters was a bit too good to be true, but I really wasn't expecting anything else by that point.

All told, I'd recommend 12 Monkeys to science fiction fans. I'm not sure it'll draw in too many who aren't interested in the time travel premise, but it's a solid offering for those who are.

Orphan Black

The main thing I learned from watching Orphan Black is that Tatiana Maslany must be a serious workaholic. She deserves that Emmy and the other awards she's garnered from playing half the roles on the show.

Orphan Black is a contemporary science fiction thriller series based on the idea that a shadowy cabal is messing around with the human body. Clones, DNA manipulation, body modifications. Over the five seasons, the characters go from blissfully ignorant to deeply involved, one layer of evil masterminds after another.

This kind of sci-fi thriller isn't a new formula, of course, but it's a solid premise if executed well. Which Orphan Black is, especially in the first 3 seasons. There's plenty of intrigue and mystery with interesting characters. Anyone who's read some sci-fi in this genre won't be too surprised by the larger plot points - there were several "big reveal" points that I saw coming a mile away - but it's still a fun ride getting there. I wasn't as impressed with the last 2 seasons in terms of plot, largely because it's just hard to sustain the suspension of disbelief as the stakes keep going higher. Eventually you become kind of numb to the ever-escalating danger and crazy mad science.

But that's all right, because there are plenty of great characters to follow into those last couple of seasons: several clones, their various friends and family, recurring villains, and new bad guys showing up on a regular basis. It's not always clear which people fall into which category, either, which is great. Keeps things really interesting when you're aren't entirely sure who is on which side. And even among the main characters who are clearly working together, there's plenty of interpersonal tension and drama, largely driven by the fact that just about everyone is flawed in some way.

What makes Orphan Black really unique is how Tatiana Maslany plays all those clone roles. There are four primary recurring characters, and at least five others with lesser roles. Each is a separate character, with their own personalities and appearances (and accents, usually). I thought she did an excellent job of really giving each one a unique feel, so that the viewer really sees them as different people. It's especially impressive when she plays one clone trying to pretend to be a different one, looking uncomfortable and purposely not-quite-perfectly mimicking mannerisms.

I had a great time watching Orphan Black, even when the plot-lines got a bit hard to swallow in the later seasons. Still a great show that I'd recommend to anyone who likes the sci-fi thriller genre.

K Project (anime)

The K Project anime series has a promising premise and themes, but doesn't do a very good job of executing on that promise.

In the world of the K Project, superpowers have begun to manifest in a small portion of the population. Most of that power is concentrated in a few individuals known as Kings, with a larger number of lowered-powered individuals forming clans around the Kings. The effect is limited to a small portion of Japan (for reasons made clear as the series goes on). The first season of the series focused on a murder mystery that leads to a conflict between Kings, while the second season expands to a larger conflict between more Kings. There's also movie in between that fills in some gaps between the two seasons.

The problem with the K Project, in my opinion, is that it constantly undercuts its own story and themes. The logic behind the Kings alone is inconsistent and confusing. There's mention of seven Kings, but the story never tells us who they all are. Each King is associated with a color and theme (red for chaos, blue for order, etc) but some don't seem to have a theme (like the Gray King) and one has no color. Supposedly the death of a King leads to a new King being chosen, but sometimes that doesn't happen for no apparent reason (such as the Gold King). Each King has a giant "sword of Damocles" that sometimes hangs in the sky above, which are never explained except that we know it's bad if they fall. There are several flashbacks that fill in some of the history leading to the Kings, but they leave so much out that it feels like we're only given a few random glimpses.

It's not just the Kings, either. The visuals are beautiful and largely take the subject matter seriously, but occasionally veer off into ridiculous fan service territory with panty shots and bouncing cleavage.  Serious themes like abuse of power and order vs anarchy are raised in the story, but they're used only as excuses to get clans battling rather than explored as complex issues.

There are some manga serializations and novels that are set in the same world. It's possible that the missing bits that I've mentioned above can be found there. If that's the case, I think they really should have somehow tied that into the anime - a simple mention of the manga stories in a post-credits scene would have sufficed.

The K Project isn't a bad series, but it could be much better in so many ways. There are better things out there to watch.

The Americans (FX)

I'd considered starting The Americans a few different times over the last few years, but there was always something else available to watch. Figured I might as well just wait until the show finished its run, which happened earlier this year.

The Americans is a Cold War era spy thriller, set in the 1980s. A pair of Soviet agents comes to America under assumed identities in the 1960s and sets about living normal lives. By the 1980s when the first season starts, Phillip and Elizabeth Jennings have two kids and are basically indistinguishable from your average suburban couple. Using their travel agency jobs as cover, they perform various espionage missions right under the noses of American counterintelligence.

In addition to the deep-cover family, other characters in the espionage game fill out the cast. An FBI agent lives next door, there are various sources and informants, and several of the Soviet embassy staff become important figures. I enjoyed seeing focus on characters from both sides of the undercover conflict. As you'd expect, there's a high turnover rate...not a safe profession, the spy game.

Spy shenanigans take up about half the plot, and I found most of it to be well written. Sure, you have to suspend your disbelief about the premise of the super-deep-cover setup, and the main characters miraculously survive all kinds of danger on a weekly basis. But that's par for the course on almost any television series. A lot of the spy action is centered around development of personal relationships with individual sources, but there's also plenty of sneaking around and even a few gun battles and car chases.

The time period in the 1980s makes it easier to accept all the disguises and sneaking, although I suppose modern spy thrillers manage the same even in today's cameras-everywhere society. Each season has some kind of big theme for the spying, from stealth aircraft to improved food crops, drawn from the big stories of the time. It was fun to see how the writers worked with the time period, from those significant plot points down to minor references like classic video games.

The other half of the plot comes from all the emotional angst that you'd expect in this kind of situation. Who is sleeping with whom, what lies are being told, the stress of hiding activities from your family and friends, and so on. I found it all interesting at first, though eventually it starts to wear thin. I thought the writers did a pretty good job of showing how the stress of the spy lifestyle wears people down over time, but in so doing there's a ton of repetition.

After about three seasons, I was more than ready for the Jennings family to finally move on from spies to whatever was next, good or bad. I'd kind of hoped that would happen in the fourth or fifth season, but instead it just dragged on in more or less the same vein. Some significant changes did finally happen throughout the final sixth season, which was the best since the first in my opinion. The last episode leaves a lot of loose ends, but there was enough resolved to make it a good series finale.

I'm glad to have watched The Americans, though I think they let it go on too long. If they'd wrapped it up around 4 seasons, that would have been about perfect.

Macross Delta

Two and a half years ago, I watched a bunch of Macross shows (Plus, Seven, Zero, Frontier). Macross Delta came out shortly thereafter, which was the whole reason I'd watched the earlier ones, but I didn't have any way to (legally) see it and eventually I kind of forgot about it. Well, a friend finally got the series recently and I was able to watch it.

The first thing you noticed in Macross Delta is the two significant differences from other Macross series. Number one: Someone writing this series really likes the magical girl genre. There's a group of young women named Walküre that performs songs to combat enemies (this is standard Macross), who change outfits during songs and dance around the battlefield with some kind of rocket-dresses (this is definitely new). Think of the "magic" part as being singing and combat dancing, and this is pure magical girl style anime. Number two: The enemy sings too, and uses it as a mind control device. In prior series, the "magic" singing has always been the province of the good guys, using it to disrupt the enemy. Occasionally an enemy might convert a singer to their side (as in Frontier) but mostly it belongs firmly on the side of the hero(ine)s. This time, the enemies are on the offensive with their songs and our heroines are largely on the defensive.

The major differences end there, and the similarities to other Macross series are legion. Young "play by my own rules" pilot gets co-opted into military organization, check. Pair of ace pilots on each side meeting in battle after battle, check. Love triangle with singer girl and military girl after hotshot pilot, check. Giant transforming battleship with aircraft carrier arms, check. Three female bridge crew and a gruff old captain, check. Refugees in space fleeing from enemy assault, check. And so on and so forth.

I enjoyed the development of the enemies from Windermere, which are revealed very early on after just a few episodes. It seemed to me that the writers put quite a bit more effort into humanizing this enemy than in most of the earlier series. We see the events that shaped the Windermere leadership's aggression as the series progresses, and time is spent to develop characters for several of the Windermere fighters. It reminded me a lot of the way that the original SDF Macross series handled the Zentradi.

Other character development was all right, but nothing special. I'd have liked to see more interaction between Windermere fighters and the Delta squad, which didn't really happen until very late in the series. Mikumo's fate was telegraphed so much that it seemed anticlimactic at the end. And the reveal of the identity of "Lady M" was wasted, in my opinion, coming as it did as an offhand comment in one of the final episodes. Surely they could have milked that for a scene or two!

I kept watching Macross Delta in the hope that there would be some kind of interesting twist that set it apart from what one would expect in a Macross series. But that never really materialized. Those two major differences that I pointed out at the beginning are great, but they're also just about the end of the deviations from standard Macross. By the time the final episode rolls around, it's not hard to predict how true love will save the day from some terrible fate. Which is fine and all, but so predictable that it feels a bit disappointing.

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

Fullmetal Alchemist has been on my list of things to watch for a long time, because it's considered to be such a good series by most anime watchers. Turns out I am not most anime watchers.

There's two anime adaptations of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga. I chose the second, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, because some folks who had seen both told me that it was closer to the original material. I figured if I liked it, I could always watch the other one to see the differences.

The series starts off following two brothers, Ed and Al, who lost all or part of their bodies to an alchemical experiment. They're searching for a way to reverse the process and run into the usual assortment of roadblocks. It expands to include a huge cast of characters spread out over an entire country engaging in romance, politics, rebellion, pursuit of alchemical power at all costs, family arguments...a bit of everything.

I should say here that I understand why people like the Fullmetal Alchemist story. It's got drama and humor.  There's a character or two for everyone to like in the huge cast. It handles serious topics, such as ethnic genocide and dealing with lost loved ones. It builds up over 60+ episodes to a big final confrontation, exactly as you'd want to see from an epic fantasy storyline.

But...I just hated the style of the show. There's constant jokes about how short Ed is, along with various other recurring gags, which cease to be funny very quickly. Ed's awkward romance with a childhood friend is just painful to watch. Al has almost no personality of his own until very late in the series. The magic...er, alchemical...battles are incredibly cheesy. I'll give them one thing, at least the battles avoid the worst anime fighting trope of people screaming stupid fighting move names at one another. But I still couldn't really bring myself to care how over-the-top alchemical manipulation of rocks/fire/lightning/etc ended up knocking one person down. (Which is weird since I'm OK with cheesy battles in a lot of other series, but these just did nothing for me.) And worst of all, almost every episode has cartoon-style emotional explosions that take me out of any kind of narrative flow in those scenes.

So I just couldn't get into that good storyline because of the style. This is especially bad in the early going, the first 20 or so episodes, when the story is trying to build its foundations. It moves very slowly, the good and bad guys hardly ever meet one another, and the motivations of characters other than the brothers don't make much sense yet. So in that early going, you're left with mostly just the style...not good if you hate it.

I considered just stopping, but friends told me that it got better, so I persevered. And they were correct, because around the halfway point the story picks up significantly and is much more interesting. And yet, every time I started to get pulled into the story, some awful attempt at humor or annoyingly excessive battle sequence or character blowing their top in the middle of a conversation would show up and kill my interest. I did end up finishing the series, technically, but I was doing something else almost the entire time with the show just on in the background. I got the general gist of the story without focusing on every scene.

This series just fell flat for me. I suspect if I'd seen this back when it first aired almost 10 years ago, I might have felt differently, because I wouldn't have seen a whole lot of other anime with more palatable styles. But my tastes today just don't line up with what Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood has to offer.

Solo: A Star Wars Story

Solo: A Star Wars Story is a decent movie. Not a great one, as I suspect many fans were hoping; and not a terrible one, as much of the Internet would have you believe.

Solo is an origin story for Han Solo, that lovable rogue from the original Star Wars films. Starting from his lowly origins as a orphaned urchin on Corellia, Han talks and fights his way into and out of any number of improbable situations on his way to becoming the smuggler we know. Along the way we see him meet Chewbacca and Lando Calrissian, and of course find the Millennium Falcon.

I went into this expecting to see how Han met Chewie, and maybe some other stuff. Which is pretty much exactly what I got out of it. Just about everything involving Chewie was great...I particularly liked that he rescued another Wookie at one point...and the rest of the movie was decent, but nothing spectacular. They filled in a few gaps (like what exactly the Kessel Run was) and expanded on the smuggler's underworld that Han inhabits. Sure, there were some silly bits (like making the marauders into a proto-Rebellion) but I'm used to that with Star Wars. (Midichlorians, anyone?)

I didn't think any of the actors did an exceptional job, but none of them were terrible either. Donald Glover was the best of the bunch as Lando, but his role was too minor to really stand out. Alden Ehrenreich is no Harrison Ford, but that would be true of just about anybody, and I thought his Han was solid but not particularly noteworthy. Neither Woody Harrelson nor Emelia Clarke impressed me much with their performances, but it's not like they were terrible. Just kinda mediocre.

The writers clearly tried to interject some social commentary into the film, most notably with Lando's droid L3-37 (oh, haha, what a clever name) agitating for droid rights. Which, in my opinion, fell completely flat because they couldn't decide whether it should be a serious issue or comic relief. Going back and forth between the two failed miserably.

There's been a ton of angst all over the Internet about how Solo had a poor performance at the box office. I doubt Disney is losing much sleep over that, because they're still going to make millions overall (merchandise, DVD sales, etc). And even if they do lose some money on this one, the Star Wars franchise isn't in danger any time soon.

For Star Wars fans, it's worth seeing Solo for a bit more story about characters that you already know. You'll likely have a good time watching, but I doubt you'll find much that stands out.

Grimoire of Zero

I'm not entirely sure why Grimoire of Zero was a fun watch, but I sure did enjoy it.

Grimoire of Zero is a very familiar story. It's a medieval world where magic is real, and our heroes are a mercenary fighter and a witch. They should be enemies, but find a way to work together. There's a girl disguised as a boy, witch hunts by ignorant/frightened people, and an evil mastermind. About all that makes this setup different from a thousand others is that the fighter is a beastman, but really any kind of defect/failing that made him a bit of an outcast from society would have worked just as well. And to be fair, the story in the last couple of episodes does veer a bit off the "defeat the evil mastermind" track.

Usually I don't really enjoy shows/books/etc that are very predictable or derivative. But something makes Grimoire of Zero work for me. I think most of it is the relationship between the main characters. It progresses from mutual suspicion to a business arrangement to respect to real friendship (with bumps along the way, of course). That relationship progression is still very predictable, but it's handled nicely and both parties are likable.

It also helps that Grimoire of Zero is well produced, with good artwork and voice acting. And there's very little fluff - at only twelve episodes, there's not a lot of room for anything that isn't part of the main story. There's some minor digressions in the usual anime way - jokes about food, annoying middle-school-level sexual innuendo - but they're short. I'm fairly sure I'd have liked it much less if there had been lots of filler, but keeping the storyline moving meant I didn't have time to lose interest.

If you like the sword-and-sorcery anime genre, it's worth giving Grimoire of Zero a try.

A Handmaid's Tale (season one)

There's a great movie or 3-4 hour mini-series in the first season of A Handmaid's Tale. Unfortunately it's spread out over about 10 hours of excruciating repetition.

The series takes place in an alternate timeline where world-wide fertility rates have been falling for many years, and finally reached crisis levels in the present day. A group calling itself the Sons of Jacob takes over the continental United States and turns it into a military state called Gilead, where women have no rights except through their male relatives. Fertile women are singled out and made into "handmaids" who are assigned to Gilead leaders to bear their children.

The story follows a woman named June who attempts to escape to Canada with her husband and daughter, but fails and is captured. Her daughter is taken away and June is assigned to Gilead Commander Waterford as a handmaid named Offred. The series splits time following June and the other handmaids in their lives in Boston, and flashing back to how things changed from the world we know to this dystopia.

I enjoyed the first couple of episodes of A Handmaid's Tale. It takes some time to figure out the world that they've built, and for June's terrible situation to really sink in. But then it's pretty much just more of the same. Hours of filling in details about the past which were already implied by prior flashbacks, conflicts between June and Mrs. Waterford, handmaids attempting rebellion and being caught, and so on. You might get 5-10 minutes of actual new information in each episode. The rest is largely just emotional manipulation...sex, oppression, fear, and occasional glimpses of kindness...so the viewer feels like something is happening when it's really just the same stuff over and over. We got all that already, thanks, it's not necessary to beat us over the head with it.

Oh, there are twists, but they're incredibly obvious. I suppose this is technically spoiler territory, but was anyone really surprised that June ends up sleeping with the household driver? Or that one of the handmaids, after giving birth in her assigned household, goes crazy when they take her away to a different household? Or that her husband who was conveniently off-screen when June heard shots that "killed" him turns out to be alive in Canada?

I suspect a lot of the reason that A Handmaid's Tale was received so well is the social commentary. The entire premise is based on misogyny and the twisting of religion to justify it. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to draw a line from the present day to the events in the alternate timeline shown in the series. But to my mind, the fact that the series says some good things doesn't excuse the fact that it gets repetitive and boring.

There's a second season of A Handmaid's Tale being released gradually on Hulu, but I can't say I'm particularly enthusiastic about it. Maybe someday I'll consider finishing it, but I suspect I'll end up just reading the summaries and saving myself a few hours.

NBC's Timeless

There were quite a few time travel shows that popped up 2-3 years ago. I've written about DC's Legends of Tomorrow on the CW (which has improved greatly since a weak season 1) and Netflix's Travelers. Frequency on the CW was pretty good, but only lasted one season. And on NBC, we have Timeless.

The world of Timeless: Time travel has been invented with the backing of deep pockets from a shadowy organization called Rittenhouse. They want to use the time ship to entrench their own positions and mold society to their ideals, which needless to say aren't progressive or friendly to anyone outside their group. A small team of uncorrupted government agents and civilians use a prototype time ship to thwart those schemes.

Like most shows based on time travel, you can't think too deeply about the premise of Timeless. The only real restriction is that you can't travel to place where you already exist, and there's ways around that (like recruiting others). The show establishes pretty early that changes made in the past do affect the future, so you have to ignore the fact that it would be incredibly easy to make a mistake that would wipe out your desired result, the development of time travel, or even all life on Earth. So watching Timeless definitely requires you to turn off the bit of your brain that tries to make sense of the whole time travel aspect.

Once you've got that suspension of disbelief going, Timeless is a lot of fun. I like pretty much all the characters, particularly Jiya and Rufus since they're nerds like me. (Younger and smarter and better looking, but then, who on TV isn't?) There's a decent amount of family and interpersonal drama that for the most part doesn't detract from the overall storyline, and in fact usually plays into it. Nice to have writers that make an effort to integrate the emotional drama, not just tossing it in on the side.

But my favorite part of Timeless is the historical characters. Pretty much every week, the crew goes to a different part of history and meets one or more pivotal persons. There's plenty of the usual suspects: the Alamo with Bowie and Crockett, Bonnie and Clyde, the revolutionary war with Benedict Arnold and George Washington, Al Capone and Eliot Ness in Chicago, etc. But some of the best stories are with lesser known characters, like Katherine Johnson at NASA (better known now after Hidden Figures) or blues musician Robert Johnson. Timeless does a fine job of bringing these characters to life, generally with a minimum of deviation from what we know from history. (The Smithsonian does a weekly blog post checking the facts.)

The second season wrapped up recently, with a cliffhanger that shows that the writers are ready to go for season 3. Hopefully NBC lets them keep going, or someone else picks it up.

Princess Principal

Cold War-style spy adventures set in a steampunk world is a fine background, if not one that you'd expect from the title of Princess Principal.

The princess in the title is one of a group of five teenage girls who act as spies in London, which is a divided city much like real-world Cold War-era Berlin. She's fourth in line to the throne of one side, the Kingdom of Albion, but acting in cooperation with intelligence operatives of the other side, the Commonwealth of Albion.

The steampunk part of the setting comes from a substance called Cavorite, used to construct airships and generally used in miraculous machines. Including one that allows one of the girls to fly and do various other amazing feats. The world at large is at early 20th century levels of technology and culture, but those Cavorite-based machines are highly advanced. All of it is beautifully drawn - the artwork is top-notch, whether drawing steampunk tech or the rest of the world.

Once you get past the usual suspension-of-disbelief about very young characters doing all these crazy things (which is necessary to almost all anime series and almost second nature for me by now), the overall story and individual episode plots in Princess Principal hang together pretty well. I like the world design, and I found the world-building history aspects interesting. Each episode generally follows a single spy mission, always going wrong in some way, as one would expect from this type of premise.

Chronology in the series is a bit odd, with the timeline jumping around with each episode. First you see a mission with all five girls, then we jump back and see how four of them first met, then a few more missions, before finally meeting the fifth member. And so on, until the last few episodes finally wrap things up in order.

For such a short series (twelve episodes), the character design is very good. Each of the five girls has some time devoted to their individual stories. Character growth is a bit odd because of the jumps back and forth in time across the episodes, but you can definitely see changes as time progresses. And of course the story of the princess and her closest friends is a big part of the overall storyline.

I greatly enjoyed Princess Principal and wish it had been longer. I see they're planning a film series next year, which I'll definitely be looking for.

Avengers: Infinity War (spoilers)

Been keeping up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU)? Hope so, since pretty much all of it shows up in Avengers: Infinity War.

Whatever themes in the MCU movies you may have liked, you'll probably find bits of it in Infinity War. Star-hopping shenanigans from Guardians of the Galaxy and Thor, time bending from Doctor Strange, alien invasions from the earlier Avengers films, Wakandan technology and home turf defense from Black Panther, and so on. If it feels like a bunch of different pieces stitched together, that's because it basically is.

The general arc of the plot is pretty easy to follow for the theoretical viewer who hadn't seen any other MCU films, as best I can tell. Big bad guy is gathering nasty weapons and killing people, try to stop him. But there's a lot of detail that would be missing. Most of that is in terms of character development - there's very little because all the time is being spent on jumping back and forth between all the different groups of heroes doing their separate things. In that way, Infinity War is more like a television series season finale than it is a stand-alone movie.

And like many good season finales, Infinity War ends on a cliff hanger. The heroes don't win, lots of people die, the bad guy is happily retired. Which is very different from the vast majority of MCU films, at least if you think of Infinity War as a stand-alone movie. But it's really part one, with a second part scheduled to come along in 2019. That will be the first episode of the next season, to continue the television series analogy, resolving that cliffhanger and setting things up for the next big storyline.

Like almost all big-budget films that I've seen in the last decade or so, I thought Infinity War was about 30-40 minutes too long. Plenty of character bits that were clearly there just to call back to the earlier movies could have been skipped. Stuff like Drax's "invisible" scene, or some of the Tony-Peter banter...not enough there to define the character relationships, just reminders of what we already know. And of course just about all the fight scenes are extended to show off more explosions and special effects. A bunch of that stuff could have been cut from the theatrical release and put into a director's cut, in my opinion. And was it really necessary to put the post-credits teaser scene (which sets up the Captain Marvel movie) at the very end of the credits?

Despite those annoyances, Infinity War is a fun ride, particularly if you've kept up with all the other MCU films over the last decade or so. It certainly did the job of setting up for the next Avengers film.

11.22.63 (on Hulu)

11.22.63 is an eight-part miniseries about an English teacher who goes back in time to prevent the Kennedy assassination. It's based on the book 11/23/63 by Stephen King.

I'm a fan of time travel and alternate history in general, so when this show popped up in a recommendation list it was a natural choice. I haven't read the book, so I didn't have any preconceived notions about the plot going in.

The series uses a very limited form of time travel in which a person can go through a "rabbit hole" in space-time and emerge in 1960. There's no other destination, and any changes you've made in prior trips are erased if you go through a second time. And if you try to make a major change to history, unlikely events will conspire to prevent you. There's no effort made to explain how it works or where it comes from, which is fine since it's just a plot device to enable the real story.

The protagonist is Jake, an English teacher who is recruited by his friend Al to go back in time and stop the assassination of JFK. Al is motivated by his experience in Vietnam, which he hopes will be prevented by changing history. Jake is a reluctant recruit, but eventually becomes dedicated to the cause.

Al gives Jake plenty of advice on how to avoid trouble while he's in the past, most of which is ignored. Just about everything Al warns Jake about...spending too much money, getting into close personal relationships, drawing attention to his future knowledge, overdoing his money-making scheme of sports betting...ends up happening. Honestly, I found it a bit silly just how inept Jake turns out to be in his role. But it makes for good drama, so it's not too hard to ignore.

The vast majority of the series is spent describing everything that happens with Jake from the time he arrives in 1960 until November 1963. While dealing with his self-inflicted issues from failing to follow Al's advice and bad luck from trying to change history, Jake follows the threads of various theories about what lead up to that day in Dallas. Russians, CIA, FBI, and of course lots about Lee Harvey Oswald. There are quite a few directions that the story could have gone, and I thought the one chosen made sense in the end.

The last episode wraps up Jake's time in the past and sends him back to his own time. I don't think it's much of a spoiler to say that he doesn't manage to create a utopia. It's a recurring theme in the series that good intentions don't always lead to the best results, and historical change is no exception.

All told, I enjoyed 11.22.63. It probably could have been a couple of episodes shorter, but it didn't drag out too long. I thought the portrayal of the 1960s was well done, and the cast did a fine job with all the characters. Worth a few hours to watch if you like drama and suspense with a historical twist.