Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 26

Star Trek Picard Takes a Trip into Jean-Luc’s Mind and Meets “Monsters”

Here is my take on the latest episode of Star Trek Picard, this time a lot faster. For my take on previous episodes and seasons of Star Trek Picard, go here.

Warning: Spoilers below the cut!

When we last met Jean-Luc Picard and his Merry Men and Women, Picard was in a coma, having gotten run over with a car by Doctor Soong and Agnes had merged with the Borg Queen and was on the loose in Los Angeles.

This episode opens with Picard, still clad in the tuxedo he wore at the astronaut party, in his ready room aboard what I presume is the Stargazer, since it does not look like the Enterprise ready room, dealing with an annoying routine psychological evaluation conducted by a annoying therapist played by an actor who looks disconcertingly familiar, though I couldn’t place him until the credits rolled.

To spare you the suspense, it turns out that the therapist is played by , who played Baltar in the new Battlestar Galactica and who has also been in a ton of other things. Of course, the original Baltar, John Colicos, also appeared in several Star Trek series over the years as the Klingon Commander Kor, beginning with the Original Series episode “Errand of Mercy” and running through several episodes of Deep Space Nine.

As I explained in one of my Star Trek Discovery reviews, I really don’t like therapy scenes and so I audibly groaned to find myself faced with yet another one of those. To quote Paul Levinson’s review of this episode, “if I wanted to see therapy scenes, I’d watch In Treatment“ (and I hate In Treatment, because it’s literally a show that focusses on the worst and most boring stuff found in other shows) In general, this episode spends way too much time in Jean Luc Picard’s head – quite literally, since Tallinn enters his mind to bring Picard out of his coma.

Since Picard is not being very cooperative, the therapist asks him to tell a joke or maybe a story or fairy tale. So Picard launches into a story about a red-haired queen and we get a flashback within a flashback (or whatever this is) about a young Picard and his mother cosplaying as queen and prince, while Picard’s mother paints the glass panes of the conservatory we saw in the first episode with scenes of fairies, stars and a shadowy monster with glowing eyes stalking through the woods.

The paintings suddenly come alive and the conservatory begins to shake. Picard’s Mom tells Picard to run and manages to close the doors to the conservatory just before the glass panes explode. Young Jean-Luc and his mother, still in their fairy tale cosplay outfits, escape into dungeons of Chateau Picard, an unseen monster in hot pursuit.

Now Americans tend to believe that any vaguely castle-like structure of course has a dungeon, though in truth many castles don’t actually have dungeons. And in spite of the name Chateau Picard is more of a villa or manor house than an actual castle, so it is extremely unlikely to have a dungeon. Chateau Picard is portrayed by the Sunstone Winery in Santa Ynez, California, i.e. it’s not even in France. And the Sunstone Villa was built in 2004, albeit modeled on villas in Tuscany, and very likely does not have a dungeon, unless the owners wanted one for the coolness factor.

In this episode, however, Chateau Picard morphs from a Tuscan inspired villa into Castle Grayskull and of course has creepy dungeons with all the expected funishings such as shackles, chains and grated doors and even monsters, though not quite as cool as those that inhabit Castle Grayskull’s dungeon. Maybe Chateau Picard was built on the ruins of Castle Joiry and has inherited that castle’s basement with its infamous portal to a hellish dimension of demonic black gods and green moons (which very likely inspired Castle Grayskull’s monster-infested dungeon). Hey, it makes as much sense as anything else.

It is implied that the “dungeons” of Chateau Picard are really the maze of underground tunnels that the Picard family used to escape the Nazis during WWII, which reminds me of the 1944 Robert Bloch story  “Iron Mask”, which was certainly one of the more bonkers vintage pulp SFF stories I reviewed for the Retro Reviews project. However, there is no explanation why random underground tunnels look like a cliché medieval dungeon.

The unseen monster eventually grabs Picard’s Mom, leaving little Jean-Luc all alone in a creepy dungeon. It is at this moment that Tallinn enters Picard’s mind and promptly ends up in the dungeon as well.  She meets young Jean-Luc, still in his prince outfit, chained to a pillar and frees him. Young Jean-Luc babbles something about monsters and his missing Mom, who’s behind a white door. So Tallinn decides to take young Jean-Luc by the hand and look for the missing mother.

By now, the dungeon has also acquired guards in chainmail and a couple of monsters straight out of a cheesy 1980s horror movie. The whole thing should probably be scary, but it’s really just silly. One of the monsters strangles Tallinn with a chain, while another grabs young Jean-Luc.

Meanwhile, in the real world, Seven and Raffi have finally remembered that Agnes Jurati exists, that they abandoned her at the party and that they should maybe look for her. Rios also points out that Agnes has been acting strangely and that he kissed him. So Seven and Raffi beam back aboard La Sirena, assuming that Agnes would have returned to the ship. However, they find no sign of Agnes and the ship’s consoles encrypted with a Borg code. Seven uses her Borg knowledge to crack the code and accesses video footage of Agnes entering the Borg encryption. Now Seven and Raffi finally realise that the Borg Queen is in the process of assimilating Agnes. Worse, the Borg Queen is loose in Los Angeles.

Rios is left behind at the clinic to watch over Picard and Tallinn, while Seven and Raffi set off to find the Borg Queen and stop her before she can assimilate Los Angeles and presumably all of Earth and make Q’s manipulation of the timeline look benevolent by comparison. They track Agnes to a bar she visited that night, still clad in the red evening gown. On yet more convenient security cam footage they see Agnes breaking a window. Seven points out that breaking the window caused Agnes to experiences an endorphine rush, which will make it easier for the Borg Queen to fully assimilate her.

I actually feel sorry for Agnes, since for most of season 2, the rest of the cast have treated her like a piece of furniture or a computer. No one pays attention to her, unless they need her to fix or hack or repair something. Considering how badly her supposed friends have treated Agnes, is it any wonder that she’s looking for friendship with the Borg Queen of all people? At least, the Borg Queen pays attention to Agnes. Plus, Borg-possessed Agnes appears to have a lot more fun than regular Agnes. She gets to wear a gorgeous dress, sing “Shadows of the Night” and gets noticed. When Agnes enters the bar where she will break the window, all eyes in the place are on her.

Back at the clinic, the various monitors attached to Picard begin to beep and his heartrate and brainwaves go haywire, as young Jean-Luc and Tallinn are being attacked by monsters inside Picard’s head.

Rios is the only one on site, but he has his hands full, because the increasingly suspicious Teresa and her space-obsessed kid Ricardo have returned. Teresa refuses to be kept out of the room where Picard and Tallinn are and Rios is running out of explanations for what is going on, what exactly is wrong with Picard and Tallinn (whose eyes have turned white and who is wearing a very telling pointy-shaped ear piece) and why he is talking to his badge (which for all Teresa knows is just a weird piece of jewellery with a voice chip).

However, for now there is a crisis and both Picard and Tallinn are in danger, so Rios calls Raffi and Seven and asks them to beam over a neural stimulator to settle down Picard’s brainwaves. Of course, Rios is not a doctor, so he hands the neural stimulator to Teresa, even though expecting Teresa to know what to do with a 25th century neural stimulator is like expecting a 17th century physician to know what to do with an X-Ray or MRT machine. However, it’s Star Trek and so everything works out. Picard’s brainwaves calm down and the monsters in his mind vanish, though young Jane-Luc finds himself chained to the same pillar again, prompting Tallinn to assume that something traumatic happened to him in connection with that pillar.

Back in the real world, Teresa is completely freaked out by talking jewellery and a weird medical miracle instrument that materialises out of thin air. “Are you from outer space?” she asks Rios in a riff on the classic scene from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. “No, I’m from Chile. I only work in outer space”, Rios replies.

The scenes with Rios, Teresa and Ricardo are the best thing about an otherwise weak episode. Santiago Cabrera and Sol Rodriguez have marvelous chemistry and you can literally see the sparks flying between those two. There are so many great moments between Rios and Teresa, such as when she tells her son to cover his ears, because she’s going to use some rude words. But Ricardo, being a kid, listens anyway and then says, “But you didn’t even use the good ones.” The young actor playing Ricardo is great anyway and behaves very much like you’d expect a kid to behave in such a situation. There’s also a nice scene where Rios and Ricardo are drawing spaceships with chalk on the walls of the clinic (another totally kid thing to do) and Ricardo draws a space shuttle variant like the spacecraft used for the Europa mission, while Rios draws La Sirena.

In the end, Rios decides to prove to Teresa that everything he just told her is the truth and beams Teresa and Ricardo aboard La Sirena. Ricardo – once again very much a typical kid – responds with, “I’m going to touch everything.” In his review at Tor.com, Keith R.A. De Candido points out that Rios taking Teresa and Ricardo for a tour of La Sirena is a spectacularly bad idea, because it has the potential to seriously alter the timeline, it’s not even Rios’ La Sirena, but a Confederation ship, and besides, the ship is full of Borg tech and touching everything is a seriously bad idea, unless you want to join the Borg collective.

He’s right, too, but I still loved Rios’ joy at showing off his ship (well, sort of his ship), Teresa’s stunned expression and Ricardo’s pure kid-like “I’m gonna touch everything” reaction and I wish we would have seen more of these characters. I also really hope that the story of Rios and Teresa and Ricardo ends more like Doc Brown’s story in the Back To The Future trilogy than Kirk and Edith Keeler’s in the Original Series episode “The City on the Edge of Forever”.

Meanwhile inside Picard’s brain, Tallinn frees little Jean-Luc again from the same shackles (which she breaks with her hands, Picard’s brain apparently bestowing the same super-strength on her as the Borg Queen does on Agnes), when suddenly who walks onto the scene but the therapist from the first scene. Only that the therapist is not in Starfleet uniform now, but in vaguely mid twentieth century civilian clothes. “You got to grow older than me”, the “therapist” says to Jean-Luc, “But I kept my hair.”

Yup, the therapist is Jean-Luc’s Dad, Maurice Picard, and he now shows up in his son’s brain decades after his own death to set the record straight. Now, Maurice Picard was not an abusive husband. His wife, however, was mentally ill and endangered little Jean-Luc, when she ran off into the underground tunnels during a breakdown. Jean-Luc’s foot got stuck in a rotting floorboard at the pillar with the chains, though there is still no explanation why the basement of Chateau Picard has a pillar with chains at all. Maybe the Nazis used it to restrain and torture prisoners, which honestly makes as much sense as anything else. Young Jean-Luc was down there for hours before his father found and rescued him.

As for Jean-Luc’s mother, Maurice loved her, but he couldn’t help her, so he locked her up in her room like a nineteenth century mad woman in the attic. Which sort of made sense in the nineteenth century, when psychiatry did not exist and mental illnesses were not understood and so-called insane asylums were usually even worse than being locked up in the attic.

However, all this happens in the twenty-fourth century and mental illness would be not only much better understood by that time, but would also likely be much better treatable (and conditions like schizophrenia can be controlled with medication even today). I mean, the flashbacks to Jean-Luc’s childhood probably happen around the same time as the Original Series episode “Dagger of the Mind”, where psychiatric treatment is a lot more advanced than locking women in attics. Yes, the Next Generation episode “Family” establishes that Maurice and his older son Robert are both luddites of sorts, which explains why they live in a nineteenth century looking vineyard and why they cosplay as if they lived in the 1930s to 1950s. However, unless there is some kind of religious cult involved, even the most fervent luddite would seek modern medical treatment for his mentally ill wife. Never mind that Maurice doesn’t strike me as someone who would leave his son along with his wife he knows is mentally ill and might endanger the kid. Honestly, none of this makes sense.

I also have no idea why we need to learn about Picard’s unhappy childhood now. I mean, the man is over eighty and considering everything that has happened to him (almost dying more than once, getting assimilated into a Borg, being tortured by Cardassians, living someone else’s life for forty years, etc…), a childhood trauma is probably not the biggest issue he has. Besides, “Family” made it more than clear that Picard is at odds with the rest of his family. As io9 reviewer James Whitbrook notes, the solution to the mystery of Picard’s deep dark trauma is not only underwhelming, it also doesn’t tell us anything about the character that we didn’t know already.

Finally, “Picard has attachment issues because of some deeo, dark trauma in his childhood” is also lazy writing. First of all, plenty of people with traumatic childhoods go on to live happy lives and have happy and fulfilling relationships. Secondly, not everybody who is not interested in a committed romantic relationship has some deep dark trauma in his past. Asexual people exist. Aromantic people exist. People who think that committed relationships are more trouble than they’re worth or who simply have no time or no interest for such things exist. People who are not opposed to committed relationships per se, but simply haven’t found the right partner exist. There are a myriad of reasons why people may not pursue committed romantic relationships and deep dark childhood trauma is only one of them.

Once Picard has resolved that part of his trauma (though Tallinn points out that there is more), he simply wakes up again and goes about his business once more. Tallinn reveals that she has pointed ears and actually is Romulan – as if the name and the pointy-eared brain interface thing weren’t giveaway enough. “I knew it”, Picard exclaims, “You must be an ancestor of Laris.” Honestly, with everybody playing their own ancestors – often multiple generations thereof, as the Soongs – I want to give everybody on the various Star Trek writing staff a genetics textbook, because that’s not how genetics work.

And talking of Dr. Adam Soong and his clone daughter Kore, in case you’re wondering what happened to them now Dr. Soong tried to murder someone at Q’s behest and Kore has learned that she’s a defective clone (and can someone please give Isa Briones storylines other than finding out that she’s not a “real girl”(TM) please?), well, keep wondering, because neither of them appears in this episode.

As for Renee Picard, the jobar point on whose fate the future of the entire galaxy hinges, her fate is dealt with in a single throwaway line by Tallinn. “Oh, she’s safe and in quarantine.” And so Renee exits the story like the MacGuffin that she was. Honestly, the character would have deserved better.

Meanwhile, Picard decides that it’s time to confront Q and ask him point blank what he wants. So he goes to see Guinan, giving us the welcome return of Ito Aghayere. The Next Generation established that there is a connection between El-Aurians and the Q Continuum, so Picard assumes that Guinan should be able to summon Q. Of course, Guinan is reluctant to do so, because honestly, who in their right mind would summon Q? The man is a bloody nuissance and nasty prankster.

However, Guinan eventually relents and agrees to summon Q by opening a bottle of a drink that was served during a peace summit between the El-Aurians and the Q Continuum. The entire bar shakes, glasses and bottles break and light bulbs explodes, but Q fails to appear – and neither does Barbara Eden. Come on, we were all thinking it.

Someone does appear however. A man in a badly fitting grey suit who says he had a hard day and just wants a drink. Guinan initially throws him out, but the man won’t go, so she pours him a drink. The new customer seems to be the chatty sort and tries to strike up a conversation with Picard, who of course has zero interest in talking to twenty-first centuries randos.

However, the randomy guy does not let up and his probings and questions become more insistent and ever so slightly sinister to the point that I wondered whether Guinan had not succeeded in summoning a Q after all, just a different one than expected.

Then the guy in the grey suit pulls out his phone and shows Guinan and Picard security cam footage of Picard materialising in the alley behind Guinan’s bar and I thought, “Oh, I bet he’s a reporter from some National Enquirer type publication.”

However, then the guy pulls out an FBI badge and no, he’s not buying Guinan’s claims that her security camera is broken adn keeps glitching. Instead, the FBI raid the bar and arrest both Guinan and Picard. Cue credits.

The last development not only comes completely out of nowhere, unlike Rios’ arrest a few episodes ago, it also makes no sense whatsoever. Because why would the FBI follow up on security camera footage of old men randomly materialising in alleys? This is not The X-Files, where the FBI absolutely would investigate such things and everything would be a huge conspiracy besides. It’s the Star Trek universe, where the FBI is probably more interested in hunting terrorists and serial killers than in investigating paranormal occurrences. Never mind that the Borg Queen is loose in Los Angeles and that Dr. Soong is conducting illegal genetic experiments and just tried to kill someone, so even in the framework of this episode, the FBI has better things to do than investigate weird videos.

Of course in the Star Trek universe, California has been experiencing strange visitors popping in and out of existence since 1968, so maybe there really is an FBI task force. But then it might have been nice to establish that beforehand. Or maybe Q or Dr. Soong are behind siccing the FBI on Picard and Guinan? But again, it would have been nice to at least hint at that beforehand.

This was the weakest episode of the season by far, largely because it spends way too much time on what was the least interesting part of the story, namely Picard’s deep dark childhood trauma(TM). In many ways, it reminds me of the endless flashbacks in the first half of The Book of Boba Fett, which told a story no one was particularly interested in, while short-changing the story we had come to watch.

What I really would have liked to see is more of “Agnes and the Borg Queen do L.A.” Or more of “The crosstemporal romance of Cristobal Rios and Doctor Teresa.” Never mind that I’d like to know what the hell is wrong with Q, what happened to Dr. Soong and Kore and what’s going on with Renee Picard. But what did the show give us instead? Endless flashbacks to the deep dark childhood trauma(TM) of an eighty-plus-year-old man who has accumulated plenty of more recent trauma since then.

I hope the show gets back on track next episode, because this episode was just irritating, a fine guest performance by James Callis aside.

 

 

 

 

 

Star Trek Picard Gets “Two For One”

Here is my take on the latest episode of Star Trek Picard. And yes, I know this is late, but I got nominated for a Hugo and then wrote a monster commentary post about the entire ballot. For my take on previous episodes and seasons of Star Trek Picard, go here.

But before we return to our regularly scheduled Star Trek Picard reviews, I want to point out this nice article by Alexandra Penth in the Weser Kurier about my Hugo nomination.

Warning: Spoilers below the cut!

When we last saw Jean Luc Picard and his Merry Men and Women, they were about to infiltrate an exclusive pre-launch party for the astronauts of the Europa mission, including Jean Luc’s ancestors Renee, whose presence on the mission is the Jonbar point on which the entire future of the Federation hinges. Picard and his team are trying to make sure that Renee joins the mission, while Q or rather his agents are trying to persuade her to resign.

Picard’s plan hinges on Agnes sneaking into the party, letting herself get captured and taken to the security center, where she will then hack into the security database to put Picard, Tallinn, Seven, Rios and Raffi on the guest list. However, unbeknowst to everybody else on the team, Agnes has a problem. She quite literally has the Borg Queen in her head. Though initially, the Borg Queen is actually helpful and allows Agnes to snap her handcuffs. How having the Borg Queen in her bestows superstrength on Agnes is not explained nor does it make any sense. Though the scenes of Agnes chatting with her inner Borg Queen are a lot of fun and Alison Pill and Annie Werschinger are clearly having a ball – quite literally.

This episode uses that really annoying flash forward device of starting off with some kind of dramatic scene – here Picard about to die on what appears to be an operating table – only to flash back to X amount of time (here 36 minutes) earlier to show the events that lead up to the dramatic moment. Tor.com reviewer Keith R.A. De Candido attributes this device to Aaron Sorkin, who apparently used it a lot in The West Wing, but I recall seeing similar flash forwards in 1990s TV shows like The X-Files, which predate The West Wing. But whoever originated the flash forward device, it still is a lazy way to generate tension by borrowing tension from a later point in the story, because the actual beginning of the story is deemed to be not exciting enough.

The flash forwards in “Two For One” are even more annoying, because there is not just the one at the beginning, but the flash forwards are peppered throughout the episode, where we see Picard lying on the table, seemingly dead or dying, while the rest of the cast shouts his name and Picard has flashbacks of his traumatic childhood and his mother. It’s irritating and entirely unnecessary and does not even do what it’s supposed to do, namely generate tension, because we know that Picard won’t die. Never mind that the show did the exact same thing, kill off Picard, at the end of season 1, only for him to come back in an android body.

Honestly, by now Picard can give reigning world record holder in deaths and resurrections Jean Grey a run for her money, which is ironic because Patrick Stewart played Professor Charles Xavier (who has died and come back a couple of times himself) in X-Men: The Last Stand, a failed adaptation of the Dark Phoenix Saga. And honestly, how come that Fox has screwed up one of the most famous superhero comic storylines of all time twice, when there are plenty of good films and TV shows inspired by the Dark Phoenix Saga out there?

Once Agnes has hacked the security database and everybody has snuck into the party, we get some nice character moments. Tallinn tries to get Picard to tell her more about Laris, since he keeps calling her by that name. Picard insists that it’s not important, which is of course Picard lying not just to Tallinn but to himself. Raffi is womanfully resisting the urge to drink alcohol and has flashbacks of Elnor again (I suspect the reason for the Elnor flashbacks is because Evan Evagora is still in the credits, even though his character is currently dead). Seven is enjoying a life without Borg implants and the prejudices that come with them. The Borg Queen is egging Agnes on to live a little and enjoy herself, which leads to the Borg Queen briefly control of Agnes’ body to kiss Rios. As for Rios, he has taken a liking to the 21st century, enjoying the intensity of real cigars, the feel of real matches and the taste of non-replicated food.

Santiago Cabrera is once more excellent portraying Rios adorably geeking out about a box of matches. Most Star Trek characters pretend that there is no difference between replicated food, etc… and the real deal, something I have never bought, so it’s nice to see Star Trek acknowledge that yes, there is a difference. Though Rios doesn’t just like the tastes and smells of the 21st century, he’s also taken a liking to Doctor Teresa. I wouldn’t be surprised if Rios elects to stay in the 21st century at the end of the season, though his particular skill-set – ace space pilot – isn’t one that is useful in the 21st century due to a relative lack of space travel.

Meanwhile, Renee Picard is having a much less good time. Her smile looks forced, she drinks too much and keeps texting her therapist (who, as we saw last week, is Q) that she wants to resign from the mission after the party. So Picard overrules Tallinn’s code that the watchers must never interact with the object of their observations and decides to talk to Renee.

However, before Picard can go after Renee to deliver one of his patented inspirational speeches, he runs into an obstacle in the form of Dr. Adam Soong. Picard looks as if he has seen a ghost – which he has, sort of, since all the Soongs look the same.

Soong is there as an agent of Q, working to keep Renee away from the Europa mission in exchange for the cure for the deadly genetic disease from which his daughter Kore is suffering. Why Q can’t attend the party himself, especially since he works for NASA as a therapist, is a mystery? As for how Soong got in – he supposedly made a generous donation to the Europe mission project.  Where did Soong get the money, considering that he just lost the funding for his research over ethics violations (which turn out be a lot bigger than previously assumed) last episode?

Picard and Soong exchange menacing looks and words, then Soong goes to his new friends from the Europa mission project (The donation was very generous indeed) and asks them to remove Picard from the premises. Soon Picard and Tallinn are surrounded by security guards, about to be kicked out or worse.

A distraction is needed, so the Borg Queen of all people comes to everybody’s rescue. She persuades Agnes to hack the electrical system and make the lights go out, throwing the security guards off track. Then a much more confident Agnes re-enters the party and begins to sing “Shadows of the Night”.  It’s a beautifully absurd moment, but also very Star Trek. After all, The Next Generation found an excuse to have Beverly Crusher teach Data how to tapdance to allow Gates McFadden and Brent Spiner to show off their dancing skills. The Borg Queen persuading Agnes to create a distraction by singing “Shadows of the Night”, allowing Alison Pill to show off her quite impressive singing voice, is nothing against that.

In my last post, I noticed that season 2 of Picard has a lot more recognisable pop music than is usual for Star Trek, but also noted that the music all hails from the same era, namely the late 1950s and early 1960s. “Shadows of the Night” breaks this trend, because the song (which I suspect was chosen for its lyrics) dates from the early 1980s. Helen Schneider was the first to perform it in 1981, but the best known version was recorded by Pat Benatar a year later. And yes, that’s a young Judge Reinhold and Bill Paxton in that video, which is one of those amazing 1980s music videos that were basically three minute mini movies. We still get this sort of music video on occasion – a few examples have been nominated for the Best Dramatic Presentation Short Hugo in the past few years – but not as frequently as in the 1980s. Here’s another example: “Love Is a Battlefield”, also be Pat Benatar, in which Pat plays a small town girl who gets kicked out of her home and runs away to New York City to become a dime-a-dance taxi girl in one of the taxi dance halls that used to cluster around Times Square, but were definitely on their way out if not already gone by the early 1980s. This video is amazing, not just because “Love is a Battlefield” is a great song, but also for the glimpse into a lost world.

Once everybody is staring at Agnes, Picard goes after Renee, who has withdrawn to some kind of exhibition gallery to be alone. Renee doesn’t quite buy that Picard is a security guard – he’s way too for that – and she does think he seems a little familiar. However, Picard does succeed in giving Renee one of his patented stirring speeches and Renee decides to go on the mission after all.

However, just as Picard escorts Renee back to the party, decided to cross the parking lot for reasons unknown, disaster strikes in the form of Dr. Adam Soong, who – furious that his plan did not work – decides to just run over Renee with his car to make sure she’d not on the Europa mission. This is clearly a spur of the moment idea, because it will only lead to Dr. Soong getting arrested and his daughter Kore dying anyway.

Picard, heroic as ever, pushes Renee out of the way and promptly gets run over by Dr. Soong, which is why he is apparently dying in the flash forwards. I honestly did not expect this – but then who does expect that Jean-Luc Picard would get run over by a deranged ancestor of Data? io9 reviewer James Whitbrook clearly agrees that the way Picard gets injured is unexpected, even if we know that he will be injured from the first few seconds of the episode on.

Once Dr. Soong has run over Picard, Rios, Raffi, Seven and Tallinn all come running, while Renee sort of vanishes from the storyline at this point, having fulfilled her function as a plot MacGuffin. Picard clearly needs medical attention – however, they can’t take him to a regular hospital, because questions would be asked and none of them have regular IDs. Luckily, Rios just happens to know one clinic where no one asks questions and so we get the triumphant return of Doctor Teresa.

Teresa is not at all happy to be roused from a well deserved night’s sleep, but helping people in need is her job and besides, the obvious attraction Rios feels for her is mutual. Teresa does manage to bring Picard’s heart back online with a defibrilator, but unfortunately Picard – or rather his android body – causes a feedback. Of course, this does not make a whole lot of sense, as Camestros Felapton points out in his review, because Picard should be in the body he has in the dystopian future they escaped from – just like Seven is in a fully human body without Borg implants. And since it’s rather unlikely that Picard just happens to have an android body in both timelines, he should have his regular human body, which is also why he almost dies from getting hit by Dr. Soong, something an android body should be able to shrug off.

By now, Teresa realises that there is something very odd about Rios and his friends, though when she asks Rios point blank about that, he fobs her off. Though I suspect he will eventually come clean.

Now Teresa has patched up Picard, he should theoretically wake up. However, Picard stubbornly remains unconscious. Tallinn uses some convenient (and never before seen) super-duper brain scanning technology and determined that Picard’s brain is active, but he seems to be trapped inside his own brain, lost in memories. Teresa has gone home to check on her son at this point or otherwise, Rios would have to answer some very hard questions.

Tallinn also announces that she will venture into Picard’s brain to bring him back, since her super duper technology also allows her to do that. Raffi is not at all happy about the idea – “What could go wrong?” – but since they need Picard and his knowledge about Q, she finally relents. So I guess we’ll spend the next episode rummaging through Picard’s traumatic memories of his childhood which have left him permanently unable to form longterm romantic relationships.

However, first we still have to tie up the loose ends from this episode. For starters, there’s Dr. Soong who manages not to get arrested, but makes it home in one piece, though rather distraught. Kore notices that something is very wrong here and begins to rummage through her father’s computer. She finds a lot of not very flattering newspaper headlines about her father – and don’t tell me that Kore, a young woman living in 2024, has never googled her father or own name before – and also private files and photos of herself as a kid, only that she does not remember any of the events depicted.

Turns out that Kore is not Dr. Soong’s biological daughter, but a clone, the latest in a long series of clones who keep dying young of the very same disease Kore has. Soong is determined to keep this clone alive, because she is – as he actually says to Kore – his life’s work. Now I have to admit that I did not see this particular development coming. It also makes me like this Dr. Soong even less – and my opinion of him was already low after he tried to run over Reneee and Picard. After all, this guy has created dozens of clones, all of whom died painfully at very young ages. This goes beyond the lovably eccentric mad scientist into villainous mad scientist territory. But then, all Soongs not named Data are at the very least dodgy. And yes, a whole multigenerational clan of mad scientists with a fervent desire to create artificial life does stretch the suspense of disbelief.

The other loose end of this episode is Agnes, who is left behind at the party, when Raffi, Seven and Rios rush Picard to the Mariposa Clinic. They don’t even seem to notice that Agnes is missing. Honestly, it’s not wonder that Agnes befriends the Borg Queen of all people, because no one pays any attention to her unless they need her to do something. Agnes is treated like a human sonic screwdriver much of the time. However, the applause and cheers of the audience at the end of her performance of “Shadows of the Night” flood her system with endorphines, which gives the Borg Queen a chance to take control of Agnes’ mind. Oops.

The Borg Queen, wearing Agnes’ body, is last seen walking along a busy Los Angeles street, barefoot and still dressed in her red evening gown and clearly ready to party Borg Queen style. She is walking towards the US Bank Tower, a building we know tends to attract alien attention. What will the Borg Queen do to 21st century Los Angeles? As Paul Levinson points out in his review, it can’t be good.

This episode is once again a whole lot of fun, but also something of a mess. Plot twists happens out of nowhere, earlier plot points are forgotten and both the Borg Queen and Tallinn come up with handy deus-ex-machina solutions more than once. It’s a testament to how much fun this show is that you don’t really notice that it makes no sense until you think about it.

I think what keeps me watching at this point are the actors and their performance, since you can see and feel how much fun they are having. That fun is infectious. Though I still hope that the plot will eventually make sense again for the remaining episodes.

The next Star Trek Picard review will go up sometime in the next few days. Not sure if I’ll do Moon Knight or not, though I like what I’ve seen so far.

Some Thoughts on the 2022 Hugo Finalists

So at last, here is my Hugo finalist reaction post. I know it took a bit, but since I’m a Hugo finalist myself this year, I took some time off to celebrate, congratulate fellow finalists and update everything that needed updating.

So let’s take a look at the finalists for the 2022 Hugo Award. You can also read the reactions of Camestros Felapton and listen to a lengthy video of a panel of Booktubers discussing the finalists. Also read this lovely piece by Chris M. Barkley detailing his reactions upon learning he was a Hugo finalist for Best Fan Writer.

And now, let’s delve right into the categories under the cut:

Best Novel

The 2022 Hugo finalists for Best Novel are a mix of new writers and returning favourites.

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine and The Galaxy, and the Ground Within by Becky Chambers are both sequels to previous winners (Arkady Martine won Best Novel in 2020 and Becky Chambers won Best Series in 2019). They are also very good books and I am not at all surprised to see them here.

A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark is a sequel to the 2020 Best Novella finalist The Haunting of Tram Car 015 and also a very enjoyable SFF murder mystery that was also on my ballot.

I have read neither She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan nor Light From Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki, though both got a lot of positive buzz, when they came out, so I’m not surprised to see them on the ballot. And I’m definitely looking forward to reading both of them.

The sixth finalist in this category is Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, which surprised me a little, for though popular, Andy Weir is more of a Dragon Award than a Hugo or Nebula type author. And indeed, Project Hail Mary did win the 2021 Dragon Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.

Now I have to admit that I did not care for The Martian and was baffled by its popularity even among people who don’t usually read SF, because to me it read like something that might have appeared in Analog in the 1960s or 1970s. Hence, I did not read Andy Weir’s next two books. However, now Project Hail Mary is a Hugo finalist, I will be reading it and maybe it will work better for me than The Martian.

Besides, the fact that there are two male authors nominated for Best Novel, including a white cis man writing hard science fiction, should pacify those folks who worry that men are being shut out of the Hugos.

Diversity count: 4 women, 2 men, 3 writers of colour, 1 international author*.

Best Novella

Here we have a a category full of familiar and popular names.

Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series is a perennial favourite in this category (and also nominated for Best Series), so it’s no surprise to see Across the Green Grass Fields here.

Becky Chambers is another favourite of the Hugo voters and is represented in this category with A Psalm for the Wild-Built, the first of a new novella series. I haven’t read it yet, though I suspect I will like it, since I usually like Becky Chambers’ work.

Aliette de Bodard is another author whom we frequently see on the Hugo and Nebula ballot. Fireheart Tiger is also a very good story and was on my ballot as well.

Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky is something of a surprise for me, though a very pleasant one, because I enjoyed the novella and its “science in a fantasy world” approach a whole lot. But while Adrian Tchaikovsky is a very good and very popular author and has won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and frequently appears on the BSFA and Clarke ballot, Hugo voters ususally tend to overlook him, so I’m glad that he finally got a long overdue Hugo nomination.

The Past Is Red by Catherynne M. Valente completely passed me by, I’m afraid. It’s a post-apocalyptic novel set in a place called Garbagetown, which does sound interesting.

I haven’t read A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow and as regular readers will know, I’m not the world’s biggest fan of fairy tale retellings. However, I’ve usually liked everything I’ve read by Alix E. Harrow, so I suspect I will enjoy this one, too.

Notable by its absence is Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells, but then I suspect that she may have withdrawn, just like she did for the Nebulas.

There’s some wailing and gnashing of teeth that all six finalists in this category were published by Tor.com. Unlike the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth from certain quarters, there is some merit to this, because if a single publisher completely dominates one category it is a problem.

That said, Tor is the biggest SFF publisher in the English speaking world and the Tor.com imprint did a lot to revitalise the novella form, which was limited to small presses, magazines and self-publishers before that. However, while small presses like Subterranean, Prime Books, Meerkat Press, Telos, Crystal Lake or Neon Hemlock do good work and publish some very fine novellas, they can’t compete with Tor.com’s marketing clout. Ditto for indies and magazines.

So rather than complain about Tor.com’s dominance, maybe we should support and talk up the smaller publishers of novellas more. For example, there were three novellas not published by Tor.com on my ballot, The Return of the Sorceress by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, published by Subterranean, “A Manslaughter of Crows” by Chris Willrich, which appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies and “The Unlikely Heroines of Callisto Station” by Marie Vibbert, which appeared in Analog.

Diversity count: 5 women, 1 man, 1 writer of colour, 2 international writers

Best Novelette

“Bots of the Lost Ark” by Suzanne Palmer is a great story and was also on my ballot.

Unfortunately, I have to admit that I haven’t read any of the other finalists in this category, though I’m looking forwatd to checking them out, because discovering great stories you missed the first time around is one of the best things about being a Hugo voter.

Besides, Caroline M. Yoachim, Catherynne M. Valente, John Wiswell, Fran Wilde and Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki are all excellent writers, so I’m sure I’m in for a treat.

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is the only first time finalist in this category. He is also the first black African born Hugo finalist of all time. For while there have been several Hugo finalists from the African diaspora in recent years, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is the first black finalist who was actually born in Africa and still lives there.

In case you’re wondering who the first Hugo African born Hugo finalist was (and no, I did not know this until a few days ago either), that was Manly Wade Wellman who was born in what is now Angola in 1903, when his father worked as a doctor there. He was a Hugo finalist in 1959 and a Retro Hugo winner in 2020. Furthermore, Dave Freer, who was a Hugo finalist in 2015, was born in South Africa, though he lived in Australia, when nominated. Also, both Wellman and Freer are white.

We have another almost first here, for “O2 Arena” by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki was published in Galaxy’s Edge magazine, which – probably due to being a print magazine – does not get a whole lot of awards love.  I actually thought this was the first nomination for Galaxy’s Edge, but they also published the 2015 Short Story finalist “Totaled” by Kary English. The other finalists in this category were published in Uncanny, Clarkesworld and Tor.com.

Diversity count: 4 women, 2 men, 2 writers of colour, 1 international writer

Best Short Story

“Mr. Death” by Alix E. Harrow is a wonderful story that will make you misty-eyed and was also on my ballot.

“Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” by Sarah Pinsker is a fascinating story in the form of a Wikipedia article plus the discussion page about a (fictional) folk ballad.

I have read neither “Proof by Induction” by José Pablo Iriarte nor “The Sins of America” by Catherynne M. Valente, though I look forward to reading them. I also note that this is a very good year for Caterynne M. Valente with one nomination each in Novella, Novelette and Short Story. And while José Pablo Iriarte has been a Nebula finalist before, this is their first Hugo nomination.

“Tangles” by Seanan McGuire is another story I haven’t read. What’s notable about it is that it was published not in one of the print or online magazines, but on the Magic the Gathering website. Tie-in fiction rarely gets Hugo nominations, which is why the Scribe Awards exist and the Dragon Awards have a tie-in category. Though tie-ins are absolutely eligible for the Hugos. Nor is this is the first media tie-in story nominated for a Hugo, that would be “The Butcher of Khardov” by Dan Wells, a Best Novella finalist in 2014.

Finally, we have “Unknown Number” by Blue Neustifter, which is another first, because it’s a story that was originally published on Twitter. You can read it here (and you should because it’s a really good story). There have been some grumblings that a Twitter thread was nominated for a Hugo. But first of all, “Unknown Number” is not a Twitter thread per se, but a story that happened to be published on Twitter. And yes, it is a story which plays with form, but then there have been several other stories that play with form on the Hugo ballot, including one (“Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”), which is nominated in this very category this year. “Unknown Number” could have been published just as well in Uncanny or Apex or Clarkesworld and no one would have batted eyelash.

Diversity count: 5 women, 1 non-binary, 1 writer of colour

Best Series

Now comes my annual gripe that the Best Series Hugo does not quite do what it was initially designed for, namely rewarding popular long-running series, which rarely get Hugo love, because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, it is striking that Outlander by Diana Gabaldon, a hugely popular SFF series which not only begot a whole subgenre (time travel romance) but also spawned a successful TV series, does not show up on the Hugo ballot, even though it would have been eligible for the publication of Tell the Bees I’m Gone in 2021.

That said, the Best Series Hugo is getting better at what it was supposed to do, because this year, we have only two series on the ballot where individual works were nominated in the respective fiction categories. Two of the finalists in this category are even first time finalists, i.e. they have never been nominated in any category before. Plus, the series are mostly actual series rather than “If you squint really hard, these books are all set in the same universe and make up a series”. Finally, this is also a really good selection of finalists, so let’s dive in:

I was very impressed with the Terra Ignota quartet by Ada Palmer and am very happy to see it recognised here. It was also on my ballot.

The World of the White Rat books by T. Kingfisher a.k.a. Ursula Vernon are a delight and once again, I’m thrilled to see them here. And while Ursula Vernon is a favourite of Hugo voters, none of the White Rat books have ever been nominated before. This series was also on my ballot BTW.

The World of the White Rat books are also unabashedly fantasy romance, a subgenre that normally does not do well at the Hugos. Now if we could only persuade Hugo voters to nominate other romancey SFF series like J.D. Robb’s In Death series or Patricia Briggs’ or Ilona Andrews’ various series or yes, Outlander.

Seanan McGuire has been present on the Best Series ballot with different series since its inception in 2017, but then she is both prolific and popular. This year, she is nominated for her Wayward Children series. I have to admit that I prefer her October Daye and Incryptid books to the Wayward Children series, but that series is clearly popular, considering several of the individual installments have been nominated in Best Novella over the years.

I have read never the Green Bone Saga by Fonda Lee nor the Kingston Cycle by C.L. Polk, but I have heard good things about both series and look forward to reading them. This is the first Hugo nomination for both Fonda Lee and C.L. Polk BTW.

Charles Stross is an author whose books just don’t work for me, I’m afraid. I bounced hard off Singularity Sky and its sequel some eighteen years ago (how time flies). And whenever I tried reading one of his books afterwards, usually because it was on the Hugo ballot, I had the same reaction. However, not everything has to be for me and that’s okay. Besides, maybe Merchant Princes, the series he is nominated for this year, will be the exception.

Diversity count: 4 women, 1 man, 1 non-binary, 2 writers of colour, 3 international writers

Best Graphic Story

We have a nice mix of returning favourite and new finalists here.

Monstress, Once & Future and DIE are all series we have been in this category before. They’re also very good comics.

Far Sector by N.K. Jemisin and Jamal Campbell is part of the Green Lantern subuniverse of the Greater DC Universe. I haven’t read it, but I have heard good things.

DC, which so far has lagged behind Image, Boom and Marvel in Hugo nominations, is also represented by Strange Adventures by Tom King, Mitch Gerards and Even “Doc” Shaner. This series represents a new take on the classic Silver Age DC character Adam Strange. Once again, I haven’t read it (not a big DC reader), but Tom King is one of the best comic writers working right now. It’s also notable that both superhero comics on the Hugo ballot are also space opera comics.

Lore Olympus by Rachel Smythe, finally, is a retelling of the Greek legend of Persephone, which started life as a webcomic and was later collected and nominated for an Eisner Award. I’m not familiar with this one at all, but it certainly sounds like something I should enjoy.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make comics.

Best Related

Best Related Work is a category I usually gripe about, because the edge case finalists like virtual cons, fanfiction archives, angry rants, documentaries, etc… tend to crowd out that non-fiction books that the category was originally designed for.

However this year, I not only have nothing to gripe about, but the finalists for the Best Related Work Hugo actually make me very happy. Because we have five non-fiction books nominated as well as one article, which is meatier than several of the other single articles we have seen in this category over the years.

And yes, there are some people who are annoyed that Best Related contains mainly non-fiction books this year, rather than the weird grab bag that it has become and are talking about a backlash. But taking the category back to what it was designed for is a course correction, not a backlash. And personally, I would be in favour of splitting Best Related into Best Non-Fiction and Best Miscellany to catch all the weird stuff people apparently want to nominate and still have a dedicated non-fiction category.

As you may remember, I started the non-fiction spotlight project in order to highlight SFF-related non-fiction books eligible for the Hugo Awards and interviewed the authors and editors of several excellent Hugo-eligible non-fiction. Therefore, I’m thrilled that three non-fiction books I featured, The Complete Debarkle: Saga of a Culture War by Camestros Felapton, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950 to 1985, edited by Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre and True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman, made the ballot. So the non-fiction spotlight project did make an impact (and I will be very interested to see, if any of the other books I featured made the longlist). I will also continue with the non-fiction spotlights and already have some excellent 2022 non-fiction books and authors lined up.

The remaining finalists in this category include two more non-fiction books. Never Say You Can’t Survive by Charlie Jane Anders is a (very good) writing craft book that was originally serialised at Tor.com before appearing in book form. As for why I didn’t feature it as a non-fiction spotlight, I erroneously assumed that Never Say You Can’t Survive was a 2020 book, based on the original Tor.com series (and indeed, it was on my ballot last year), and missed the fact that the book version came out in 2021 and is therefore eligible for the 2022 Hugos. Luckily, plenty of other people noticed and so we have another excellent finalist in this category.

Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism is a memoir by Elsa Sjunneson, last year’s Hugo winner for Best Fan Writer. This is another genre-related non-fiction book I did not feature, because until a few days ago I had no idea that it existed – sorry, Elsa. However, I always find Elsa’s thoughts about ableism in SFF and society very insightful and look forward to reading the book.

The final nominee in this category is the Vox article “How Twitter Can Ruin a Life” by Emily St. James, i.e. the article about the Isabel Fall “Helicopter Story” affair. I have some issues with this article, since it was used as grounds for further harassment of writers deemed responsible for the speculations about and attacks on Isabel Fall – which is neither Emily St. James’ nor Isabel Fall’s fault, but a case of harassers will harass. That said, the article itself is well researched and a lot meatier than some of the shorter essays and articles we have seen nominated in this category, so it’s certainly a worthy finalist.

Diversity count: 4 men, 3 women, 3 international writers (all of whom are Australian)

Best Dramatic Presentation Long

I expected/feared a full Marvel/Pixar/Disney sweep in this category with Dune and maybe a Zack Snyder film thrown in. Luckily, the actual ballot is more interesting and diverse, even if only one of my own nominees made it.

Denis Villeneuve’s take on Dune is of course a finalist (and IMO the favourite to win), as was to be expected. Coincidentally, Dune has now been nominated for a Hugo in five different versions, the serialisation of Dune World in 1965, the novel Dune as we know it today (which combines the serials Dune World and Dune Messiah) in 1966, the David Lynch adaptation in 1985, the Sci-Fi Channel mini-series in 2001 and now the Denis Villeneuve adaptations.

Superhero movies/TV shows in general and Marvel in particular are represented by WandaVision and Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings this year. I can’t disagree with either nomination and WandaVision was also on my ballot, since it’s a case where the whole was greater than the sum of its parts, so into Best Dramatic Long it went. I do find it interesting that of the four Marvel movies that came out in 2021 Shang-Chi is the one which got the Hugo nod over the massively popular Spider-Man: No Way Home, which Marvel was heavily pushing for the Oscar. But while Spider-Man: No Way Home is a lot of fun and full of fan service, Shang-Chi actually is the better movie and tells a story that is comprehensible without having watched twenty years worth of Spider-Man as well as all other Marvel movies.

The nomination for Encanto was probably inevitable, though I have to admit that the magic of the Disney/Pixar CGI animated movies escapes me, but then I’m not the target audience for those either. Encanto at least has some catchy music courtesy of Lin Manuel Miranda. And this excellent review by Arturo Serrano giving the cultural background has made me more interested in watching it.

Now we come to the two Best Dramatic Presentation Long finalists which make me really, really happy, namely The Green Knight and Space Sweepers. Both are the sort of smaller indie films that I often nominate in this category (though ironically, I nominated three other smallish indie SFF films this year, namely Ich bin dein Mensch/I’m Your Man, The Spine of Night and Last Night in Soho), but which rarely make the ballot, getting crowded out by the Marvel/Star Wars/Disney/Pixar machine on the one hand and the “big budget serious business science fiction film of the year” on the other.

The Green Knight is a visually stunning and utterly beautiful take on the Arthurian legend, which did not get nearly the attention it deserved, when it came out last year, and was completely overlooked by the Oscars as well. Some reviewers also seemed to confused that the story was quieter and somewhat meandering and there were less swordfights than expected, which made me wonder if they were familiar with the original legend at all. So I’m really glad to see The Green Knight on the Hugo ballot.

Space Sweepers is a delightful science fiction movie from South Korea about a rag-tag spaceship crew. In recent years, South Korea has established itself as a powerhouse of SFF film and TV, though so far the Hugo ballot does not really reflect it. Furthermore, films and TV shows in languages other than English still have a very hard time getting nominated for Hugos and there have only been a handful of non-English language films nominated for a Hugo, namely Last Year at Marienbad in 1963 (lost to No Award), Spirited Away in 2003 (lost to Lord of the Rings) and Pan’s Labyrinth in 2007 (won).

Of course, I hoped that the fourth non-English language film to make the Hugo ballot would be the German film Ich bin dein Mensch/I’m Your Man and I’m disappointed that one did not make it, but I’m still very happy for Space Sweepers.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make movies.

Best Dramatic Presentation Short

There are several surprises in this category. It’s also one of the most diverse Best Dramatic Presentation Short ballots we’ve seen in a long time, with episodes from six different TV series nominated and only one of them a repeat nominee. Finally, this is the first Best Dramatic Presentation Short ballot in sixteen years without a single Doctor Who episode, even though there were several eligible.

The Expanse is the only returning finalist in this category (and this will be its last year, since the series ended), represented by the episode “Nemesis Games”. I’m woefully behind with The Expanse, so I haven’t watched it yet, though I usually enjoy the show.

Along with WandaVision, Loki was the most interesting and innovative of the Marvel Disney+ series and I’m happy to see it recognised here for the episode “The Nexus Event”. This is also the only one of my nominations which sort of made it, since I did nominate Loki, albeit a different episode.

For All Mankind is a show I just cannot connect with. A lot of people I respect like the show, but I simply have zero interest in it. US space program alternate histories seem to be popular at the moment, but one thing that annoys me about them is that a lot of them try to downplay or erase the contributions of the German rocket scientists to the US space porgram. Not sure if this show does it, but I recall seeing an early review along those lines, which set me against it. Also, if one Apple+ streaming show should have made the ballot, I think Foundation would have been a much better choice and it’s absence is baffling. Or even that post-apocalyptic show with Jason Momoa.

The Wheel of Time is a show I am a little surprised to see here, because the fanbase of the books did not seem to like the TV series all that much, plus it came out during the glut of SFF series that were released by the streaming services around Thanksgiving last year. That’s also why I haven’t watched the series yet, because it came out around a time when there were a whole lot of other SFF series that I wanted to watch more. Besides, I don’t care for the Wheel of Time books, so the series is low on the list of things I’m interesting in watching.

Finally, we have two animated series on the ballot. Now we have seen animated series on the Hugo ballot in this category before, e.g. a She-Ra episode was nominated last year and a My Little Pony episode a few years ago, and several animated films have been nominated in longform over the years, but we have never seen two animated series on the ballot in the same year. Though the animated series I was really rooting for, Masters of the Universe: Revelation, sadly did not make it.

Star Trek: Lower Decks is the one Star Trek series I don’t watch, because there simply is more Star Trek out there than I have time to watch. Plus, with animated series the animation style is very important to me and if the style puts me off – as happened with the new She-Ra – I’ll have a hard time with a series, even if I like the actual stories. And I’m not a fan of Lower Decks‘ animation style. Coincidentally, this is also the first time any Star Trek episode has been on the ballot since 2018, in spite of the fact that there is a lot of Star Trek right now.

Arcane came out during the end of the year content glut and largely passed me by. It does look interesting, though, and stylistically more up my alley than Lower Decks and I look forward to trying it.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make TV shows.

Best Editor Short

This category is a nice mix of the established and new names, all of whom do good work.

Neil Clarke, Jonathan Strahan and Sheila Williams are all names we have seen in this category several times before.

Mur Lafferty and S.B. Divya are on their second nomination in this category. Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki and Sheree Renée Thomas are first time finalists in this category and coincidentally also the first black finalists in Best Editor Short ever.

Diversity count: 4 women, 3 men, 3 editors of colour, 2 international editors

Best Editor Long

Ruoxi Chen is the only new editor nominated in this category. Sarah Guan and Nivia Evans are on their second nomination, Brit Hvide on her third. Navah Wolfe (six nominations) and Patrick Nielsen Hayden (I lost count, sorry) are the relative veterans in this category.

Interestingly, this is the first time since 2013 that Patrick Nielsen has been on the Hugo ballot for Best Editor Long and the first time since 2018 that a male editor is a finalist in this category, since longform editing is heavily female nominated.

Diversity count: 5 women, 1 man, 3 editors of colour.

Best Pro Artist

This used to be a category with few changes and the same few people nominated over and over again, but that has changed in recent years and so we have a nice mix of new and returning finalists in this category.

Will Staehle and Ashley McKenzie are the two new names in this category. Maurizio Manzieri, Rovina Cai, Tommy Arnold and Alyssa Winans have been nominated before in the past few years. They all do excellent work and I’m happy to see them on the ballot, particularly Alyssa Winans who is not only a great SFF artist, but also a friend.

Diversity count: 3 women, 3 men, at least 2 artists of colour, 3 international artists.

Best Semiprozine

Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Escape Pod, FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction, PodCastle, Strange Horizons and Uncanny are all very good magazines, all of whom we’ve seen nominated in this category before.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to publish magazines.

Best Fanzine

I’m really, really happy to see Galactic Journey back on the ballot after a years of absence and not just because I write for them, but also because they do really great work.

Journey Planet is the veteran in this category, but they continue to do good work. Plus, I even had an article in issue 59 of Journey Planet.

Quick Sip Reviews has been nominated several times in this category and Charles Payseur has been steadily doing good work reviewing short fiction. Quick Sip wound down at the end of 2021, so maybe this will be their year.

The Full Lid and An Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog are both back on the ballot and I’m very happy to see them here, since they both do great work.

The one new finalist in this category and also the only one I was unfamiliar with is Small Gods. There have been some grumblings about this nomination, because while the other fanzine finalists publish reviews, essays, news pieces and discussion, Small Gods is a combination of art and microfiction.

Of course, there have been fiction fanzines nominated in Best Fanzine before, though not in the last twenty years or so, since fanfiction has moved largely onto the internet into places like AO3. And the definition of Best Fanzine does not exclude fiction.

There have also been some grumblings that Seanan McGuire is a professional writer, but then we have seen several professional writers nominated in the fan categories before. Honestly, I thought that we settled that particular issue back when John Scalzi won in 2008.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make fanzines

Best Fancast

This category tends to get a little stale with the same podcasts nominated over and over again, which is part of why I started the Fancast Spotlights. However, we have two first time finalists this year – both of whom I featured – which is nice.

Last year’s winner The Coode Street Podcast (whom I still haven’t featured) is back, as is Be the Serpent and – after a year of absence – Our Opinions Are Correct.

Worldbuilding for Masochists (featured here) was one of my favourite ballot discoveries last year and so I’m glad to see them on the ballot again.

Which brings me to the two first-time finalists in this category, Hugo, Girl! (featured here) and Octothorpe (featured here). They’re both very different podcasts – Hugo, Girl! discusses past Hugo finalists from a female POV, while Octothorpe is a traditional fanzine in podcast form and discusses primarily fandom issues – but they both do excellent work and I’m happy to see them on the ballot.

There have been some grumblings that there are no Booktube channels on the ballot this year. However, the nice thing about audio podcasts is that you can listen to them while doing something else. Also, I really haven’t been enamoured with most of the Booktube channels I’ve tried.

No diversity count, too many people are needed to make podcasts.

Best Fan Writer

Yeah, at last I’ve reached the category I’m nominated in and in most excellent company, too.

Paul Weimer and Jason Sanford were also nominated in this category last year (and Paul in 2020 as well). They both continue to do excellent work and I’m thrilled to be nominated alongside them again.

Chris M. Barkley has been active in fandom for forty-five years or so. This is his first nomination and I’m really glad to finally see him recognised.

Alex Brown has been reviewing primarily YA SFF for Tor.com, Locus and NPR for several years now and they also wrote this really nice article about Our Flag Means Death. This is their first nomination.

Chris M. Barkley and Alex Brown are also both black and – unless I’m mistaken – the first black finalists in what has traditionally been a very white category

Bitter Karella is a name that was unfamiliar to me. A bit of googling revealed that they are the person behind The Midnight Society Twitter account which many of us have been enjoying. Together with the short story nomination for “Unknown Caller” by Blue Neustifter, this is certainly a good year for Twitter fiction.

Diversity count: 1 woman, 2 men, 2 non-binary, 2 writers of colour, 1 international writer

Best Fan Artist

We have a nice mix of returning and new finalists in this category as well as a mix of different art styles and media, ranging from illustration via comics and jewellery to calligraphy.

Sara Felix, Ariela Housman and Iain J. Clark are all returning finalists in this category and continue to do excellent work.

Lee Moyer is the artist half of the duo behind the fanzine finalist Small Gods and does some striking work. Nilah Magruder mainly seems to be a comics artist and animator, though she also does covers for Uncanny.

Lorelei Esther finally does illustrations, caricatures and comics. She’s also the daughter of Gideon and Janice Marcus of Galactic Journey and also writes for the site and I’m really happy to see her work recognised.

At age 18, Lorelei is also the youngest Hugo finalist of all time, beating Robert Silverberg and 1950s fan writer Ron Smith (both aged 20 at the time of their first nomination) and fellow fan artist Sarah Webb (nominated a few weeks before her twentieth birthday).

Diversity count: 4 women, 2 men, at least 1 artist of colour, 1 international artist

Lodestar

I’m not a YA reader, so Chaos on CatNet by Naomi Kritzer is the only book in this category that I’ve read and enjoyed. It’s also the sequel to the 2020 Lodestar winner Catfishing on CatNet.

Redemptor by Jordan Ifueko and The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik are both sequels to books which were nominated in this category last year. I liked Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko quite a bit and look forward to the sequel. I did not care as much about A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik, because I’m very much over school or university stories, but then I’m also really not the target audience for any of these books. There is apparently some question whether A Deadly Education and The Last Graduate are really YA, but the university setting feels YA-ish, which is probably why they are up for a Lodestar.

I haven’t read A Snake Falls to Earth by Darcie Little Badger, but I enjoyed her 2021 Lodestar finalist Elatsoe a whole lot and am looking forward to reading it.

Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders got a lot of buzz last year and I’m not at all surprised to see it nominated. Ditto for Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao, which got a lot of buzz, though I have to admit that I did not know it was YA until it made the Lodestar ballot.

Diversity count: 5 women, 1 non-binary, 3 authors of colour, 1 international author

Astounding

Micaiah Johnson and A.K. Larkwood were both also nominated in this category last year and I’m happy to see them on the ballot again, because I enjoyed their work very much.

I initially assumed Tracey Deonn was a repeat finalist as well, but while her novel Legendborn was a Lodestar finalist last year, she was not an Astounding finalist, so this is her first nomination in this category.

Everina Maxwell, Shelley Parker-Chan and Xiran Jay Zhao are all first time Astounding finalists in their first year of eligibility. I enjoyed Everina Maxwell’s Winter’s Orbit a whole lot and nominated her. As mentioned above, I haven’t read Shelley Parker-Chan or Xiran Jay Zhao, but look forward to trying their work.

Diversity count: 5 women, 1 non-binary, 4 authors of colour, 3 international authors

***

And that’s it for the 2022 Hugo finalists. Personally, I think it’s a very good and diverse ballot with a mix of new names and returning favourites (though you inevitably become “the same people who are always nominated” upon your second nomination).

It’s also a ballot with several firsts. First African born black finalist, first black finalists in Editor Short and Fan Writer, youngest finalist ever. And it’s a ballot which includes finalists from five continents: Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. I don’t think there is a finalist from South America, though I haven’t googled everybody in the semiprozine, fanzine and fancast categories. I strongly suspect that there is no finalist from Antarctica on the ballot, but otherwise this is as global as the Hugos have ever been.

Once again, I don’t see a lot of strong themes on this ballot. We do have a couple of retellings on the ballot, but they’re not as prominent as they were a few years ago.

Who’ll win? We’ll see in early September.

I’ll keep the comments open for now, but if things get rude or people start fighting each other, I reserve the right to close them.

*I define “international” as a writer/creator living outside the US. If we include writers who are first or second generation immigrants, there would be several more. I’ve also stopped counting LGBTQ+ finalists for the diversity count, because it’s very difficult to tell, since not everybody is out.

Finally, apologies if I have accidentally misgendered or otherwise misidentified someone.

Cora is a Three-Time Hugo Finalist!

As you probably know, the finalists for the 2022 Hugo Awards have just been announced. And I promise you that the detailed analysis of the finalists, which I know you’re all waiting for, is coming as soon as I can get it done. And the ballot is truly excellent this year, with several firsts, including the first ever black African-born finalist and the youngest ever Hugo finalist.

But for now, I want to focus on just one category, namely the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. Cause if you take a look at that category, you will find – among the most excellent company of Paul Weimer, Jason Sanford, Chris M. Barkley, Alex Brown and Bitter Karella – my name. Yes, I’m a Hugo finalist for Best Fan Writer again!

I’ve known about this for about three weeks now (for those who don’t know, the Hugo administrators contact you beforehand to ask if you want to accept the nomination). Indeed, I got the mail from Chicon 8 a day after I posted my Open Letter to the 2022 Hugo Finalists on this blog.

It’s a great honour to be a Hugo finalist for the third time and I want to thank everybody who nominated me.

Now there are three Hugo pins.

Because the covid pandemic is still ongoing, I’m not sure if I can attend Chicon 8 this year. I certainly hope that I can attend, but I’m not holding my breath. So I may I lose out yet again on my chance to attend the Hugo ceremony in person as well as the reception beforehand and the party afterwards again. That said, I got the full Hugo finalist experience in Dublin in 2019 as the designated accepter for Galactic Journey.

I also have a request. Like all Hugo finalists, I will be asked to put together a selection of writings for the Hugo voters packet. And that’s why I need your help. Which 2020 articles, essays or reviews of mine should go into the Hugo Voters packet? There is a full list here, so let me know in the comments which ones you think should go into the packet.

How can you vote for the 2022 Hugos? I guess pretty much everybody here knows how it works, but for those who don’t, it’s quite simple. If you buy a supporting membership for Chicon 8, the 2022 Worldcon, you can vote for the Hugo Awards as well as vote to select the location of the 2024 Worldcon. You also receive all of the convention publications and get access to the Hugo Voters’ packet, which contains most of the nominated works either in part or as a whole. If you buy a virtual membership, you can also attend the virtual panels and other events online. If you want to attend in person, you’ll need an attending membership. You can buy memberships here.

As I said above, the detailed analysis of the 2022 Hugo ballot is coming soon. But for now, I just want to say thank you for nominating me.

This is last year’s Hugo finalist packet, including the pin and certificate, from DisCon III, which came in the mail two days ago.

Star Trek Picard Sings “Fly Me To the Moon”

Here is my take on the latest episode of Star Trek Picard. And yes, I know this is late, but I have been tired and busy. My take on Moon Knight will probably come in the next few days. For my take on previous episodes and seasons of Star Trek Picard, go here.

Warning: Spoilers below the cut!

When we last met Jean-Luc Picard and his Merry Men and Women, Rios was still in prison, Elnor was still dead, Seven and Raffi were bonding over Seven’s attempts to drive a 21st century police car, Agnes was still playing cat and mouse with the Borg Queen and Picard had just found the Watcher, who looks uncannily like Laris, his Romulan housekeeper and potential love interest.

However, the woman is not Laris. She is called Tallinn and she is a supervisor like Gary Seven from the Original Series episode “Assignment Earth”. Of course, it was widely theorised that season 2 of Picard would reference “Assignment Earth”, which was after all one of the time travel episodes of the Original Series. And indeed, Picard even namechecks that particular adventure of his predecessor as captain of the Enterprise. There are a lot of visual callbacks to “Assignment Earth” as well such as the smoke effect when entering Tallinn’s retro apartment which in itself looks more like the 1960s than 2024. Honestly, that could be a repurposed Mad Men set. And while talking of “Assignment Earth”, doesn’t Teri Garr look just like a Mod era Barbie in this publicity still with the human form of Isis, the cat? This 1968 Barbie dress named “Rare Pair” hits the look even better. Honestly, she looks like the lost Roberta doll. Coincidentally, this also explains why I have always liked the Mod era Barbies so much. Because they look like Star Trek supporting characters. See this Christie doll from 1968, who looks a lot like Uhura.

Like Guinan last episode, Tallinn isn’t particularly eager to help Picard, until he introduces himself to her. For it turns out that the person that Tallinn is supposed to watch over and protect is none other than Renee Picard, a direct ancestor of Jean-Luc Picard. Renee is a brilliant overarchiever, a teenged single-hand sailor, former test pilot and now the NASA astronaut, who is supposed to take part in the Europa mission, for which we saw billboards all over the place. Renee is also the blonde woman whom Q was observing at the end of last episode.

Even though Renee is brilliant, she also suffers from the bad case of imposter syndrome as well as depression, so NASA has assigned her a therapist. Unfortunately, that therapist is Q who’s doing his utmost to make things worse for Renee and talk her out of the Europa mission, which is apparently the timeline change he is trying to make. Picard learns all this from Tallinn’s handy futuristic laptop, via which she watches over Renee.

Tallinn also tells Picard that once Renee and the other astronauts go into pre-launch quarantine, she’ll be safe from Q’s influence and it will also be very difficult for her to back out of the mission. So they’ll only have to keep Renee on track for another day or so. Unfortunately, this day involves a huge party thrown for the astronauts pre-launch. This reminded me very much of A.E. Van Vogt’s 1944 story “Far Centaurus”, where the narrator kisses a girl at exactly such a pre-launch party and the moons over her whenever he awakes from cryosleep on a five hundred year sublight mission to Alpha Centauri. They do get a happy ending, though you have to read the story (or my review, but just read the story) to find out how.

However, infiltrating the pre-launch party to build up Renee’s confidence and get her away from Q won’t be easy, because security will be heavy. “We’ll need help”, Tallinn notes. Luckily, Picard has got a team that can help.

Which brings us to Raffi and Seven who are still trying to rescue Rios from ICE detention, deportation and possibly worse. Agnes has managed to beam Raffi and Seven to a hilltop near the road that the ICE prison bus carrying Rios and others about to be deported will come along. Raffi wants Agnes to just beam out Rios (though he lost his com badge at the Mariposa clinic), though Seven points out that this will cause a lot of attention they cannot afford. Of course, Raffi and Seven themselves just vanished into thin air in front of a bunch of police officers after a chase with a stolen police car, so one person suddenly vanishing into thin air from a ICE prisoner transport will not exactly make things worse. In fact, considering that Starfleet personnel been showing up in California – usually San Francisco, but also Los Angeles – regularly since 1968, I suspect there are urban legends about strange visitors from the future or alien planets who suddenly appear out of and vanish into thin air all over California.

However, if the solution to Rios’ dilemma was as simply as beaming him out of the bus, the car chase, which made up the bulk of the previous episode, would have been entirely pointless and so the show goes for another solution. Seven uses Raffi’s tricorder to disable the bus via an EMP pulse, causing it to stop.

Rios realises that the unscheduledd  bus failure is probably the prelude to his rescue and tells one of the other prisoners, Pedro, to be ready. This attracts the attention of one of the ICE guards, who doesn’t speak Spanish (which should be a must for someone dealing with immigrants from Spanish speaking countries), but really doesn’t like his prisoners talking. Rios knocks out the annoying guard with some help from Pedro, then Raffi and Seven storm the bus, stun the driver and proceed to free all the prisoners. Rios hugs Pedro and Raffi briefly mistakes a young Hispanic man with long hair for Elnor, to show both that Raffi is still mourning Elnor and probably also to justify why Evan Evagora is still in the credits, when his character has been dead for two episodes now.

Of course, by freeing a busload of prisoners who were destined to be deported and/or disappeared, Raffi, Seven and Rios may well have changed history in a big way, but the episode ignores this implication. Besides, those ICE thugs really had it coming and freeing the prisoners is a “Hell yeah!”, so we shall just ignore the potential issues and assume that all of the freed prisoners will keep a low profile. Unless Raffi, Rios and Seven accidentally changing the timeline by doing good is the plot for season 3, which we know was shot alongside season 2.

Meanwhile, aboard La Sirena, the Borg Queen is lonely and bored. She is missing the voices of the Collective in her head, so she tunes into the local radio and cellphone chatter. Then she accesses La Sirena‘s computer – mimicking the voices of Seven and Picard before realising that La Sirena only responds to Rios – and places a call to the local emergency services to order herself some company.

The local emergency services send a gendarme to check out the call reporting about hearing a woman screaming for help on the deserted vineyard. The gendarme checks out the chateau first and is literally seconds from finding Agnes, who is not in danger at all, but sleeping on the couch, when he notices a flicker among the trees outside, which turns out to be the La Sirena‘s cloaking device fizzing out.

The gendarme apparently expected the call to be a hoax and did not expect to find a spaceship from the future. He even less expected to find the Borg Queen inside the spaceship, because no one expects to find a Borg Queen. Before the poor gendarme can as much as fire his gun, the Borg Queen wraps a tentacle around his throat.

When Agnes comes back, carrying a shotgun that was seen hanging over the fireplace of Chateau Picard last episode, she finds the Borg Queen with her hostage. The Borg Queen promises Agnes she’ll let the gendarme go, if Agnes allows herself to be assimilated, since it’s Agnes the Queen really wants. Agnes, however, pulls the trigger and shoots her – with a rifle that was seen hanging over a fireplace at Chateau Picard. Yes, Agnes literally shoots the Borg Queen with Chekhov’s (Anton, not Pavel) Gun, which makes my geeky heart a lot happier than it should.

Raffi, Seven and Rios make it back just in time to find a blood-splattered Agnes, a dead Borg Queen and an unconscious gendarme. Though Agnes has managed to stabilise the gendarme and erase his memories, so he won’t be blabbering about alien spaceships and murderous tentacled cyborg women who are only torsos. When Picard arrives with Tallinn in tow, Raffi and Rios are just dragging the still unconscious gendarme out of La Sirena, prompting Tallinn to ask if Picard is sure that these are the right people for the job.

However, it’s not as if Picard can hop back into the future to grab Ryker, Worf, Geordi, Data, Beverly Crusher or Deanna Troi. Okay, if Picard were to break the fourth wall, he could in theory grab Ryker or at least Jonathan Frakes from the director’s chair, but it’s not that kind of show. Therefore, this is the team he has and so they get to work. Security at the astronaut pre-launch party is tight – facial recognition, biometrics, the whole shebang – so infiltrating the party is extremely difficult. Hacking the guest list isn’t possible either, because the guest list is kept on a separate computer. And Tallinn can only sneak one person in, not six.

So it is decided to send Agnes in and let her be captured, so she can get into the security center and hack the guest database. Which is exactly what happens. Agnes attends the party in a stunning red gown, has a glass of champagne while the band plays “Fly Me To the Moon”, justifying the episode’s title.

And while we’re on the subject, can we talk a little about the use of music in season 2 of Star Trek Picard. Because not only does season 2 have a lot of non-orchestral music, which is normally rare in Star Trek – Remember the fury when Star Trek Enterprise had a (perfectly fine) theme song with lyrics rather than an orchestral theme? – but music from a very particular era, namely the 1950s and early 1960s. “Fly Me To the Moon” was written in 1954 and the famous Frank Sinatra recording was made in 1964. “Time Is On My Side”, which can be heard in episode one, was written in 1963 and the famous Rolling Stones recording was made in 1964. And “Non, je ne regrette rien” was written in 1956 and recorded by Edith Piaf in 1960. All three songs fit the mood perfectly, but they’re songs you’d expect to hear in Mad Men rather than in a series set in 2024 and the 25th century. And indeed, “Fly Me To the Moon” did appear in Mad Men, playing over a scene where Peggy Olsen masturbates in what I always thought was a brilliant music and visual match, even though Mad Men also had a lot of anachronistic music choices, which are one of my pet peeves in period TV shows. Of course, Guardians of the Galaxy popularised the idea of pairing up science fiction with vintage pop music (though Guardians picked songs from the early to mid 1970s, i.e. the Musikladen era) and it worked really, really well, so it was likely that other SFF shows would eventually follow suit. Though I still wonder why Picard went for music from the 1950s and early 1960s. It’s not because the 1960s were the era of the Original Series, because the songs playing in Picard all date from a few years before the Original Series. Also, pop music changed and evolved extremely quickly in the 1960s, a lot quicker than in any other decade. In 1966, when the original Star Trek premiered, “Fly Me To the Moon”, “Time Is On My Side” and “Non, je ne regrette rien” were not exactly the cutting edge of pop music. Anyway, I may be overthinking this, but I find it interesting.

Everything goes as planned. Agnes is arrested, taken to the security center and handcuffed to a chair. However, we then get a flashback to what really happened aboard La Sirena when Agnes shot the Borg Queen. Because just before the Borg Queen expired, she transferred part of her mind into Agnes’, setting up Agnes to either become the new Borg Queen (which would fit in nicely with her terminal loneliness) or a Borg hybrid disconnected from the Collective like Seven or Hugh. Either way, this is going to throw a massive wrench into Picard’s plans. It’s also a shocking moment, for while it was obvious that Agnes was at risk of assimilation, I for one did not expect it to happen like this and neither did Paul Levinson, as he explains in his review of this episode.

However, Picard and his team are not the only ones who have a plan. Q has a plan as well. And since he can no longer make things happen just by snapping his fingers (and what’s up with that anyway?), he, too, recruits himself some help. This help happens to be a brilliant of unorthodox geneticist named Dr. Adam Soong, ancestor from Noonien Soong, creator of Data. Like every male member of the Soong family, Dr. Adam Soong is played by Brent Spiner, who has by now played four different members of the Soong family, six if you count Data and Lore. We first meet Dr. Adam Soong in front of a university committee, which is withdrawing his funding for unethical behaviour. The chair of the committee is played by none other than Lea Thompson, star of several 1980s SFF films, who also directed the last two episodes. Sitting next to her is a man billed as Dr. Rozhenko by his name plate. Star Trek fans will recognise the name, since the Rozhenkos were Worf’s adoptive family.

Dr. Soong is heartbroken, for he has a very good reason for crossing all sorts of red lines with his research, namely his daughter Kore (played by Isa Briones, who also played Soji and Daj and is apparently what all female members of the Soong family look like). Kore has a rare genetic disorder which means that expore to sunlight or dust can kill her. Dr. Soong is looking for a cure, which is why he is so desperately pursuing his research.

Soon after losing his funding, Soong is contacted by a mysterious benefactor, who just happens to have a small vial of a blue liquid that could cure Kore. However, the cure is only temporary and in order to make it permanent, Soong will just have to do a little favour for this mysterious benefactor. And of course, the benefator is none other than Q. The phone number on the dramatic calling card Q leaves for Soong actually does work, as James Whitbrook points out, and plays a snarky message from Q himself, if you call.

I hadn’t heard that Brent Spiner would be in season 2 of Picard, so his appearance her is a pleasant surprise. Though it’s also notable that not only do all Soongs look at same, they’re also all in essence mad scientists tampering with life itself. Also, why do all the Soongs look the same? Are they clones, just like the Emperors Three from the Foundation TV show?

While the previous episode moved too slow, “Fly Me To the Moon” is a very busy episode. New characters are introduced and a lot of stuff happens. Tor.com reviewer Keith R.A. DeCandido is happy that the plot is finally moving forward again, since the season has already reached its mid point. However, io9 reviewer James Whitbrook also points out that “Fly Me To the Moon” has almost too much plot and that quite a few things don’t make a whole lot of sense.

For example, why is the security so tight at the astronaut pre-launch gala? Cause the sheer amount of security suggests a G7 summit rather than a party for some astronauts. And if NASA security is so tight in this era, how can Q of all people sneak in, posing as a therapist? And since Q’s finger-snapping trick no longer works, how did he come to have the cure Dr. Soong needs for Kore? Finally, why exactly do Q’s powers no longer work? And what is up with Agnes and the Borg Queen? And what about the Mariposa Clinic? Was that a red herring or is it going to be significant in the future?

It’s a credit to the writers that you don’t ask all of those questions during the episode, but only realises that there is a lot here that makes no sense when you think about it afterwards.

“Fly Me To the Moon” has pushed the plot a large step forwards, so let’s see where the show goes next.

Fanzine Spotlight: Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations

I initially started the Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project to highlight Hugo-eligible fanzines, fansites and podcasts. For more about the Fanzine/Fancast Spotlight project, go here. You can also check out the other great fanzines and fancasts featured by clicking here.

The Hugo finalists for 2022 will be announced later this week, but I want to keep the project (as well as the Non-Fiction Spotlights) going, because after the Hugo nominations is before the Hugo nominations. And besides, there are still a lot of great fanzines, blogs and podcasts out there that I haven’t covered.

Today’s featured fansite Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations is a blog which focusses on reviews of vintage science fiction from the 1950s to the mid 1980s.

As regular readers will know, vintage science fiction is also close to my heart, therefore I am pleased to welcome Joachim Boaz of Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations to my blog.

Tell us about your site or zine.

Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations maps the varied landscape of SF produced during the turbulence of the post-WWII to the mid-1980s world. I am fascinated by the ways authors responded to the advent of nuclear weapons, the rise of 50s suburbia and commercialism, the Civil Rights movement, the Counterculture and radical student politics, the Vietnam War, and the 1970s political backlash. I chart what’s produced in a specific time and territory to understand the people who dwelled at that moment—their dreams for the future, their fears of the present, and all the manifestations of estrangement and elation generated by a rapidly transforming world. Science fiction is a fantastic way to get at the zeitgeist of an era.

I am particularly receptive to New Wave science fiction of the late 60s and early 70s that attempted to tackle our oblique interiors via radical structure/politics, non-standard characters and perspectives, and experimental prose. Sometimes it’s beautiful. Sometimes it doesn’t work. But it’s all fascinating.

Who are the people behind your site or zine?

It’s just me – Joachim Boaz! I’m a historian by trade and training under another name. My pseudonym comes from a wonderful Russell Hoban novel—The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (1973)—about a son’s quest to find his father who sells magical maps that diagram the locations of inspiration and clarity. Other than the occasional guest post that I solicit, I write and edit everything posted on Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations.

Why did you decide to start your site or zine?

My site was birthed in a moment of acute isolation—my first year of my PhD program in 2010. I needed an outlet for my non-medieval passions. And despite my other areas of interest, my fascination with post-WWII to mid-80s science fiction was never going to disappear. I now see my website as my primary avenue for writing and research. And the wonderful community keeps me going. I hope my passion comes across!

What are your current research projects?

In addition to my normal reviews on whatever I happen to be reading, I have four current science fiction short story reading initiatives that I’ve started over the past few years. My newest series explores future formulations of the media landscape spurred by the explosion of television ownership in the 50s, fears of both Communist brainwashing and corporate subliminal messages, and the theories of Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980). Other series include a readthrough of Carol Emshwiller’s pre-1980s short fiction, subversive takes on astronauts and the culture that produced them, and generation ships.

The four fan categories of the Hugos (best fanzine, fan writer, fan artist and fancast) tend to get less attention than the fiction and dramatic presentation categories. Are there any awesome fanzines, fancasts, fan writers and fan artists you’d like to recommend?

The sites I end up visiting the most contain frequent reviews of older science fiction due to my research interests. A handful of worthy writers include Rich Horton over at Strange at Ecbatan, Mark Yon and John Boston (among others) at Galactic Journey, Rachel S. Cordasco at SF in Translation, James Nicoll Davis at James Nicoll Reviews, J. W. Wartick’s vintage reviews at Eclectic Theist, Andrew Darlington’s SF articles at Eight Miles Higher, and our wonderful host Cora Buhlert and all the various places she posts her ruminations on older SF.

Where can people find you?

Website: Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations

Social Media: Twitter

Email: ciceroplatobooks@gmail.com

Thank you, Joachim, for stopping by and answering my questions.

Do check out Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations, cause it’s a great site.

***

Do you have a Hugo eligible fanzine/-site or fancast and want it featured? Contact me or leave a comment.

 

 

First Monday Free Fiction: Sacrifice to the Kitayu

Welcome to the April 2022 edition of First Monday Free Fiction.

To recap, inspired by Kristine Kathryn Rusch who posts a free short story every week on her blog, I’ll post a free story on the first Monday of every month. At the end of the month, I’ll take the story down and post another.

This month’s free story is called “Sacrifice to the Kitayu and it can be found in Children of the Stone Gods, a collection of science fantasy, planetary romance and sword and planet stories. As for why I chose it, I realised that in four years of First Monday Free Fiction, I had never posted a story from that particular collection before, so time to rectify that.

So accompany the beautiful Hafzira, as she becomes a…

Sacrifice to the Kitayu

It was near the time of returning and the people of Volitan were preparing this solar cycle’s sacrifice.

Like every cycle, the sacrifice was chosen from the daughters of Volitan. One lunar cycle before the returning, all women of the colony who were of childbearing age and not yet mated were called together in the Great Hall to select this cycle’s sacrifice.

Many came willingly, for it was considered a great honour to be chosen as an offering to the Kitayu on their annual return. After all, only the best and brightest, the purest and the most beautiful of all the daughters of Volitan were considered worthy of becoming an offering of peace and tribute to the Kitayu.

Others had to be forced. They were pulled out of the cellars and closets and outhouses where they’d been hiding and led into the Great Hall in restraints. Some girls also tried to escape the selection by getting mated very quickly.

Still, in the end they all came, willingly or not. All the unmated women and girls of childbearing age of the whole colony gathered together in one place, so that the sacrifice could be chosen.

The selection process was rigorous. First, all of the young women were subjected to a thorough physical examination to determine whether they were healthy and thus fit to be sacrificed. The girls’ virginity was also inspected to prove that the chosen sacrifice was pure and worthy.

Girls found impure escaped the selection process and were led away from the Great Hall in shackles, lest they contaminate its sacred atmosphere with their impurity. They were taken to the gaol and eventually condemned to lifelong servitude in the houses of lust for daring to defy Volitan’s customs and laws.

Next, those girls found to be healthy and pure enough were subjected to a battery of scans, puzzles and tests to determine the quality of their intellects and their very minds. Great machines bestowed by the Kitayu themselves compiled results and evaluated the tests and in the end, an algorithm honed by centuries of experience selected this cycle’s sacrifice, the best and noblest and worthiest young woman Volitan had to offer.

In the end, the great machine spat out a single name, the name of the chosen maiden, printed on a sealed piece of paper. The seal could only be broken by the Pontifex of Volitan, governor and high priest combined into one.

Before the name was read out, all doors of the Great Hall were locked and barred. For in the past, it had sometimes happened that the chosen maiden attempted to escape and had to be chased down. So trusted guards were placed at all exits, making sure that the chosen one could not slip away.

A hush fell over the assembled women and girls, as the Pontifex stepped onto the stage, attired in his splendid red robes of office, to break the seal and read out the name of the chosen one. And many a young woman breathed out a clandestine sigh of relief, when the name was read out and it was not her own. Though a handful of girls — those who had volunteered for the honour — could barely hide their disappointment.

Though everybody present agreed that the great computers had chosen wisely, for this cycle’s sacrifice, the beautiful Hafzira, was a most worthy tribute. Tall and statuesque, intelligent and of sterling character, with red hair, gilded skin and brilliant green eyes — yes, none could imagine a more worthy candidate than Hafzira. And if Hafzira herself had harboured a smattering of hope in her well-formed bosom that she might be spared and another chosen, then she hid it well. As a true daughter of Volitan, she knew where her duty lay.

***

Once the selection was made, the chosen maiden was whisked away by the guards at once, to prepare herself for the sacrifice in seclusion and solitude. She would spend the remainder of the lunar cycle in quiet study and contemplation to familiarise herself with the sacred texts handed down by the Kitayu themselves.

And so Hafzira was led to the chamber of seclusion. She was given new garments, the plain white robes of the chosen sacrifice, and handed the sacred texts, thick dusty tomes printed on yellowed paper. Then the door was locked behind her and Hafzira was left alone. Only now did she break down, sobbing bitter tears into her plain white robe.

She cried a lot during those first few days and cared not who knew it. Though she suspected her tears did not much bother the priests and attendants, for they left her strictly alone. Only once every day, when the morning bell rang, was the door to her chamber unlocked and a low-level attendant brought her a bowl of cleansing broth, a jug of water and some bread, for the chosen maiden had to be prepared for her sacrifice by strict fasting.

Sometimes, Hafzira tried speaking to the attendants who brought her food, but they never replied. Once she even hurled the bowl with the scalding hot broth at an attendant, but the woman just ducked and left without a word, while Hafzira went hungry that day.

Every night, when the evening bell rang and the sun set behind the tiny barred window of Hafzira’s cell, the door to the chamber was unlocked once more and High Priest Matadan, right hand to the Pontifex himself, entered. He forced Hafzira to kneel on the bare stone floor of her cell and demanded that she confess her sins and repent. When Hafzira told him that she had no sins to confess, the high priest would clasp her hands in his and force her to pray with him, chanting prayers with nigh hypnotic intensity.

If the silent attendants were frustrating, Matadan was a thousand times so. For though he at least spoke to Hafzira, he still did not listen to her nor did he answer her questions. He merely chanted prayers, demanded that Hafzira confess and repent her sins and admonished her to study the sacred texts.

Once, Hafzira began to cry while Matadan was chanting his prayers at her. Matadan regarded her, entirely unmoved.

“Cry as much as you wish, child,” he finally said, “For tears cleanse the mind and the soul and thus will prepare you to receive the wisdom of the Kitayu.”

Another night, Hafzira hurled her soup bowl at the priest. It was empty and cold by then and as the attendant before him, Matadan dodged it easily. Nonetheless, he ordered that she be subjected to a light flogging as well as two days of strict fasting to drive the defiance out of her. After that, Hafzira did not resist again.

And though she had initially rejected the sacred texts, Hafzira began to read them anyway after a few days of silence and seclusion, because she was bored out of her mind. Not that the sacred texts provided much in the way of relief to her overwhelming boredom, for their content was as dry as the dust that had settled onto their ancient pages.

When cracking open the sacred texts, Hafzira had expected something along the lines of Matadan’s chants. But instead, the sacred texts seemed to focus on science and technology. There was a lot about machines and astronomy and navigation, though in directions and dimensions that Hafzira had never heard of. There were other subjects, too, subjects that Hafzira did not even know the names of.

Every night, Matadan asked her, “Have you been faithfully studying the sacred texts, child?”

And every night, Hafzira answered, “I have. But I do not understand them.”

“You will, my child, you will,” Matadan said, patting her head, “Enlightenment will come, once you are joined with the Kitayu.”

“But do not wish to be joined with the Kitayu,” Hafzira said, “I do not understand the sacred texts, which must mean that I am unworthy of the honour bestowed on me.”

“On the contrary child, you are most worthy in spite of your willfulness,” Matadan declared, “After all, the great machine of the Kitayu chose you. And the Kitayu and their machines are eternal and unfailing.”

Then he departed, leaving Hafzira alone in her cell once more with only the sacred texts to keep her company.

***

As the day of the Kitayu’s arrival drew nearer, the preparations for Hafzira’s sacrifice intensified. Matadan spent more time with her, praying and chanting and exhorting her to confess and repent her sins. Hafzira finally confessed every wrong she had ever done in her life just to get rid of him.

On the night before the sacrifice, the silent attendants arrived to lead Hafzira away to the bath chambers. They washed and cleansed and scrubbed her until her skin was raw and then they anointed her with scented oil that was supposed to be pleasing to the Kitayu.

After the bath, Hafzira was given new robes, the scarlet robes of the chosen sacrifice. She was also handed a goblet and told to drink the sweet wine mixed with spices that dulled her senses and sapped her will.

Once Hafzira was dressed, Matadan appeared again, together with a full accompaniment of temple guards and the Pontifex himself.

As befitted a true daughter of Volitan, Hafzira dropped to her knees before the great man, asking his blessing and imploring him to reconsider her sacrifice, for she still did not feel worthy of the honour bestowed upon her.

“Oh, I’m quite sure the Kitayu will find you most worthy, my child,” the Pontifex replied, “After all, the great machine said so and the great machine is never wrong. But we must hasten, for the time of arrival approaches. So be blessed for your great service to our world and our people, my child.”

The Pontifex nodded to one of the guards who stepped forward to bind Hafzira’s hands behind her back with iron shackles.

Then finally, Hafzira was led to the place of offering. The Pontifex walked on her right side and Matadan on her left and the temple guards surrounded them on all sides.

Hafzira walked with her hands bound and her head demurely lowered. And the people of Volitan who had come to witness the sacrifice praised her humility and modesty and remarked what a worthy choice she was.

The full contingent of guards ascended the first three levels of the tower of offering, but only Hafzira, Matadan, the Pontifex and two handpicked guards ascended to the fourth level.

The morning air was cool up here, the wind fresh and Hafzira shivered in her thin sacrificial gown.

“Have no fear, my child,” the Pontifex whispered in what was probably supposed to be a sympathetic tone, “It shall all be over soon.”

Hafzira did not feel comforted by that at all.

The Pontifex and the two guards remained behind on the viewing platform of the fourth level of the tower. Only Matadan accompanied Hafzira onto the final ledge that led to the place of offering.

The ledge was narrow and oxidated with age and covered in strange machinery that sang and hummed as Hafzira passed.

She made the mistake to look down at those gathered below, hoping to spot her parents in the crowd, so she might see their faces one more time. But the ledge was so narrow and the ground so far down that she stumbled and swooned and might have fallen, had not Matadan’s iron grip caught her just in time.

“Oh no, girl. You won’t get out of this so easily.”

And then she was at the end of the ledge and there was no further to go. Matadan’s hands were still closed around her upper arm like an iron shackle, as he reached up to retrieve the traditional mask of the chosen sacrifice.

Hafzira emitted a squeak of fear as she saw the sacrificial mask, though seen this close it was more helmet than mask and a truly terrifying thing indeed.

“No, please, I…”

The mask locked around her face, cutting off her voice and plunging Hafzira into darkness. She screamed, but there was no one to hear.

Behind her back, she felt movement. From witnessing previous sacrifices, she knew that Matadan was now connecting a thick cable to the back of the mask. Supposedly, it was to facilitate her union with the Kitayu, but Hafzira felt and saw nothing, so that was probably just a myth.

She did not see the Kitayu descend from the sky, did not see the massive metallic body hovering right above the tower of offering. She only felt their presence, as the strong gusts of wind generated by the Kitayu’s arrival pressed her robe to her body and sent a shiver through her bones.

Far below, the people of Volitan waited with bated breaths, if the Kitayu would accept the chosen sacrifice or if they would visit their wrath upon the world and its people. Their hearts hammered more rapidly than Hafzira’s own, as a door opened in the side of the great metal vessel of the Kitayu and a lance shot out, examining the sacrifice.

Because of the mask, Hafzira never saw the lance, though she did feel the cable that shot out of its tip to wrap itself around her body. Against her will, she felt herself pulled forwards, pulled into the embrace of the Kitayu.

The door in the belly of the Kitayu closed behind her and the people of Volitan cheered. They were still cheering as the Kitayu ascended to the heavens again, dropping gifts for their faithful servants as they left.

***

When Hafzira came to again, everything around her was still dark. She was not in pain, not even in discomfort, apart from the fact that she could not see.

Briefly, she wondered whether she was dead. But this sensation of floating in a sea of inky black water was not like any of the legends of the afterlife that the priests had recounted.

There was a voice, in her head or in her ear, she knew not which. It was a friendly voice, gentle almost.

“Welcome, child. Do you have a name?”

“Ha… Hafzira,” she said or thought, she knew not which. Never mind that in this sea of blackness, speaking and thinking were the same anyway.

“Welcome, Hafzira of Volitan. I am Cruiser XW-56Z of the Kitayu Expeditionary Forces.”

Hafzira was just about to ask if the voice had a nickname, something shorter and catchier by which to call it, when all of a sudden her vision returned and she could see again. Only that she was no longer on Volitan or even inside the great metal belly of the Kitayu. She was floating, floating amongst the stars.

Knowledge flooded into her, knowledge about the stars and their names and how to get there. Hafzira smiled in wonderment or maybe she just thought she did.

“You will be my pilot, Hafzira, and together we shall travel the universe.

***

That’s it for this month’s edition of First Monday Free Fiction. Check back next month, when a new free story will be posted.

A Couple of Mixed Links, Mainly Promo-Stuff

This week’s Star Trek Picard review is coming and I’ll probably do Moon Knight, too, once I’ve actually watched it.

But in the meantime, here are some mixed links to elsewhere on the web. Cause I’ve actually had quite a lot of things coming out in the past few weeks and there’s even more coming up.

Let’s start with a flash story that came out only today as part of the Friday flash fiction series of Wyngraf Magazine of Cozy Fantasy. My story is called “Rescue Unwanted” and it’s the story of a knight, a princess and a dragon. And since it’s cozy fantasy, two of them even get a happy ending. So head over to Wyngraf Magazine and read “Rescue Unwanted”.

I also was a guest on Oliver Brackenbury’s excellent So I’m Writing a Novel podcast, where we chat about sword and sorcery, pulp fiction, the Silencer, writing, linguistics, self-publishing and all sorts of other stuff, so give it a listen.

Furthermore, I was also at Galactic Journey and back in 1967 last month, reviewing a very infamous SFF book, namely Tarnsman of Gor by John Norman, while my colleague Victoria Silverwolf reviews Why Call Them Back From Heaven?, a science fiction novel about cryogenics by Clifford D. Simak. Needless to say that Victoria got the better deal.

I offered to review Tarnsman of Gor, for even though I was of course aware of its reputation, I had never actually read the book. DAW Books were not all that easy to come by in pre-Internet Germany and the import bookstore where I got most of my English language SFF paperbacks in the 1980s and early 1990s never had any Gor books. I also suspect that they wouldn’t have carried them anyway, since whoever stocked the two genre fiction spinner racks at that store certainly knew their SFF and kept most of the problematic stuff out, though they missed Piers Anthony.

I remember coming across a whole shelf full of yellow-spined Gor novels – at least thirty or so – in the catacombs of a used bookshop on London’s Charing Cross Road (and yes, that store really had a network of mazelike catacombs that went down so deep that a passing Northern Line tube train would make the shelves shake) as a student in the mid 1990s and being entranced by the striking Boris Vallejo covers. I contemplated trying the series, but there were so many books and I couldn’t figure out the order, so I passed. In retrospect, that was a wise decision.

So now that I’ve actually read Tarnsman of Gor, what is the verdict? Well, it is a bad book, though not entirely for the reasons I expected it to be bad.

What I knew of the Gor books was that they were BDSM erotica disguised as Edgar Rice Burroughs style sword and planet adventure and that the BDSM to Burroughs ratio shifts in the course of the series in favour of the former. But while the Burroughs influence is certainly notable to the point that things happen to Tarl Cabot just because the same thing happened to John Carter, the BDSM stuff and the sexual content in general is mild by modern standards. Mostly, Tarnsman of Gor is just dull.

Honestly, I would never have imagined that a book infamous for its kinky sexual content could be so dull. Because the entire first third of Tarnsman of Gor is basically one endless infodump about the history of the Cabot family and then the history of Gor. The fact that this endless infodump is imparted mostly in extremely stilted dialogue doesn’t help either. While slogging through the never-ending infodump, I came close to crying out, “You promised me sex, you promised me slave girls, you promised me adventure, so where is it? Where is any of that?”

Honestly, if I had bought Tarnsman of Gor in that used bookshop on Charing Cross Road, intrigued by the iconic Boris Vallejo cover (which wasn’t actually the cover of the 1966 edition I reviewed for the Journey) and had then gotten mired in endless infodumps, the book would have met the wall very fast.

While I’m on the subject of Galactic Journey, their publishing house Journey Press just released a brand-new anthology of science fiction by women writers of the 1950s. It’s called Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women Volume 2 (1953-1957) and collects some excellent and little reprinted stories that will prove that the much repeated claim that women did not write science fiction during the so-called golden and silver ages of science fiction wrong.

I’m obviously not a science fiction writers of the 1950s, so how did I get involved with this anthology? Well, every story is accompanied by an essay by contemporary woman SFF writer, critic, scholar or artist and I contributed the essay for “The Queer Ones” by Leigh Brackett.

Finally, feast your eyes on that cover and then get the book and volume 1, too, if you don’t have it already:

Women write science fiction. They always have.

Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1953-1957) offers, quite simply, some of the best science fiction ever written: 20 amazing pieces, most of which haven’t been reprinted for decades…but should have been. Whether you are a long-time fan or new to the genre, you are in for a treat.

This collection of works—18 stories, 1 poem, 1 nonfiction piece—are a showcase, some of the best science fiction stories of the ’50s. These stories were selected not only as examples of great writing, but also because their characters are as believable, their themes just as relevant today, their contents just as fun to read, as when they were written almost three quarters of a century ago.

Dig in. Enjoy these newly-rediscovered delicacies a few at a time…or binge them all at once!

Amazon | B&N | Bookshop.org | Journey Press

Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for March 2022

Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.

So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of crime fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some February books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.

Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have cozy mysteries, historical mysteries, Jazz Age mysteries, Regency mysteries, paranormal mysteries, crime thrillers, psychological thrillers, legal thrillers, adventure thrillers, financial thrillers, revenge thrillers, historical thrillers, romantic suspense, police officers, private investigators, amateur sleuths, FBI agents, lawyers, hookers, serial killers, con artists, missing children, terrorism, organised crime, crime-busting witches, crime-busting socialites, crime-busting reporters, crime-busting morticians, murder and mayhem in London, Chicago, Florida, Ohio, Montana, the Caribbean and much more.

Don’t forget that Indie Crime Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Indie Crime Scene, a group blog which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things crime fiction several times per week.

As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.

And now on to the books without further ado:

Murder Among the Silent Dead by Blythe Baker:

While visiting a London cemetery, Lillian Crawford and her twin brother Felix are witnesses to a violent crime. When Felix is mistakenly arrested as the culprit, it’s up to Lillian, with some assistance from the handsome Eugene Osbourn, to uncover the truth.

But will Lillian find the answers she needs in time to clear her brother’s name?

 

 

An Infamous End by Blythe Baker:

After the terrible revelations of the past several weeks, Jane realizes she can no longer stay with her Pemberton relations. Fleeing to the countryside, she becomes a temporary guest in the home of her sister and brother-in-law.

But danger finds Jane once more, when she becomes entangled in the investigation of a local murder. And worse, the shadows of Pemberton Heights continue to beckon, threatening to draw her back once more…

 

The Tea Shop Witch by Thora Bluestone:

A disappearing body.
Hidden magical talents.
An adorable mind-reading dog.
And small-town secrets . . .

Addie James’s life imploded when she discovered her fiancé cheating and got downsized from her biotech job. So she left Silicon Valley for the haven of her Aunt Kate’s tea and apothecary shop in the peaceful mountain town of Stargaze. There, she plans to take a deep breath and figure out what’s next.

But when Addie reaches Stargaze, there’s no trace of her aunt. Until one night, Aunt Kate’s lifeless body shows up and then disappears from the locked shop.

And that’s when things really start to get strange.

As Addie sets out to find the murderer, she begins to realize her own hidden magical talent is the key to discovering what really happened to her aunt . . . who might not be quite so dead after all.

The problem is, logical Addie isn’t sure she can accept the magical parts of herself that science can’t explain. Will she learn to embrace this new life that’s full of supernatural surprises and solve her aunt’s case?

Hometown Magic by Amy Boyles:

There is a killer on the loose in Peachwood, and that person is targeting witches. Worse, there’s no rhyme or reason to the murders. Clementine and Rufus are at a loss as to how to find the killer.

They need help, and a lot of it. So the entire witch and wizard community of Peachwood bands together to help. Only, those folks tend to whine a lot and they’re not sure if Rufus can be trusted. With time running out, and more attacks occurring, Clem and Rufus are forced to rely on witches who can’t be trusted for help.

Will they solve the mystery? Or will Clem and Rufus be the next victims?

God’s Ponzi by Robert Buschel:

Gregory Portent demands revenge. Revenge is best served cold and when the prey begs to be the target. With his skills and charisma he lures them in easy—using an investment bank to launch a Ponzi scheme. Gregory Portent has one advantage—artificial intelligence. At a critical point, he loses his way. A ‘black swan’ event follows and the Ponzi scheme borders on the brink of collapse. It’s not about revenge anymore; it’s about survival. Greedy lawyers, the FBI, and international syndicates pursue him. Greg must go on the run. Everyone he cares about is now in danger. He must win. The strange thing? You’ll be rooting for him the whole time. Will he win big and get his vengeance? Robert Buschel proves beyond a reasonable doubt, he is a rising storyteller. Pick up God’s Ponzi and unlock the secret behind the world’s most diabolical Ponzi scheme.

A Romantic Little Murder by Beth Byers:

Jack and Vi have been on edge. Maybe Vi has been snippy and distracted. Maybe Jack has been sharp and irritable. Maybe they panic when they realize they’re unhappy with each other.

On an evening of romance, they dance, they kiss, they connect, and then they find a body. Of course, they aren’t surprised. Only this time, they realize they know the victim.

Once again, they delve into an investigation. They work together to find a killer, and if they repair what’s been going amiss between them at the same time, they’re all right with that too.

Fortuitious Justice by Dennis Carstens:

WHEN THEY THROW THE BOOK
AT YOU, WHO YOU GONNA CALL?

ANSWER: You’d better call top Minneapolis criminal defense attorney Marc Kadella.

Fixer Burt Chayson had well and truly fixed it this time. About to be charged in a vote-buying scandal, he was overheard declaring that if he went down, he’d take some people with him. Within hours he’s dead, and, at first glance, it looks like a suicide—until incriminating fingerprints are found.

The suspect—and Marc’s client—is realtor Hope Slade, one of a group of law-breaking former Vikings cheerleaders, now known as the Suburban Housewife Hooker Ring. Hope’s had a little bad luck lately—her husband threw her out, her children no longer trust her, and she’s already facing a plethora of other criminal charges. All she needs is a murder rap.

But not only are her fingerprints on the murder weapon but the victim, a client of several of the Housewife Hookers, was last seen with her.

Relying on the SODDI (Some Other Dude Did It) defense that’s worked so well for him before, Marc knows he’ll have no trouble coming up with other suspects. But even if Hope’s not convicted of the murder, she faces RICO, prostitution, and money laundering charges.

And it’s not just Hope. The Grand Jury’s thrown the book at the entire hooker gang, apparently in an attempt to squeeze them for information on much bigger fish – a major local drug wholesaler. The major local drug wholesaler. And danger shadows them since some of those people the fixer had planned on taking down with him want to make sure the hookers don’t spill Burt’s pillow talk.

Bridge to Trouble by Elisabeth Grace Foley:

Jeanette Pierpont is out of patience.

On the run from hurt and humiliation, she’s fled back to her home in the Montana mountains in search of solitude. But to her unpleasant surprise, she discovers she’s not alone there. In fact, there are altogether too many strangers lurking in the woods and around the abandoned mining town nearby—some decidedly suspicious, others merely infuriating.

Before long it becomes clear that the mountain has become the setting for a daring crime—and Jeanette finds herself dragged into a race against time to foil it before it’s too late.

A novella that blends the classic romantic-suspense style of Mary Stewart with the rugged setting of the American West.

Love, Lies and Suicide by Elle and K.S. Gray:

“You can’t always get what you want.”
“But, if you try, you might find…”

You’ll get exactly what’s coming for you.

FBI agent Olivia Knight has seen the realities of what happens when nightmares come to life.

When she’s called to investigate a case of an apparent murder-suicide in an affluent community.

She finds herself buried by the unexplainable questions that arise regarding the couple’s seemingly perfect life.

When a deep dive into the life of the philanthropic couple leads to a revelation to a potential double life.

Olivia finds herself wondering if their hidden life finally caught up to them…

They say the purest form of good in this world is love.
But what happens if the love you feel is all a lie?
What happens when the thing you love the most turns into a monster that breaks you?

With her own romantic life in shambles, Olivia begins to wonder what price one’s willing is to pay for love?
And what is the truth behind this case of love, lies, and suicide?

Tall Tales and Witchy Fails by Lily Harper Hart:

Splat.

That’s the sound Hali Waverly made when she hit the pavement after a drunken billionaire ran her over with his golf cart.

Cha-ching.

That’s the sound her bank account made when his handlers got him under control and swooped in to buy Hali off. The offer? Ownership of a tiki bar on the property of a busy resort and lodging in one of the villas on St. Pete Beach.

Now Hali is officially successful. That doesn’t mean her life is a beach of roses.

When private investigator Grayson “Gray” Hunter shows up asking questions about a missing woman, Hali is evasive. It’s not because she doesn’t want to help as much as she’s already running her own investigation with the help of her best friend, another witch, and a group of sirens who control the beach.

Gray and Hali lock horns as they continuously cross paths with one another, to the point where they agree to join forces … but only temporarily.

Evil is stalking the resort. Young women are going missing at every turn. It’s going to take a mixture of magic and might to save the day … and even that might not be enough.

St. Petersburg has a new crime-fighting team. Are they strong enough to survive the rising tide and take down a monster?

You’re about to find out.

Path of Justice by Robin James:

To everyone else, Denny Sizemore is the handsome face on a highway billboard. A man to be trusted. Respected. Re-elected.

To college student Neveah Ward, he is her monster.

When Neveah accuses the former mayor of a brutal rape, it’s easier for everyone not to believe her. Mayor Sizemore has lived his life in the public eye. He’s a family man. A rising star in Ohio politics. She’s a nobody with questionable motives and a shady past.

Except DNA doesn’t lie and Neveah never wavers from her story.

Lucky for her, Prosecutor Mara Brent never backs down from a worthy fight.

The case will pit Mara against some of the biggest power players in the state. They soon learn Mara can’t be bought. But she has plenty at risk in her personal life as she gears up for a nasty custody battle against her formidable ex-husband.

Mara’s willing to put her career on the line to champion Neveah. But when the rape trial takes a shocking turn, the fallout could cost Mara what she cherishes most of all. Her son. This time, the path to justice could reveal a dark family secret those close to her would do anything to protect.

Sticks and Crones by Amanda M. Lee:

When Scout Randall’s past came into focus, she thought the hard part was behind her. She was wrong.

Now, not only is she dealing with a day-walking vampire who has all the strengths and none of the weaknesses associated with his kind, but there’s also a new bloodsucker in town … and this one is out for revenge.

When she killed the last master, Scout assumed that was it. She didn’t count on him having a brother. That brother is intent on making her pay, and he’s not shy about dropping bodies in an attempt to rattle her along the way.

Scout has a sister she can’t trust, a former partner she’s trying to bring back to the world of the living, and a crew that’s often steeped in drama. When you add the Winchesters from Hemlock Cove into the mix, she has her hands full. A new vampire gang is the last thing she needs, especially when people start falling under glamours and making targets of themselves.

Scout has magic and might on her side but the fight she’s facing could force her to make a choice she never thought she would have to make.

Darkness is taking over Hawthorne Hollow. Vampires are gathering evil forces to take over the town.

The fight is on.

Fake News & Office Blues by Amanda M. Lee:

Taking down a killing team means Avery Shaw is getting a lot of attention. It’s almost too much attention. That’s why she’s ready for a new story, and when one falls in her lap, she’s more than ready to flip the script.

When leaving the courthouse, she witnesses two men in a car trying to abduct a local woman. She intervenes, but when the dust settles, the woman is nowhere to be found and people are telling her that she’s reading too much into the situation.

She knows better. Unfortunately, nobody will listen.

Her boss is trying to force her to cover pageant stories. Her husband is trying to placate her. And the sheriff? He’s convinced she’s losing her mind.

Avery doesn’t play around, however, and she keeps digging … despite the numerous distractions she’s got going. What she finds is a huge operation, and when it’s time to take it down, she’s the one in danger of not only losing her life but also her freedom.

Avery Shaw is a force to be reckoned with. She’s about to prove it … again.

Patient Vengeance by A.L. Masters:

The 2012 London Olympic Games are coming up and the country is in a state of excitement. The mood in the country is positive and hard times are forgotten, if just for a short time. But a young woman is reported missing. And then a dismembered woman’s body is discovered at an ancient historical site. Or is it? Another young woman is reported missing. Another body is found floating in the Thames. Or is it? Spence Hargreaves and his team find themselves hurled into an investigation that stretches from the Wiltshire countryside to London to East Anglia to Australia. What brings things together? Is the past the past and the present the present? Or can past and present never be separated? Is vengeance ever just? Is it true that we reap what we sow? As the reader ponders such issues, Spence and his team struggle to understand the reason why? And then how to unravel the threads.

Don’t Get Close by Matt Miksa:

An infamous reincarnation cult resurfaces in the wake of a deadly bombing, and it’s up to an FBI novice to learn its true aim—and uncover its dark past before it consumes her.

Special Agent Vera Taggart walked away from a promising career as an artist to join the FBI, and she impresses her new colleagues with her eerie ability to divine conclusions from the grisliest crime scenes. Taggart’s first assignment is a decades-old cold case centered on a cult of suicide bombers known as the Sons of Elijah who believe they’ve been reborn hundreds of times, going back centuries. It seems like a low-risk assignment until a bomb tears apart a crowded Chicago restaurant. The Sons of Elijah have returned—and now it’s up to Taggart to stop their modern-day reign of terror.

Taggart’s investigation begins with Dr. Seth Jacobson, a renowned psychiatrist who claims to help people remember past lives through hypnotherapy. Jacobson had treated two of the Sons of Elijah’s founders before they’d gone on to commit a series of horrific murders. Desperate to understand how these ordinary patients could have taken such a violent path, Taggart agrees to undergo similar treatment with Jacobson.

Through her hypnosis sessions, Taggart comes to suspect the Sons of Elijah are targeting a high-tech government laboratory that could expose the group’s greatest secret with a controversial experiment. To save millions of innocent lives, Tag must come to grips with the shocking truth about the cult and her own puzzling role in its timeless mission. The fate of humanity rests on her ability to determine which threats are real and which exist only in her mind—and to decide whose side she’s really fighting for.

Bad Blood Sisters by Saralyn Richard:

Quinn McFarland has grown up around dead bodies…

Quinn’s always joked about death, but this summer, death stops being funny. For one thing, her brother finally undergoes transplant surgery. For another, Quinn’s estranged BFF—her “blood sister”—is brought into the family mortuary, bludgeoned to death.

Quinn is haunted by the past, her friendship gone awry, and the blood oath she’s sworn to keep secret. The police consider her a person of interest, and someone threatens her not to talk. Quinn is the only one who knows enough to bring the killer to justice, but what she’s buried puts her in extreme danger.

Little Did She Know by Willow Rose:

It was supposed to be the happiest day of her life when her kidnapped daughter returned, but it wasn’t.

Fourteen years ago, Clarissa Smalls was born, and a few hours later, she was taken from the hospital. Kidnapped. Her mother searched desperately for her for years, but she never found her.

Until now.

When Clarissa Smalls is suddenly found in the swamps of central Florida, badly bruised and confused, it causes much joy and celebration in her family, especially with her mother, who has waited fourteen years to see her baby girl again. Little did she know that this day would end up being the worst in her life. Because Clarissa doesn’t want to know about her mother, she refuses to talk to anyone and won’t tell the police what happened to her.

When another baby girl is kidnapped from the same hospital, in the same manner, the police believe it’s the same kidnapper that took Clarissa. Suddenly, time is of the essence to make her answer the many questions that are piling up.

Where was she for fourteen years?

Who took her?

Why won’t she tell them who her kidnapper is?

The FBI brings in former profiler Eva Rae Thomas to help them in this peculiar case. Eva Rae Thomas knows the girl’s mother very well and is willing to go to great lengths to help her out, even though the two of them share an unpleasant history. In addition, Eva Rae’s sister recently came back into her life after being kidnapped thirty-five years ago, so the FBI hopes that she can contribute with a deeper understanding of the situation and maybe get through to Clarissa.

Little could she have known that soon she would wish that she never got involved in this, as the case becomes very personal for her.

Murder at the Savoy by Lee Strauss:

Mrs. Ginger Reed, known also as Lady Gold, settles into homelife with her husband Chief Inspector Basil Reed, son Scout and newborn daughter Rosa, but when an opportunity to join a dinner party at the renowned Savoy Hotel is offered, she’s eager to engage in a carefree night with friends. Some of the guests are troubled when their party’s number lands at unlucky thirteen, as death is sure to come to the first person who leaves the table.

Thankfully, the Savoy has an answer to this superstitious dilemma. A small statue of a black cat fondly known as Kaspar is given the empty seat, rounding the number to fourteen.

Unfortunately, in this instance Kaspar didn’t fulfill his duties and a murder is committed. The case is tricky and complicated by a recent escape of a prisoner who has a bone to pick with Basil. Are the two seemingly unrelated incidents connected?

Ginger and Basil work together to solve one while avoiding the other, and what can they do about the black cat who crossed their path?

Confusion People by Ted Teja:

Framed for a bewildering array of crimes, Martin is on the run. The government thinks Hodges is either dead or gone rogue. That makes it hard to save the world from his ex-wife who is doing her best to take over various arms and drug deals, and whatever else the cartels are doing. With both Interpol and the bad guys after them, time is not their friend.

 

 

The Girl Who Killed You by Amy Vansant:

When Mick and his retired military gun-for-hire “fixer” service is hired by a United States Senator to find his missing son, he enlists the help of his daughter, Siofra “Shee” McQueen. An experienced tracker, Shee quickly tracks the boy to a Bahamian island playground catering to the young and wealthy. The job seems like such a breeze, she hires her daughter, Charlotte, to infiltrate the age-restricted compound. They’ve just been reunited after a lifetime apart, and the mission offers them serious quality mother-daughter time.

Is the mother-of-the-year award in the mail yet?

Before Shee can kick back with a Bahama Mama, the senator’s son’s girlfriend turns up dead. The boy is the primary suspect. Could be he’s not the underachieving goofball he seemed to be…and her daughter is on the island with him.

Shee needs to extract Charlotte, but communication has been cut, and the sinister underbelly of the resort is beginning to show.

Shee will need to tap into her father’s collection of ex-military misfits, including a retired FBI agent, a newly-hired thief hiding a secret, and Charlotte’s father—the wounded SEAL whose heart Shee once trampled—if she’s going to save their daughter.

The island has other ideas.

Star Trek Picard finally meets the “Watcher”

Shockingly, we only have one Star Trek series airing right now (but have no fear, because Disney Plus is giving us Moon Knight next week), so here is my take on the latest episode of Star Trek Picard. For my take on previous episodes and seasons, go here.

Warning: Spoilers below the cut!

When we last met Jean-Luc Picard and his Merry Men and Women, they had traveled back in time to 2024 and landed themselves right in trouble again. Elnor was killed, Agnes was almost assimilated by the Borg Queen and Rios was injured and arrested by ICE. Worse, neither their com badges nor their transporters are working properly. Things are not looking good for Picard and his friends.

The episode opens with Seven and Raffi arriving at the Mariposa Clinic, looking for Rios. They find the clinic ransacked. Only the nurse is present and tells them that Rios was arrested along with Doctor Teresa. Teresa is a US citizen, so she will be released eventually. Rios, however, has neither an ID nor a Green Card nor proof of citizenship, so he will be deported to hell knows where. That is, if the ICE doesn’t get even worse in the next two years and simply disappears people altogether, which this episode at least implies.

We next see Seven and Raffi on a city bus, where we get the first of several Easter eggs that call back to previous Star Trek time travel episodes. This one is a callback to the bus scene from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, because Seven and Raffi encounter a middle-aged punk with a noisy boom box on the bus and have as little appreciation for bad punk music (and it is bad punk music) as Kirk and Spock almost forty years before. The boom box still plays the same song and they even got the same actor Kirk Thatcher (who’s actually a production designer and producer) to reprise the part. Only that this time around no one needs to nerve-pinch or punch out the punk, because when Seven asks him to turn down the music, the punk touches his neck and switches off the boom box. It’s a fun cameo, even if makes next to no sense, because very few former punks still wear a mohawk and full punk get-up at age 60. Nor would they use an ancient boom box – if they can even find one that still works (one of the old boom boxes I had in the 1980s – a cheap South Korean no name radio, not the pricey Sony one – actually does still work, though the tape deck has been broken for years) – but would probably listen to the music on their phone or maybe an iPod. Never mind that this random bus-riding punk has no real reason to connect to strange men he met on a bus in 1985, one of whom nerve-pinched him, with two strange women he meets on a bus in a different city almost forty years later. Besides, as other events in the episode show, the punk most likely does not even remember the incident with Kirk and Spock back in 1985, because due to the impending timeline change it may never happen.

Since they know that Rios has been arrested, Raffi and Seven make their way to the LAPD headquarters, which would seem to be the logical place to find someone who has been arrested. However, the desk sergeant can’t find Rios in the system and an outraged Raffi getting in her face doesn’t help either. After Seven pulls Raffi away, a random good Samaritan informs them that someone arrested by ICE won’t be in the LAPD system and that they’d better hurry before ICE disappears Rios forever. I’m not sure if this is a reference to the fact that ICE apparently “lost” several of the detained children they separated from their parents or if this hints at something more ominous.

Once they leave LAPD headquarters, Raffi is determined to determined to draw even more attention to herself – something the team have been explicitly warned against, because it could affect the timeline – by pulling a phaser she wasn’t supposed to take out of the ship and using it to disintegrate the window of a parked police car.

“You’re not going to steal the police car”, a horrified Sevn exclaims. Raffi tells her that she only wants to steal the laptop inside the car to look up Rios’ whereabouts. But then, a bunch of cops catch wind of what Raffi is doing, so Raffi and Seven are forced to steal the police car anyway. Raffi finally finds Rios in the computer and learns that he is held at an ICE detention facility, while Seven is forced to take a crash course in driving a 21st century police car. Seven’s issues with driving the car – and understanding traffic rules – ring true, even if the “yellow means go very fast” joke is almost as old as Star Trek by now, though Raffi is a little bit too skilled with the computer, compared to Scotty’s failed attempts to interact with a 2oth century computer in The Voyage Home. And how does Raffi know what GPS is, considering that GPS has likely long been replaced with a succesor system by the 25th century? Finally, it’s striking that neither Raffi nor Seven ever consider switching on the police car’s siren, which would have at least chased other cars out of their way.

While Seven and Raffi are trying to rescue him, Rios is not having a good time. He finds himself locked up in a cage in an ICE detention facility and when he tries to intervene on behalf of another detainee – Rios being the type who just doesn’t know when to shut up – he promptly get himself tasered. He also has a few nice chats with Doctor Teresa through mesh wire. Teresa has by now pegged that something is really off about Rios, especially since he seems to be completely unaware of the routine cruelties of ICE. Rios doesn’t tell her who he really is – though she probably wouldn’t have believed him anyway – though he does try “I’m a starship captain from the future, I’m only passing through and if you’d just let me fulfill my mission, I’ll be gone and will bother you no more” on a guard, with the expected success.

Meanwhile, Picard and Agnes – and the revived Borg Queen – are still aboard La Sirena, trying to get the various systems running again. The heating is among the systems that are not working and Agnes is clearly cold, so Picard suggests retiring to Chateau Picard, which is deserted in this time and has been since WWII, when the Picard family fled to Britain from the Nazis. This bit of history does double duty here, to explain why no one noticed La Sirena crashing and destroying large swarthes of Chateau Picard’s grounds as well as to offer an entirely unnecessary explanation why Jean-Luc Picard speaks with a very British RP accent, in spite of being French.

Inside the deserted chateau, Picard has another flashback of his mother and manages to start a fire in a remarkably well-preserved and too modern looking fireplace. How Picard manage to start a fire with likely neither matches nor a lighter (if he even knew what to do with either) nor anything else is another mystery to episode glosses over. Picard tries to persuade Agnes to rest and sleep, but Agnes is too wired (in the literal sense, since she was plugged into the Borg Queen only last episode) to sleep and instead begins to grab random books, wine bottles and other things lying around. All of these things include the number 15 – the 15th volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica, in 1915 bottle of pinot noir, so Picard and Agnes realise that Agnes’ subconscious is trying to tell them something she got from the Borg Queen.  They figure out that the timeline change will happen on the April 15th and that today is April 12th, so they have three days to prevent the timeline change and save the future from becoming a fascist hellscape.

Since they have no time to waste and the transporter is working again, Picard beams to the coordinates where the Watcher is to be found according to the info Agnes stole from the Borg Queen, while Agnes stays behind aboard La Sirena with the Borg Queen, even though that is obviously a very bad idea.

Picard lands in a dilapidated part of Los Angeles – another Sanctuary district, it seems – but one which he recognises because he visited it in the first episode of season 2 in the regular timeline. Precisely, Picard was there to visit a certain bar, a bar which also exists in 2024 almost unchanged, but then is was clearly a historical retro bar in the 25th century.

Guinan was at the top of the list of people who might be the Watcher and indeed, once I saw where Picard was going, I thought, “Well, that was kind of obvious.” Though in the end, the show was not quite as obvious as I feared, for while Picard does meet a young Guinan in the bar, Guinan is not in fact the Watcher.

If this had been Star Wars, we would have been treated to a creepy digitally de-aged Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan. Star Trek, however, doesn’t really do digital de-aging and so Ito Aghayere plays this much younger version of Guinan. Personally, I prefer this approach, because while the digital de-aging technology has advanced significantly and we certainly have enough footage of the younger Whoopi Goldberg to use, the result has that typical uncanny valley creepiness. See Mark Hamill’s digital ghost guest-starring in The Book of Boba Fett recently. Besides, Ito Aghayere does a fine job playing the younger and much more disillusioned Guinan.

Guinan does not recognise Picard – even though they met in “Time’s Arrow” back in 1893. The episode itself never really goes into this, but the implication that due to the impending timeline change, which will wipe the Federation from existence, Picard never travelled back in time to 1893 and so Guinan has never met him. And so this younger, angrier and more cynical Guinan initially assumed that Picard is trying to rob her and threatens him with a shotgun even after Picard has befriended her dog (going by the obvious rapport between Picard and the dog Luna, I wonder whether this is another of Patrick Stewart’s real life dogs). Picard tells Guinan that he knows she’s an El-Aurian, which gets her attention.

It turns out that Guinan is planning to leave Earth behind forever, because it’s just too shitty and terrible a place.  Picard tells Guinan that the timeline is about to be altered for the worse – something which Guinan with her sensitivity to timeline changes is noticing herself – and begs her not to leave just yet, but Guinan is adamant. She’s done with Earth.

Now I certainly sympathise, because the US of 2024 as portrayed in Star Trek Picard certainly is a shitty place, a bit like the Trump era on steroids, though at least it does not seem to have covid. However, Guinan has been living on Earth at least since the late 19th century, so she’s certainly seen worse times, particularly as a black woman.  Cause awful as this version of the early 21st century may be, it’s still not nearly as bad as things used to be. Guinan already lived on Earth when she would neither have been allowed to vote nor would have been allowed to go into many public places. If she spent most of her time in California, she lived through several racism fueled riots – not to mention two World Wars and several genocides. So the question is, why is Guinan so adamant to leave now? Is the awful 21st century, where “they’ve traded hoods for suits”, really the straw that broke the camel’s back?  Or is Guinan just upset because the plot demands her to be.

Tor.com reviewer Keith R.A. DeCandido has similar issues. Guinan must have seen a lot of shit in the more than a century she’s been on Earth, so why is she so upset now? Keith R.A. DeCandido also takes issue with the fact that “Watcher” hammers home its message – that this world, which is very much like ours, is shit – with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Which is absolutely true, but then Star Trek has never been subtle with its messages – “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield”, anybody? In fact, I find “Watcher” a lot less annoying in spite of its very blunt message than “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield”, because “Watcher” does not really engage in clumsy metaphors like “Battlefield”, but gives us a slightly exaggerated version of things that already happen in our world. Besides, no matter how blunt and unsubtle Star Trek is about its messages, there are always people who still won’t get it. Witness Brad Torgersen, who honestly thought that Star Trek was a show about automatic sliding doors.

I also don’t find it very believable that Guinan, no matter how angry and upset, would not at least listen to Picard, especially since she realises herself that something is wrong. Guinan has normally been portrayed as a more reflective character and someone who is willing to listen. As it is, however, Guinan only listens when Picard tells her his name – which should mean nothing to her, since their meeting in 1893 never happened in this timeline – and agrees to take him to see the Watcher, though she also warns him that the Watcher is not easy to get along with.

They go to see the Watcher in a park with a lake, which is one of those locations you’ve seen a hundred times in different movies or TV shows. Guinan departs once the Watcher or rather their avatar appears, for the Watcher takes over different bodies Dr. Mabuse style, jumping from a little girl to a hot dog vendor to a creepy random dude and finally appearing as a well dressed woman who looks very much like Laris, the Romulan with whom Picard has a complicated relationship. Why does the Watcher look like Laris? That won’t be revealed until next week, though lots of people suspect that the identity of the Watcher will tie in to the 1968 Star Trek episode “Assignment Earth”, one of several time travel episodes of the Original Series. The fact that there are plenty of Easter eggs referring to the Original Series scattered throughout this episodes, e.g. the existence of a 21st Street Mission, which was the name of Edith Keeler’s organisation in “The City on the Edge of Forever”, or a plaza named after Dr. Jackson Roykirk, inventor of the errant space probe from “The Changeling”, would support this theory.

While Picard is catching up with a younger Guinan, Agnes is left stuck aboard La Sirena together with the Borg Queen, which is not a good place for her to be. And so the Borg Queen needles Agnes mercilessly. Agnes, however, understands the Borg Queen as well and point blank tells the Borg Queen that with the Collective gone, she is lonely, just as Agnes is lonely. Agnes also offers her a deal, help her restore communications and the transporters and she’ll talk to the Borg Queen on occasion.

Leaving Agnes alone with the Borg Queen is not a good idea at all and indeed I fear that poor Agnes may be headed for assimilation or may even become a new Borg Queen – or the original Borg Queen, via timey-whiny shenangigans. I’m not the only one who worries about this, Paul Levinson and io9 reviewer James Whitbrook have similar suspicions. James Whitbrook also points out that Agnes is not only stuck in the tech support, the rest of the team also doesn’t treat her very well, which may drive her further to seeek connection via Borg assimilation.

However, it also seems to me as if the writers don’t quite know what to do with Agnes, just as they have no idea what to do with Soji and Elnor. And so Soji is simply forgotten after a brief appearance in episode 1, while poor Elnor is killed off. Which is a pity, because all of those characters have potential.

As for why Agnes so desperately needs to get the transporters and communication system back online, Rios is put on a prison bus to be deported to presumably Mexico, so Raffi and Seven urgently need to rescue him, before he disappears forever, Mexico apparently being some kind of black hole in this version of 2024. Either that or this version of ICE just kills people to be deported and buries them in the desert.

However for now, Raffi and Seven are still stuck in the middle of an extended chase with the police. By US TV standards, it’s not even a bad car chase, though nowhere near the level of Alarm für Cobra 11, but then what is? However, this is Star Trek and not Alarm für Cobra 11 and for Star Trek, the chase goes on way too long. Though the way the chase ends is fun, for Agnes has finally managed to get the transporters back online and tell Seven to break, even if it seems counter-intuitive, because Agnes cannot beam them out of a moving vehicle. So the police car comes to a halt and is immediately surrounded by LAPD officers, only for Raffi and Seven to vanish in front of their eyes. The official police report about that incident will certainly be interesting.

Raffi and Seven reappear on a hill near the road that the prison bus with Rios on board is travelling down. So now they have to stop the bus and rescue Rios – without any equipment or even a vehicle.

The lengthy car chases also masks the fact that even though this is a busy episode with lots of things happening, the plot barely moves forward at all. Rios was in ICE detention at the start of the episode and he still is in ICE detention by the end. Seven and Raffi were chasing after Rios at the start of the episode and they still are by the end. Agnes was at risk of falling under the spell of the Borg Queen at the beginning of the episode and she still is at the end.  Only Picard’s plot moves forward at all, though not very fast, cause he spends most of the episode catching up with Guinan and only meets the Watcher – if the woman who looks like Laris is indeed the Watcher – at the very end. The often glacial pace was already a problem in season 1 of Picard and in season 4 of Star Trek Discovery and sadly, it continues to be an issue in season 2 as well.

Finally, there is also Q, who’s sitting at a table in some kind of outdoor café, watching a woman who’s reading a Dixon Hill mystery (a nice callback to the Next Generation episode “The Big Goodbye”), while trying to feed her insecurities and imposter syndrome. Patches on their clothing indicate that both the woman and whoever Q is pretending to be work for the Europa mission that is advertised in billboards all over Los Angeles of 2024. Well, it should have been obvious that those were Chekhov’s (Anton, not Pavel) billboards and not a random bit of set decoration. And so the impending timeline change will clearly have to do something with this mission and probably its failure and the woman Q is harassing is clearly important. Though Q himself is having problems, for when he snaps his fingers, nothing happens.

Season 2 of Star Trek Picard is still a lot of fun, but it’s increasingly obvious that the plot moves at a glacial pace. This entire episode could have been condensed to fifteen minutes and nothing would have been lost. Let’s hope the speed picks up next week.