Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 30

The Book of Boba Fett moves over for “The Return of the Mandalorian”

I guess I am doing episode by episode reviews of The Book of Boba Fett now, so here is my take on episode 5, “The Return of the Mandalorian”. Reviews of previous episodes may be found here.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

Pretty much every reviewer agrees that “The Return of the Mandalorian” is the best episode of The Book of Boba Fett so far. There’s only one problem. It’s not really an episode of The Book of Boba Fett, but an episode of The Mandalorian which happens to have been inserted into The Book of Boba Fett. Boba himself doesn’t even appear, though Fennec does, briefly.

Instead, the episode follows around Din Djarin after the end of season 2 of The Mandalorian. Now that Baby Grogu is at Jedi Academy, Din Djarin is no longer on the run and has gone back to the only job he knows, bounty-hunting.

We first see Din Djarin walking into a meat processing plant to arrest its owner. Meat processing plants in the Star Wars universe look a lot like they do in owners, only that staff and owner are Klaatoonians. So far, we’ve had Klaatu and Nikto, so where are the Baradas?

Din wanders into the slimy owner’s office to arrest him. The owner at first denies that he is the person Din seeks and when Din shows him his holographic Wanted poster, he insists that the portrait doesn’t even look like him. Din, however, is not fooled and gives the Klatoonian his “I can bring you in warm or cold” line. The Klatoonian opts for cold and a fight breaks out. Luckily, Din Djarin still has the darksabre, which he took from Moff Gideon at the end of season 2 of The Mandalorian. And while the darksabre may make him king of the Mandalorians, it’s also really handy to slice and dice the muscle of a slimy Klatoonian meat processing plant owner. And so Din cuts several Klatoonians in half, including the meat processing plant owner. Alas, he’s no Jedi and hasn’t had lightsabre lessons, so he also manages to slice his own thigh with the darksabre.

We next see Din Djarin limping out of the office of the meat processing plant owner, what is clearly a severed head wrapped up in a towel in his hand (the darksabre is also really handy for cutting off heads, so Din doesn’t have to cart around the whole bounty), only to find himself faced with the meat processing plant workers, all brandishing meat cleavers and knives. Din is tired, wounded and really not in the mood for any more fighting, so he tells the workers, “Your boss is dead and he has a lot of New Republic credits in there that I have no right to, so help yourself.” The workers decide that loyalty to a dead boss does not pay and help themselves to the money, while Din leaves unmolested.

There is a cut and we now see the place all this is happening and it turns out to be a Ringworld, a bonafide Ringworld. And yes, reader, I squeed. I’m not the only one either. Andrew Liptak describes the same experience in this Polygon article.

Din Djarin limps across this Ringworld, lugging a severed head in a bag, much to the disgust of a female alien who has to share an elevator with him. He struts into some kind of bar/casino. Once again, we see some extras in brightly coloured punk outfits, so apparently a neon punk youth subculture arose in the Star Wars universe after the fall of the Empire. Given the Star Wars universe’s preference for earth tones (for rebels and various planetary populations) as well as black, white and grey (for the Empire), it makes sense that young people wanting to express their rebellion in fashion would go for bright colours, no matter how much some Star Wars purists may hate it.

Din Djarin, however, doesn’t have any time for fashion arguments. He limps right into a separate dining room and dumps the severed head of his bounty onto his employer’s dinner table, recalling a scene in Lois McMaster Bujold’s 1991 novel Barrayar, where Cordelia Vorkosigsan dumps the head of Count Vordarian onto the council table. Din Djarin’s employer is a lot more pleased about having a severed head dumped onto his dinner table than the assorted Barrayaran nobles and promptly invites Din to sit down for dinner (bad idea, since Din only eats in private) and also offers him more jobs. Din Djarin, however, only wants his payment, the exact location where one can descend into the Ringworld’s catacombs to find the hideout of the Mandalorian clan of the Mythosaur crest.

So we follow Din Djarin as he descends into the vertigo inducing catacombs, which are basically on the outside of the Ringworld, seemingly suspended over open space, where he finds none other than the female Mandalorian armourer (Emily Swallow), last seen in season 1 of The Mandalorian, for him. The Armourer has obviously survived her last stand against the Stormtroopers, but then she is a badarse, though her underground clan of Mandalorians has been much decimated and is basically reduced to three members: Din, the Armourer and a portly Mandalorian named Paz Vizsla (played by showrunner Jon Favreau, so Happy Hogan finally got the closest thing to an Iron Man suit), who doesn’t like Din very much.

However, the Armourer is in charge and orders Paz to patch up Din’s leg. Then she takes a look at the goodies Din brought back from his quest, namely the darksabre and . The Armourer does not approve of the lance, since it can pierce beskar armour and be used to kill Mandalorians, though she does approve of the darksabre. The lance, however, must be melted down and turned into armour.

Din Djarin insists that the beskar lance be forged into a piece of armour for a foundling. And not just any foundling either but Grogu. The Armourer points out that Grogu is with the Jedi and no longer a foundling, but Din Djarin is adamant. The Armourer also points out that Jedi are forbidden to have any attachments, whereupon Din Djarin exclaims, “But that is the opposite of our creed. We believe in togetherness and solidarity.”

This is another instance where a Star Wars character points out in universe that much of the Jedi creed is actually crap and actively harmful. Forbidding all attachments is what drove Anakin to the Dark Side in the end. But while Star Wars characters occasionally point out that Jedi beliefs are shit, none of them truly act on it. I thought Rey and Kylo Ren might overcome the light side/dark side dichotomy, when they decide to work together against Snoke in The Last Jedi, but we all know how that ended.

We don’t see what exactly the Armourer makes for Grogu, though chain links suggest a mail shirt. But it hit me that “making the first armour for my foundling” is the Mandalorian equivalent of knitting baby shoes. Once the Armourer is done, she wraps up the mini armour in a red and white knotted handkerchief that has the approximate shape of Grogu’s head. Din stares at at wistfully. He very much misses the child that’s now his.

The Armourer also delivers a neat infodump about the darksabre and its history. And unlike the interminable flashbacks that have characterised this series so far, the capsule history of Mandalore does not bring the plot to a screeching halt. First of all, the Armourer reminds us that the Mandalorians and their culture have survived for thousands of years, while the Empire lasted less than thirty years, a fact that is easy to forget, considering that Star Wars is so very focussed on the Empire.

That darksabre was forged by a Mandalorian Jedi named Tarre Vizsla (ancestor of Paz). “I have met Jedi”, Din Djarin helpfully points out like a kid would say “I’ve met Santa Claus and he’s real.” The person who wields the darksabre is leader of Mandalore – however, it must be won in battle. If gifted rather than won in battle, the darksabre will bring bad luck to the Mandalorians.

The Armourer also knows about Bo-Katan Kryze and unsurprisingly does not approve of her. For Bo-Katan inherited the darksabre rather than win it in battle and this is not “the way”. In fact, the Armourer blames Bo-Katan for the destruction of Mandalore at the hands of the Empire – which is illustrated in an impressive flashback sequence of mushroom clouds over Mandalore and K-2SO droids stalking through the ruins in a scene that is reminiscent of the original Battlestar Galactica (whose effects were famously created by John Dykstra of Star Wars fame), Terminator and The Day After.

Indeed, it’s interesting that The Book of Boba Fett not only draws on works which came out shortly before Star Wars, e.g. outlaw biker movies, the Billy Jack movies, American Graffiti, Lawrence of Arabia, Dune and Italian westerns, but also on works that came out concurrently with or shortly after the original Star Wars trilogy and which often were in conversation with it such as cyberpunk, Quadrophenia, the Vorkosigan novels, Battlestar Galactica, Terminator, The Day After, the Conan films of the 1980s. Because nowadays, it’s easy to forget that Star Wars grew out of the New Hollywood movement of the 1970s and was in conversation both with the SFF and the larger movie and TV sphere of its time.

Meanwhile, the Armourer and her sect, including a young Din Djarin, only survived the destruction of Mandalore, because they had retreated/been exiled to a moon. Of course, as Tor.com reviewer Emmet Asher-Perrin points out, the Armourer isn’t exactly an unbiassed source, since we know that she and her people are Mandalorian fundamentalists and the Star Wars equivalent to an evangelical fire and brimstone preacher who believes that Dungeons & Dragons, LGBTQ people and the covid vaccine are all the work of the devil, so we should take everything she says with a generous grain of salt.

Since Din Djarin did win the darksabre in battle, the Armourer has no issues with him keeping it and even proceeds to give him some fighting lessons, darksabre against beskar hammer. Din is having trouble with the darksabre, since it becomes heavier the more he wields it, which is a lightsabre trait I at least have never heard about. The Armourer tells Din to stop fighting the darksabre. So do lightsabres respond to their wielders in some way?

Now it is a longstanding theory of mine, developed in my teens, that lightsabres can only be used by Jedi and other Force-sensitive people. The initial idea was that lasers are light and light doesn’t just randomly stop in space, so whatever the lightsabre blades are, they’re not lasers. So my teen self came up with the theory that lightsabre blades are focussed Force energy. The Empire Strikes Back blasts that theory to bits when Han briefly uses Luke’s lightsabre to cut open a dead Tauntaun. So if Han, who’s not a Jedi, can ignite a lightsabre, no matter how briefly, that’s it for the theory.

However, “not a Jedi” doesn’t mean “not Force-sensitive” and there are several indications that Han might indeed be Force-sensitive, but was never found by the Jedi due to being a street kid born towards the end of the Republic. After all, fast reflexes are a harbinger of Force-sensitivity and Han has extremely fast reflexes. The fact that Luke is able to perceive Han and Leia being tortured several planets away also suggests that both of them might have been inadvertedly reaching out. Never mind that Han becomes a Force ghost of sorts in the sequel trilogy.

As for other people who are not Jedi wielding lightsabres, Finn does a remarkably good job keeping Kylo Ren at bay before Rey wakes up in The Force Awakens. And Finn is revealed as Force-sensitive in The Rise of Skywalker. I’m not sure about Moff Gideon and Bo-Katan, but then both of them lose the darksabre. As for Din, there are hints that he might be Force-sensitive, too, but more on that later.

It is very obvious that the Armourer could kick Din’s arse and take the darksabre, if she wanted to – she did take out an entire squadron of Stormtroopers, after all – but chooses not to. And yes, the Armourer is awesome, even if she is a religious fanatic.

Paz Vizsla, on the other hand, very much wants the darksabre. After all, his ancestor forged it, so he thinks he has a right to it – even though that’s very much not how things work on Mandalore, as the Armourer explains. Nonetheless, Paz challenges Din to a duel, Din accepts and the Armourer agrees to it. Of course, a duel to the death between two members of your sect is a bad idea, if there are only three Mandalorians left – three that the Armourer approves of, since we know of at least four others. However, this is the way and so Din and Paz fight it out in one of those fights on a narrow and railing-less walkway that Star Wars loves so much.

Initially, things don’t go so well for Din, because he’s wounded, weakened and has trouble with the darksabre, whereas Paz Vizsla is fresh and fueled by anger. However, the tide turns when Paz gloats – with a vibroknife at Din’s throat – that he will exterminate Din’s entire clan. And since Din and Grogu are a Clan of Two, that means Paz has just woken Papa Bear and Din beats and disarms him, though he doesn’t kill Paz.

The Armourer seems pleased with the outcome of the duel, but then she asks Din if he has ever taken off his helmet. Din, of course, can’t say “no”, cause he did take off his helmet, even though it was perfectly justified each time, because it was to receive medical treatment that would save Din’s own life, to infiltrate an Imperial fortress to save Grogu’s life and while saying good-bye to Grogu, the person he loves most in the world. However, the Armourer is a fanatic who knows no exceptions and so she tells Din that he isn’t a Mandalorian any longer. There is a way to redeem himself, but that requires bathing in the pools in the salt mines under Mandalore, mines which – as Din points out – no longer exist.

I really hope that Din will eventually realise that both the Mandalorian and the Jedi way have their share of issues and that he and Grogu will find their own way. However, Star Wars has disappointed me in that regard before, cause whenever it seems as if characters are beginning to question some of the more idiotic rules of their respective groups, the story never follows through, see The Last Jedi.

A crestfallen Din Djarin leaves the Mythosaur Clan and boards a passenger liner, which leads to a hilarious scene where a security droid forces Din to relinquish his many weapons, because “I am a Mandalorian. Weapons are my religion” does not override transport security regulations. The passenger liner is delightfully grubby – the Star Wars universe equivalent to a Greyhound bus or a Baltic Sea ferry rather than a luxury cruise ship. Din has a brief interaction with a Rodian child – and it’s fascinating how Din suddenly notices other children, now he’s a father himself. However, he’s a father separated from his kid, so it only plunges him even further into depression. io9‘s James Whitbrook points out how utterly alone Din Djarin is in these scenes . His clan has disowned him, Grogu is with the Jedi and Din has no one. Kudos also once again to Pedro Pascal who manages to convey Din’s with no facial expressions and only fairly limited dialogue, using body language alone.

The passenger liner is headed to Mos Eisley on Tatooine. Din is here to see Peli Motto, who has sent him a message that she has a replacement for the late lamented Razorcrest, blasted to bits by the remnants of the Empire back in season 2 of The Mandalorian. However, Peli’s proposed replacement for the Razorcrest is not a Clone Wars drop ship like the old Razorcrest, but a battered Naboo Starfighter. Din initially calls it a pile of junk and wants nothing to do with it, but Peli persuades Din to give the Starfighter a chance, once they’ve fixed it up.

So Peli and Din do just that, they repair the Naboo Starfighter, while alternately technobabbling or bantering. Peli thoughtfully even turns the astromech droid port into a child seat for Grogu. These scenes take up about half of the episode and yet watching Din Djarin, Peli Motto or her droids patch up an spaceship is glorious fun and never boring. This is one moment where the tendency of The Book of Boba Fett and The Mandalorian to cast comedians in Star Wars roles comes in handy, because Amy Sedaris is hilarious as Peli Motto and I’m pretty sure most of her dialogue was improvised. Cause I really can’t imagine a Star Wars scriptwriter writing a line like “I dated a Jawa once. They’re fuzzy.” AV-Club reviewer Nick Wanserski is full of praise for Amy Sedaris, as is Tor.com‘s Emmett Asher-Perrin who also points out that they would watch a whole show of Peli Motto cracking jokes while repairing starships. So would I.

However, Peli is not just dating Jawas, she’s also handing them shopping lists for hard to find components. “I don’t ask, they don’t tell”, she tells Din. Din has a request of his own: a component called a cryogenic density combustion booster, which – as Germain Lussier points out at io9 – will look mightily familiar to eagle-eyed Star Wars fans since it’s one of the pieces of trash that Han, Luke and Leia use to try to stop the walls of the Death Star trash compactor. However, the Jawas did not get the component from the Death Star trash compactor, but stole it from a Pyke spice train, which gives Peli the chance to remind us that The Book of Boba Fett does actually have overarching plot, namely the impending turf war between Boba Fett and the Pykes.

But before we can get back to that plot, Din takes the Naboo Starfighter – now all shiny and silvery instead bright yellow, since Din prefers is metal shiny and natural – for a test flight. And so we watch Din swooshing around Mos Eisley and darting through Beggar’s Canyon – where Anakin Skywalker used to go podracing and Luke Skywalker used to shoot at whomp rats. Earlier Star Wars films have made it clear that the reason that Anakin and Luke could fly way too fast through Beggar’s Canyon without going splat is because they are Force-sensitive and have extremely fast reflexes. Din also flies way too fast through Beggar’s Canyon without going splat, suggesting that he, too, might be Force-sensitive.

Din also takes the Naboo Starfighter into orbit, puts on a show for the Rodian kid aboard the passenger liner and promptly runs into a New Republic patrol consisting of our old friend Captain Teva and a new recruit. The patrol harrasses Din about his licence, a missing transponder, unauthorised modifications, etc… Furthermore, Captain Teva recognises Din’s voice and has some questions about the various incidents involving Imperial remnants that Din was involved with. Din responds by flipping a switch – another callback to the hot rods of American Graffiti, which was not only directed by George Lucas, but starred Ron Howard, father of Bryce Dallas Howard, who directed this episode and did a stellar job – and just streaks away, leaving behind two baffled New Republic traffic cops.

Given how the New Republic has been portrayed in The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett, namely as a bunch of incompetents who’s rather harrass random Mandalorians over traffic violations than root out the various Imperial remnants or deal with the fact that crime is running rampant in their territory, it’s no surprise that the New Republic will eventually fail. Because frankly, they are incompetent.

When Din returns the Starfighter to Peli Motto’s – and of course he is going to keep it – he finds Fennec waiting for him, wanting to hire him. However, once Din finds out that Fennec doesn’t want to hire him for a bounty hunting job, but as muscle for Boba Fett, Din tells her that’s on the house, as a thanks for Fennec and Boba helping him against Moff Gideon. However, he first needs to visit a little friend. And we all know what that means, don’t we? Din Djarin is going to visit Grogu and quite possibly pick him up from Jedi Aacademy for good.

Most of us suspected that we would get to see Din Djarin this episode as the muscle Fennec wanted to hire. However, I don’t think anybody expected that we’d get what is basically an episode of The Mandalorian shoehorned into The Book of Boba Fett. Nor did anybody expect that the best episode of The Book of Boba Fett would be the one that’s basically an episode of a completely different series.

If anything, “The Return of the Mandalorian” highlights how much better The Mandalorian is than The Book of Boba Fett. This episode didn’t even have a lot of plot, but the fight scenes, fltght scenes, the banter, the Ringworld setting are all so much better than anything The Book of Boba Fett has given us so far. Daily Dot reviewer Gavia Baker-Whitelaw writes:

Above all, Din Djarin is a more compelling protagonist. He’s defined by consistent emotional goals: Loyalty to his Mandalorian creed, and love for his foundling child Grogu (currently offscreen at Jedi school with Luke Skywalker). His code of ethics also makes more sense than Boba Fett’s directionless new role as a crime boss.

She’s absolutely right, because after two seasons of The Mandalorian, we know who Din Djarin is. We know his devotion to the Mandalorian way, his love for Grogu, his loneliness and his vulnerability. We also know that Din is not in fact the best at what he does. He’s clumsy, cuts himself with his own darksabre and almost gets his arse handed to him by blurggs and a mudhorn. It’s the fact that Din Djarin is very human underneath that shiny armour that makes him such a likeable character.

Meanwhile, we still have no real idea who Boba Fett is. In the original trilogy, he was basically a henchman in a cool looking suit of armour. The prequels showed us his childhood and the tragic (for Boba) loss of his father. The Mandalorian gave us a different, more honourable Boba, who makes himself de-facto ruler of Tatooine. The Book of Boba Fett should have picked up there and told us more about who Boba is and what his motivation is, but it stumbled badly.

Personally, I wonder whether the reason that The Mandalorian is so much better than The Book of Boba Fett is because The Mandalorian is the story that Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni et al really want to tell, whereas The Book of Boba Fett is the story Disney wants them to tell.

Still, let’s hope that the last two episodes of The Book of Boba Fett will maintain the quality of this one, while actually featuring the title character again.

 

Fancast Spotlight: GeekShock

Nominations for the 2022 Hugo Awards are open, so I will be continuing the Fanzine and Fancast Spotlights. 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.

Today, I’m pleased to feature GeekShock, a podcast from Las Vegas, Nevada, about all things geeky.

Therefore, I’m happy to welcome Kerstan Szczepanski aka Kommander K of GeekShock to my blog today:

Tell us about your podcast or channel.

GeekShock is a podcast about the week-in-geek. We like to think we’re a funny bunch, so we style ourselves as a comedy podcast. We approach geek topics of the day however they may strike us as humorous, but we get serious when serious subjects arise. We talk about movies and television of course, but we also cover subjects in comics, games of all types (video, board, tabletop rpg), geek accessories i.e., toys, collectables, curiosities, and genre literature.

Who are the people behind your podcast or channel?

The Ugly Couch Show was a video show started by four friends from Las Vegas’ Star Trek: The Experience themed attraction. Before the attraction closed in 2008, they had dropped several videos exalting things in geek culture they loved. Mastertorgo, The Famous Paul, and Vlarg were all performers at the Experience, and 80s Jeff, a childhood friend of Torgo’s (they met at Space Camp!) was a bartender at the Experience’s famous Quark’s Bar and Restaurant. While improv actor Famous Paul has moved on, the others continue our current roster along with Deb, a former server at the Experience, Maple Leaf Matt, husband to Deb’s BFF, and myself, Kommander K, another performer from the Experience.

Why did you decide to start your podcast or channel?

We wanted to create the show that we wanted to listen to. The idea started as a talk show pitch for an AM radio station back in 2008. We wanted to create a companion show to go with “The Ugly Couch Show”, but one where we talked about the geeky news of the week rather than the focused subjects of the video show. The podcast worked so well, the video show went on hiatus after a few years.

What format do you use for your podcast or channel and why did you choose this format?

It grew organically over the years, but it was always based on a “geeky news of the week” discussion format. In 2009 there wasn’t much of that around. We have our week-in-geek segment, our popular News You Don’t Give a Shit About, the Week in News, as well as other bits.

The fan categories at the Hugos were there at the very beginning, but they are also the categories which consistently get the lowest number of votes and nominations. So why do you think fanzines, fancasts and other fan projects are important?

Passion is important. Love is important. And it’s the passion and love for all things genre that make the nerd world go round. As geek celebrity Wil Wheaton says, “It’s not about what you love, it’s how you love it.” GeekShock embraces that fully.

In the past twenty years, fanzines have increasingly moved online and fancasts have sprung up. What do you think the future of fan media looks like?

YouTube will continue to dominate for some time, but the explosion of podcasting makes it easier and easier to make, and find, your particular love. Podcast and YouTube cross-pollinating with streaming services like Twitch will continue, and growth in diverse voices will be great in the coming years. Watch for non-English and non-Western media!

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?

“Talking Scared” a horror literature podcast.

Matthew David Surridge is one of the premier fantasy bloggers we have. He was unfairly hurt by the Sad Puppies years ago. He wasn’t a part of the movement, and in no way agrees with their politics, so he turned down the Hugo nom he got with the Puppies shenanigans. He should be much wider read than he is.

James Maliszewski of Grognardia is a wonderful historic pulp and tabletop rpg blogger who had a hiatus but has returned. Check him out!

Where can people find you?

Our Home: https://geekshockpodcast.com/
Our Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/geekshockpodcast/
Our Twitter: https://mobile.twitter.com/geekshockpod

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

Do check out GeekShock, cause it’s a great podcast and source of news on all things geeky.

***

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

Of Squeecore and Conan

No, Conan has not been declared “squeecore” yet, though come to think of it, Conan the Cimmerian is a person from a marginalised background who rises to a high position, he’s something of a wish fulfillment character, there is banter and there are plenty of “hell,yeah!” Everything also usually works out for Conan, though not for necessarily for those around him, and there are two Conan stories (“Queen of the Black Coast” and “Beyond the Black River”), which are total downers where everybody not named Conan dies. So yes, maybe Robert E. Howard was writing squeecore some ninety years ago (at any rate, he was definitely writing for the money, i.e. he had the capitalist motive of needing to eat, pay for his car and support his sick mother). Because the definition is so muddled that everything can be “squeecore”.

Talking of “squeecore”, the Rite Gud podcast now has a transcript available of the episode where Raquel S. Benedict and J.R. Bolt attempt define what they mean by “squeecore”, so maybe their muddled points will become a bit clearer.

While on the subject of podcasts, the Geek Shock podcast, which is run by some geeky people from Las Vegas, including some who used to appear in a Star Trek live show there, not only weighs in on the “squeecore” debate, but also gave a lovely shout-out to this blog as well as to Galactic Journey. Geek Shock is a fun podcast, which will also be featured as a Fancast Spotlight here soon, so check them out.

Which brings me to my final link for today. Because I’m also back in 1967 and at Galactic Journey again, where I celebrate the 61st (in Journey time) and 122nd (in regular time) birthday of Robert E. Howard by reviewing Conan the Adventurer, first of the Lancer Conan reprints which have only just started coming out in 1967 and will introduce a whole new generation to Howard’s work in general and Conan in particular and which will also kick the sword and sorcery revival of the 1960s, which was already gradually ramping up through the first half of the decade, into overdrive.

The Lancer Conans are controversial these days, because of the way series editor L. Sprague De Camp not only forced the stories into a chronology that was never intended (Howard wrote the Conan stories out of order, actually beginning with an adventure late in Conan’s career and then going back to a very early adventure), but also mucked about with the actual stories, completed unfinished fragments, turned non-Conan stories by Howard into Conan stories and inserted his and Lin Carter’s own pastiches to fill up perceived gaps in the chronology.

Nowadays, Lin Carter’s and particularly L. Sprague De Camp’s contributions to Conan are viewed very negatively, because De Camp did not really get neither Conan nor Howard and because a lot of his mucking about was highly questionable and his and Carter’s Conan pastiches were often only a pale shadow of Howard’s original stories from the 1930s.

However, the Lancer editions were extremely well packaged. Frank Frazetta’s cover art is iconic and Frazetta’s Conan is the definitive image of the character by now, even though Margaret Brundage, Hugh Rankin and Harold DeLay all illustrated Conan before Frazetta did. The Lancers were also hugely successful, kept Conan from falling into obscurity and introduced him to a whole new generation of readers.

I was absolutely ready to roast De Camp for what he did to Conan – especially since some of the De Camp/Carter solo Conan efforts just don’t match the character from the Howard stories at all. However, it turned out that in early 1967, as the first two Lancer editions had only just come out, De Camp actually hadn’t actually done all that much that was objectionable.

Conan the Adventurer collects three largely unchanged Howard stories (and I don’t object to De Camp removing the occasional bit of racism) and one Howard fragment that De Camp completed, based on Howard’s outline. Both the original Howard fragment and the outline survive and have been reprinted in the Del Rey collection The Bloody Crown of Conan, so we can compare them to De Camp’s effort – entitled “Drums of Tombalku” – and De Camp really didn’t do too badly. He stuck to Howard’s outline and did a decent enough job completing the fragment. “Drums of Tombalku” is still a weaker Conan story and I’m pretty sure Howard abandoned it for a reason, but De Camp can’t be blamed for this.

I will be reviewing Conan the Warrior, the second Conan collection that Lancer put out, for Galactic Journey next month. Initially, both collections were supposed to be reviewed in one post, but it ran too long, so we split it in half. Conan the Warrior collects three novellas and is pure Howard with De Camp only providing the introduction and the bridging bits.

By the time, we get the the pure De Camp/Carter pastiches like Conan the Liberator, Conan of Aquilonia or Conan of the Isles, I’ll happily drag De Camp and Carter for what they did to Conan. And indeed, I was not very kind of Lin Carter when I reviewed his space opera The Star Magicians for Galactic Journey last year.

However, at Galactic Journey it’s January 1967 and by January 1967, L. Sprague De Camp really hasn’t done anything to deserve the reputation he later acquired yet.

Finally, just because I can, enjoy this diorama of Conan, Valeria and the “dragon” (really a dinosaur) from “Red Nails”.

Conan, Valeria and the “dragon” raid a cookie platter.

The Book of Boba Fett Faces “The Gathering Storm”

I guess I am doing episode by episode reviews of The Book of Boba Fett now, so here is my somewhat delayed take on episode 4, “The Gathering Storm”. Reviews of previous episodes may be found here.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

“The Gathering Storm”, the latest episode of The Book of Boba Fett starts off with Boba lying in his bacta tank once again. And we all know what that means by now. It’s flashback time.

And since Boba’s flashbacks still happen in remarkably chronological order, we now get what happened after the Tusken tribe that adopted Boba was slaughtered in the previous episode’s flashback. I’d have assumed that Boba Fett would take on the Nikto biker gang that killed the Tuskens next, but instead we find him spying on Jabba’s former palace, clearly planning to break in. However, there are too many guards and so Boba takes off with his trusty bantha companion into the desert again.

We next see Boba eating that time-honoured Tatooine desert specialty critter on a stick and even feeding some to his trusty bantha (banthas are carnivores?!), when he notes flares going off in the distance. Boba and the bantha (that sounds like a 1960s band) investigate and find Fennec with a gut shot, left for dead, a scene we already saw from a slightly different angle in season one of The Mandalorian.

Boba takes Fennec to a mod parlour on the outskirts of Mos Eisley and pays the modder to fix her and save her life. The Book of Boba Fett takes another detour into Cyberpunk territory here, down to some kind of techno music playing in the mod parlour. I also find it fascinating that there apparently is a sizeable cyber-mod teen subculture on Tatooine – sizeable enough that there are mod parlours catering to them – and that we’ve never seen the slightest hint of this before.

A bit later, Fennec wakes up in the desert, not dead and with a cyborg midriff. She’s even more surprised to find herself in the company of Boba Fett, who’s not dead either, though he’s supposed to be. Boba knows Fennec’s reputation – well, he used to be a bounty hunter and Fennec has a bounty on her head – and makes her an offer. If she helps him recover his ship from Jabba’s palace, he’ll let her go.

So Boba and Fennec scout out Jabba’s palace, while Boba cuddles his trusty bantha, gets licked in the face and then sets the bantha free to make baby banthas. Yes, really, this happens and the look on Fennec’s face is priceless when she watches it. Now Boba’s interactions with the Rancor last episode do show that he clearly has a soft spot for mega-fauna, but the galaxy’s most notorious bounty hunter cuddling a bantha is still a bizarre sight, as Emmet Asher-Perrin points out in their review at Tor.com.

Figuring out how many guards there are inside the hangar bay of Jabba’s former palace is not easy, because the gate always opens only for a few moments. However, Fennec has a drone they send in to map the interior of the hangar bay and the adjacent area. Now Boba and Fennec have a map of the layout of the hangar bay plus the positions of the guards and their patrol schedule, they sneak into the palace to steal the ship that is no longer named Slave-1, since Disney has only just realised that slavery is a bad thing.

Their path into the hangar bay leads through the kitchen, where we see two droid chefs – EV-9D9, whom we saw back in Return of the Jedi, and an unnamed slicing and dicing droid with six arms and a knife or cleaver at the end of each of them.  The two droids hear sounds and initially assume that rats of gotten into the kitchen, so they summon the rat catcher. But they quickly realise that these “rats” are human sized, which leads to a hilarious fight scene. Boba knocks out EV-9D9 fairly easily with his gaffi stick, but the multi meat cleaver droid gives him trouble, until Fennec just severs a cable and disables it. However, there’s still the rat catcher, a strange robotic bunny/cat hybrid, which Boba chases around the kitchen, since the droid does the wise thing and deactivates itself. We briefly see it in a present day scene, suggesting that it survived. After the bulbs of fennel briefly glimpsed in Aunt Beru’s kitchen in A New Hope, we can also now add red cabbage and leek to the tally of vegetables that inexplicably seem to grow somewhere on Tatooine or at least are imported in reasonably fresh condition.

One of the things that makes the Star Wars universe so great is the beautiful absurdity and weirdness found in every single corner of it. And the kitchen fight involving a a knife-twirling food preparation droid and a robotic bunny/cat hybrid fighting a cyborg imperial ex-assassin and a bantha cuddling Mandalorian who’s lost his armour and his ship is just one example of the wonderful weirdness of this universe, as Nick Wanserski points out in his review at the AV-Club.

Once they’ve dealt with the kitchen droids and make their way into the hangar proper, Boba and Fennec take out two Gamoreans (the same Gamoreans that follow Boba along everywhere, though these Gamoreans wear shirts?), but then Weequay reinforcements arrive. Fennec puts her sniper skills to good use, while Boba dashes abaord Slave-1 (until it officially gets another name, I will continue to call it that) to get the old girl off the ground. Of course, Slave-1 is too big for Jabba’s hangar bay and scrapes the walls, before Fennec takes out the counterweight of the gate with a well-aimed shot, allowing them to escape. Boba promised Fennec that she could leave, once they’d gotten Slave-1 back, but Fennec decides to stick around, curious what Boba will do next.

What Boba Fett does next is finally wreak vengeance on the Nikto biker gang who had wiped out his Tusken friends. The scene is less spectacular than I had expected. Given the Billy Jack parallels, I expected a prolonged martial arts battle, but instead Boba just guns down the Niktos with Slave-1. I also wonder why he didn’t at least leave one Nikto alive to question, since both Boba and Fennec agree that it’s rather unlikely for a Nikto biker gang to take out a whole tribe of Tuskens.

After wreaking righteous vengeance on the Niktos, Boba wants to get his armour back, starting at the place where he last saw it, namely the sarlacc pit. Boba clearly doesn’t remember that the Jawas stole his armour, so he decides to fly Slave-1 close enough to the sarlacc’s mouth to allow him to shine a light inside and see if there’s any beskar armour lying around there. This manoeuvre almost goes wrong, when the sarlacc wakes up and decides to gobble up Slave-1 and only Fennec deploying a sonic grenade saves them – and coincidentally also kills the sarlacc.

However, it’s only after Boba has bodily descended into the sarlacc pit that he is satisfied that is armour truly isn’t there. He also rinses off the sarlacc’s stomach acid with water, which confused not only Tor.com‘s Emmet Asher-Perrin, but me as well, because that is not how you neutralise acid.

Later that night, Boba outlines his plans for the future by the campfire (come to think of it, there are a lot of campfire scenes in this episode and in The Book of Boba Fett in general). Of course, we already know what those plans are. He wants to kill Bib Fortuna, because Bib supposedly betrayed him. Nick Wanserski is as confused about this as I am, because while Bib Fortuna may be unpleasant, slimy and a jerk, it’s not his fault that Boba ended up in the Sarlacc pit. And then, once Bib Fortuna is out of the way, Boba Fett wants to become a crime lord.

Fennec correctly points out that Boba Fett is a bounty hunter, so why is he suddenly looking at a midlife career change? Boba Fett replies that he’s sick of working for bad bosses, who couldn’t care less about his welfare and will only get him killed. After all, Boba Fett almost got killed, while working for Jabba, and his Dad got killed while working for Darth Sidious. Boba believes that he can do better and also invites Fennec to be his partner. Fennec initially declines. She’s perfectly willing to do jobs for Boba, but she’s an independent contractor. Boba then offers her something none of her other employers have ever offered her. Loyalty and a share in his ill-gotten gains. He also tells Fennec that his time with the Tuskens – which apparently was years, though it only seems like a few months – taught him the importance of having a tribe.

Those aims seem straightforward enough, but they still don’t make a whole lot of sense. For starters, as Tor.com‘s Emmett Asher-Perrin wonders, why Boba needs the Tuskens to teach him the importance of community and having a tribe, when he’s a Mandalorian, i.e. a member of a people with a strong sense of community. Even if Jango was an outcast due to collaborating with the very Empire that would eventually wipe out Mandalore, one would expect him to have taught young Boba about “the way”.

io9‘s James Whitbrook is confused whether Boba wants to set up a criminal empire or a labour union for bounty hunters. And if it’s the latter, how does Boba’s outfit differ from e.g. Greef Karga’s bounty hunter guild seen in The Mandalorian?

At the Guardian, Chris Edwards wonders what’s the matter with Boba Fett, since he barely seems like the mysterious villain we met in the original trilogy some forty years ago. Instead, we get labour leader Boba who befriends Tuskens, cuddles banthas, suddenly hates the very Empire he used to work for and wants to become a crime lord to implement better working conditions for bounty hunters. It’s not even that kinder, gentler Boba is a bad character, but he’s not the character we know and there is little explanation given for the change beyond his sojourn among the Tuskens.

We don’t get any answers, because at this point Boba wakes up – naturally for once – and is informed by a helpful droid attendant that his wounds are now healed and he will need no more bacta treatments. So I guess this was the last flashback, which is a good thing, especially since this flashback took up some 75 percent of the episode.

Back in the present, the newly healed Boba decides to head to Mos Espa to show his face in town. He winds up in Garza Fwip’s bar, where Black Krrsatan is getting drunk and decides to beat up a group of Tradoshan gamblers. Apparently, there is an ancestral feud between the Tradoshans and the Wookies, but Black Krrsatan’s behaviour still feels oddly personal. Garza Fwip tries to talk down Black Krrsatan by pointing out that he has nothing to prove, because everybody knows that he is the arena champion, but that times have changed and that since the demise of the Empire gladiator fights and gratuitous violence are no longer acceptable. Also, if Black Krrsatan will kind set down the Tradoshan gambler, all his drinks – and Black Krrsatan is clearly badly drunk – will be on the house. Black Krrsatan does set down the Tradoshan, though not without ripping his arm off. Then he leaves and Boba goes after him to offer him a job.

Black Krrsatan clearly accepts, because the next time we see him, he is standing guard at a banquet that Boba and Fennec are giving for the local crime bosses, Jabba’s old lieutenants, who have divided Mos Espa amongst themselves. Boba points out that he does not want to muscle in on their territory, but that it would be in everybody’s best interest, if they were to band together to fight the Pyke Syndicate who are gearing up for war. One of the crime bosses, a Tradoshan, points out that they are making good profit selling the Pyke Syndicate’s spice. But Boba insists that the Pykes want to take over “our planet” (nice that Boba considers Tatooine his home now, but it’s not his planet). And since the crime bosses don’t want to help, Boba proposes a compromise: He’ll handle the Pykes himself and the other crime bosses will just stay out of it and promise not to side with the Pykes. Two of the three crime bosses think this is an acceptable proposal, only one guy, a member of a species I don’t recognise, wonders why he and his people shouldn’t just kill Boba and take his territory. At this point, a Rancor claw extends through the floor grating, which quickly shuts up the crime boss.

The episode ends with the crime bosses and their entourage departing. Fennec wants to know whether Boba thinks they can be trusted. Boba replies that he trusts that they will act in their own best interest.

And that’s it. We’re past the halfway point of this seven episode series and the plot has barely moved forward in this episode at all, because “The Gathering Storm” should have been called “The Endless Flashback”, since three quarters of it are flashback. At least, this flashback is more entertaining than the previous ones, if only because it has plenty of Fennec Shand and I’m here more for Fennec than for Boba Fett.  However, as Daily Dot reviewer Gavia Baker-Whitelaw points out, this episode doesn’t tell us anything knew, since we already knew that Boba rescued Fennec and had her injuries healed/repaired and that she’s loyal to him as a result.

Don’t get me wrong, this episode was a lot of fun, but I still have no idea what Disney is trying to do with this show. And at past the halfway point, we should have some idea where it’s going or even what the purpose of the whole thing is.

The Book of Boba Fett takes to “The Streets of Mos Espa”

I’m still not convinced that The Book of Boba Fett is truly worth doing episode by episode reviews, but here is my much delayed take on episode 3, “The Streets of Mos Espa”. Reviews of previous episodes may be found here.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

This latest episode of The Book of Boba Fett opens in the present day – hurray – with Boba Fett seated on his throne, while ex-torture droid 8D8 delivers a lecture about the criminal empire of the late Jabba the Hutt. After Jabba’s demise, Bib Fortuna could not hold all of Jabba’s business in Mos Espa and therefore had to rely on other gangs to keep the peace. As a result, Mos Espa has been divided into three quarters (“Mos Espa est omnis divisa in partes tres”) controlled by different gangs and the Mayor Mok Shaiz (whom we met last episode) is making deals with all of them. Though both Boba and Fennec agree that the Mayor isn’t the true power here and didn’t send the assassins. Someone else did, likely the Hutt twins whom we met last episode as well.

This little infodump is interrupted by the arrival of a petitioner, played by veteran character actor Stephen Root who has been in literally everything. The petitioner introduces himself as a watermonger and obsequiously informs Boba Fett that no one is respecting him. For it turns out that someone has been stealing the watermonger’s water.

Boba Fett’s incredulousness that someone is making money selling water and that people would steal it is linked to Boba growing up on water-logged Camino, but it still doesn’t make any sense. As a bounty hunter, Boba has travelled all over the galaxy and knows that different planets are different. Plus, he has spent several years on Tatooine at this point, working for Jabba, living with the Sand People, trying to take over the place. Unless Boba Fett is a complete idiot – and he’s not – he should have realised by now how precious water is on Tatooine. In fact, he could probably make more money by importing water from Camino or the “Bremerhaven in space” planet from season 2 of The Mandalorian to Tatooine than by being a crime lord.

Boba knows that the watermonger is baiting him, but nonetheless he, Fennec and the two Gamoreans (who still don’t get names) head to Mos Espa to sort out the situation with the water thieves. They quickly locate the water thieves, too, since they’re enjoying the ill-gotten gains of their criminal activities in the middle of the street. And the water thieves turn out to be cyberpunk mod kids on tricked out floating Vespas. Yes, really.

Star Wars has always borrowed from all sorts of genre and non-genre films, novels, TV-shows, subcultures. The Disney+ Star Wars shows drive this “everything and the kitchen sink, too” approach to the max. The cyber-modifications of the street kids are clearly a nod to Cyberpunk, a subgenre from which Star Wars borrowed surprisingly little (maybe the neon-drenched streets and clubs of Coruscant in the early scenes of Attack of the Clones), probably because Cyberpunk always positioned itself as a countermovement to Star Wars and its imitators (as well as to 1970s feminist SFF). Still, Cyberpunk is just another movement of the past now and therefore ripe for borrowing.

However, the more surprising influence here is that that of the Mod subculture of the 1960s, as Nick Wanserski accurately notes in his review at the AV-Club. The body modifications and the punk outfit of the female gangleader may be borrowed from Cyberpunk, but the tricked out Vespas and the parkas and outfits worn by the male gang members are pure Mod. Indeed, my initial reaction was “Oh, it’s Star Wars does Quadrophenia.”

At Vice: Motherboard, Gita Jackson reports that quite a few fans dislike the street kids on their Vespas, though Tor.com reviewer Emmet Asher-Perrin likes their style and swagger, even though they wonder how a gang of unemployed and clearly poor kids can afford such swanky rides and fashions. Probably the same way they were able to afford the water, by stealing.

Gita Jackson points out that George Lucas was part of the California car racing culture in the 1960s and that this comes through in many of his films, from THX 1138 via American Graffiti, which very much is a film about California car culture in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to Star Wars and beyond. Space mods on floating Vespas is absolutely the sort of thing Lucas would come up with. Quadrophenia actually came out two years after Star Wars, though the album it was based upon dates from 1973. But even if Lucas has not seen Quadrophenia, he very likely was aware of the Mod subculture. As an influence, it’s not at all unlikely.

Boba Fett confronts the street kids about stealing water, whereupon the kids reply that the watermonger is charging extortionate prices. “This is the workers’ quarter,” Boba says, sounding like every grumpy suit wearing adult ever, “Why are you not working?” The street kids reply that there are no jobs to be had, so Boba hires them on the spot. The watermonger is of course outraged, but Boba pays him off and also warns him to charge fair prices for his water.

So Boba Fett’s criminal empire now consists of himself, a former Imperial assassin, two Gamoreans, an ex-torture droid and four cyber-mod street kids on space Vespas. It’s not wonder no one takes him seriously.

Boba, Fennec and the new recruits return to Jabba’s castle, where Boba goes to sleep in his bacta tank and we get – groan – another flashback. At least this one is mercifully short.

We see Boba, now apparently a fully fledged member of the Tusken tribe that found him, getting on a bantha and riding off to Mos Eisley (nice cameo by Peli Motto from The Mandalorian and her pit droids in the background) to collect payment from the Pyke Syndicate (the masked fish people seen last episode as well as in Solo) for allowing their drug train to cross the Tusken territory. The Pyke leader is quite willing to pay protection money – it’s part of the business – but he’s not willing to pay twice. And he is already paying the Nikto biker gang that harrassed Fixer and Cami last episode for right of way in the same territory. “Settle it among yourself,” the Pyke leader says.

When Boba returns to the Tusken camp, he sees smoke on the horizon. Turns out the Nikto biker gang has decided to settle the matter first by killing all the Sand People. Now I predicted that the Sand People would probably all die horribly, though I hadn’t epxected it to happen so soon. Though maybe this will mean fewer flashbacks.

I already said last week that Boba Fett seems to be doing a Billy Jack movie in the flashbacks and this episode made the parallels even clearer with the Tusken tribe standing in for the town of Big Rock in The Born Losers and the Freedom School in Billy Jack. The Nikto gang literally are the titular biker gang from The Born Losers or the terrible townspeople from Billy Jack. The flashback scenes even borrow the earnest if problematic white saviour aspect of the Billy Jack movies, where Billy Jack is supposedly half-indigenous, but played by white actor/director Tom Laughlin, who made those movies out of an earnest desire to draw attention to the injustices facing Native Americans. Meanwhile, The Book of Boba Fett sidesteps the white saviour issue, since Boba is played by a Maori actor. Plus, it has not borrowed the weird rape obsession from the Billy Jack movies, which can only be a good thing.

Once again, the Billy Jack movies are unexpected but not unlikely influences to show up in Star Wars. Because strange – and they are very strange indeed – as they are, the Billy Jack movies were huge counterculture hits in the early 1970s and George Lucas was definitely aware of them and very likely at least saw them. And besides, you just know that Lucas liked biker movies. He may even have known Tom Laughlin, since both were indie directors doing their own thing and telling the stories that mattered to them in early 1970s Hollywood.

As everybody who has seen the Billy Jack films or indeed any film ever expected, Boba lights a funeral pyre for the bodies and then sets off to wreak righteous vengeance on the Nikto biker gang. At this point, the flashback is rudely interrupted by the Wookie bounty hunter Black Krrsatan, who clearly dislikes interminable flashbacks as much as the rest of us and just rips Boba out of his bacta tank to slap him around. As an assasination attempt, this one is none too impressive, because while Boba may have been a match for a Wookie while in armour, he clearly is no match for Black Krrsatan while in underpants.

Boba gets his bacon saved by the cyber-mod kids and the Gamoreans who try to save him from Black Krrsatan, so Boba did get his money’s worth for hiring them. That said, as Nick Wanserski points out, the fight scene looks clumsy and stagy. And indeed, none of the action scenes in The Book of Boba Fett have looked particularly impressive. Which is odd, because Disney clearly has the money to do impressive action scenes and we know that Robert Rodriguez (who directed this and at least one other episode) and writer/showrunner Jon Favreau know how to do action.

Black Krrsatan is holding his own until Fennec opens the trap door to the Rancor pit, which would have been more impressive if we hadn’t seen someone dropped into the Rancor pit only last episode. Still, the Rancor pit has a new inhabitant now.

Shortly after Black Krrsatan’s attack, who shows up at Boba’s doorstep but the Hutt twins introduced last episode? They arrive on their giant litter carried by approximately twenty people, which makes me wonder just how they got there in the first place. Were they just carried through the desert? And why don’t they use some kind of motorised transport? The litter may make sense in a city like Mos Espa, but not in the open desert.

The Hutt twins explain that they are very sorry for siccing Black Krrsatan on Boba and that they no longer want his territory, since someone else has laid claim to hit, which would mean war. “And war…” the female Twin says, “…is bad for business.” So the Hutt twins decide that Tatooine is a worthless rock and depart. They don’t want Black Krrsatan back either, since Wookie bounty hunters who can’t even manage to kill a guy in his underwear clearly aren’t in great demand. Boba lets Black Krrsatan go with some friendly advice from bounty hunter to bounty hunter to be more discerning in his choice of employer. That’s really rich, coming from Boba Fett who worked for Jabba the Hutt and the Empire among others and whose Dad Jango worked for Darth Sidious. I actually expected Boba to offer Black Krrsatan a job – as he did with the Gamoreans and the cyber-mod kids – but Boba just lets him go.

Furthermore, the Hutt twins bring a “Sorry we tried to kill you. Nothing personal” gift. Because the empty Rancor pit is a sad state of affairs, so the Hutt twins have brought along a Rancor and his trainer, played by none other than Danny Trejo (director Robert Rodriguez real life cousin), as a housewarming gift, as io9 reviewer James Whitbrook puts it.

Boba is clearly pleased, since he always wanted a Rancor. The Rancor is placed in the pit, while Boba has a chat with the Rancor keeper, who informs him that Rancors are very complex creatures, bond with their owners and keeper and are only aggressive, when they are trained to be. This would be pretty ridiculous – this giant people-eating monster is a very emotionally complex creature – if not for the scene in Return of the Jedi where Jabba’s Rancor keeper cries bitterly over the body of the creature after Luke kills it.

Boba’s new Rancor is just a baby and wears blinders, because – so Danny Trejo explains – Rancors imprint on the first person they see. So Rancors are basically baby ducklings? Danny Trejo also explains that the witches of Dathomir have trained Rancors as riding animals, which thrills Boba, because he clearly wants to ride on a Rancor (and will before the series is through). So Boba Fett’s criminal empire has grown to encompass himself, an Imperial ex-assassin, an ex-torture droid, two Gamoreans, four cyber-mod kids on tricked out Vespas, a baby Rancor and Danny Trejo.

The Hutt twins said that someone else has laid claim to Jabba’s old territory, someone who clearly bothers them more than Boba Fett. So Boba quickly deduces that his rival must be Mok Shaiz, the mayor of Mos Espa. So Boba and his entourage (sans Danny Trejo and the Rancor) go to town once again to see the mayor. The mayor is supposedly very busy, but when Boba and Fennec break into his office, they find the office empty. Mok Shaiz has vanished and his annyoing Twi’lek major domo is just about to escape in a landspeeder that looks like a vintage Cadillac. The cyber-mod kids set off in pursuit, which leads to an amusing chase through the streets of Mos Espa, complete with everybody running over market stalls. In Hollywood, street chases only take place on market days and participants get points by hitting each and ever stall.

In the end, the Twi’lek’s landspeeder buried in fruit (Emmet Asher-Perrin points out that these fruits are called meiloorun). Being a coward, the Twi’lek blurts out that the mayor is working for the Pyke Syndicate and the Pykes are coming to Tatooine.

Shortly thereafter, one of the cyber-mod kids is lurking at the spaceport, where a large group of masked Pyke troopers emerge from the belly of a starship. So the Hutt twins and Mok Shaiz were only red herrings and the Pykes are the real big bad, both in the flahback (cause you can bet the Pykes sicced the Nikto bikers on the Tuskens) and in the present day, setting up the conflict for the remaining episodes. Which is fair, I guess, except that I don’t find the Pykes particularly impressive. Not that Mok Shaiz is impressive either and the Hutt Twins are weird rather than impressive.

Three episodes in, The Book of Boba Fett still seems to have no idea what it wants to be. Does it want to be a Billy Jack movie in the Star Wars universe? Does it want to be a gritty crime drama about a turf war, a kind of Breaking Bad or Peaky Blinders in the Star Wars universe? Does it want to be King Conan, only starring Boba Fett? Any one of those would have been interesting choices, but the show mashes all of them together, resulting in an unholy mess.

Also, as Gavia Baker-Whitelaw points out at The Daily Dot, The Book of Boba Fett also comes up against restrictions imposed by Disney+’s insistence on being “family-friendly”, whatever that means. Therefore, even though Boba Fett lously declares that he wants to be a crime boss, he doesn’t really act like one. Instead, he’s more of a grumpy Dad who adopts random strays and wants to rid Tatooine from Hutts, Pykes and corrupt mayors. Which is fine, it’s just not what anybody expected of a Boba Fett show. The desire to be family-friendly also probably explains why all the assassins, whether it’s the Order of the Night Wind or Black Krrsatan, are so bad at their jobs.

The elements for a fun Star Wars show are all there: A fan favourite lead, a talented cast, great visuals, cool creatures, a hodge-podge of genre influences. But unlike The Mandalorian, which shared many of the same ingredients, The Book of Boba Fett doesn’t really come together so far.

Since this review has been delayed, the next episode has already been made available, so maybe the story will finally come together.

How To Define a New Subgenre/Trend: The Speculative Epic and an Addendum to the “Squeecore” Debate

I initially put this as an ETA under one of the previous posts in the so-called “squeecore” debate. However, I think it deserves it’s own post.

Lincoln Michel has also gotten into the business of defining a new subgenre/trend as well in his Counter Craft newsletter and that new subgenre/trend is – no, not “squeecore” – but the speculative epic, which is the term Michel has coined for overwhelmingly literary works with multiple timelines, one of which often takes place in some dystopian future.

Lincoln Michel has noted a definite trend here, though it is not really a new thing. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, which appears to be the protoype, came out in 2004, and Henderson’s Spear by Ronald Wright, which has past and present timelines, but now future ones, came out in 2001. Green Darkness by Anya Seton, which also has multiple intertwining timelines, predates both and came out in 1972. And there are even earlier examples such as The Star Rover by Jack London from 1915 (a really fascinating book, which influenced H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard among others) or The Ship of Ishtar by A. Merritt from 1924. You could probably also make a case for Dorothy Quick’s unjustly forgotten Patchwork Quilt series, which appeared in Unknown in the early 1940s. However, those works are scattered examples and what unites them is mainly a fascination with past lives and reincarnation.

That said, Lincoln Michel is right that there seem to be more books featuring multiple intertwining timelines right now, that they share certain characteristics such as addressing social issues (though you could argue that The Star Rover address the issue of prisoner abuse) and that they mainly come from the literary side of the pond rather than from the genre side, whereas the predecessors were mostly genre writers. In addition to Cloud Atlas, the examples Michel gives are Appleseed by Matt Bell, To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara, Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel and How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu.

However, I’m not just linking to this article because I’m interested in literary trends, subgenre formation and genre taxonomy (though I am), but also because Lincoln Michel demonstrates how to identify and define a new trend/potential subgenre without being a jerk about it.

The article is structured as follows: I have identified a trend and here are some examples of people who have noticed it, too, as well as some examples of works that fit into that trend. I propose this name for it (a name that’s not derogatory) and it has this characteristics. It’s also part of a larger trend towards genre-bending fiction.

What this article notably does not include is snarky asides against authors and books that Lincoln Michel does not like, buzzwords like “neoliberal” and issues that are worth addressing but have nothing to do with the subgenre in question. Also, Michel offers solid criteria for defining speculative epics and not criteria that are so vague that they apply hundreds of things up to and including Shakespeare. And yes, I am aware that I have just retroactively claimed Jack London, A. Merritt, Anya Seton and Dorothy Quick (and Robert E. Howard, whose James Allison series was directly inspired by The Star Rover) for the speculative epic, but they all wrote works which match some of the characteristics given and could be considered predecessors to this genre/trend.

Woll “speculative epic” catch on as a term for this trend/movement/subgenre? I don’t know, though personally I like the term and shall use it, crediting Michel, for works that fit. However, I suspect that Lincoln Michel’s essay will not generate nearly as much attention as the debate about “squeecore”, even though his points are solid and he makes them without being a jerk about it.

More on the Squeecore Debate

The so-called “squeecore” debate is still raging and I’ve linked to various entries, responses and comments as ETAs in my other post.

However, I think this point deserves a separate post, for and highlights a post by someone named Gemini Dreams, which according the Raquel Benedict of the Rite Gud podcast, who kicked off this whole debate, best sums up the point she wanted to make.

Here is what Gemini Dreams identified as elements of “squeecore”:

It’s overwhelmingly preoccupied with setting up “Hell yeah!” “epic” moments rather than, say, organic character growthCharacters (or sometimes just the author) are extremely genre aware and constantly draw attention to the tropes of the story they occupy, without ever actually breaking the fourth wall. This genre-awareness usually isn’t used in any interesting way, and is fairly surface-level observation (i.e. red shirts, final girl, etc.)Characters are extremely sarcastic and have a lot of lazy banter, because it’s easier to write for the author than “real jokes” or “real humor” (though the podcast, I would criticize, fails to define what that means)Related to the last point: A huge discomfort with intense emotions; major emotional moments are undercut with “Whedonesque” interruptions like “Well that happened” to give a kind of glib distance from really fully experiencing the momentOver-explanation of everything happening rather than leaving room for interpretationMetaphors that fall apart after any scrutinyA “neoliberal” preoccupation with making sure that everything works out for all the characters, often including converting the villains into alliesA huge preoccupation with mainstream pop culture references, but especially to movies and TV

Now this definitely describes elements that you can find in some contemporary SFF works, though it’s a writing style rather than a genre/movement. Because you could apply those stylistic choices to almost any genre and indeed, you find a similarly glib and snarky tone in other genres. What used to be called “chick lit” often had a very similar tone, for example.

Ironically, Raquel Benedict or rather the Redditor Gemini Dreams also capture a lot of what always annoyed me about Joss Whedon’s writing. Yes, I was a Whedon skeptic, since before it was cool to hate Whedon, and I got quite a bit of flak for pointing out issues with Whedon’s work, such as that Whedon tended to undercut emotional moments, because he didn’t know when to hold back the snark, ten to fifteen years ago. I also pointed out that Whedon’s characters were not nearly as feminist and progressive as they were supposed to be, which went down just about as well as you can imagine. Though at the time I didn’t know that the terrible abuse of pregnant Cordelia, which made me stop watching Angel for good, was actually a case of terrible abuse of the pregnant Charisma Carpenter in real life, since abuse of pregnant women on screen was such a common motif at the time.

And talking of Joss Whedon, this lengthy profile/interview/apologia about the man by Lila Shapiro just came out today in Vulture. If you don’t want to read the thing (and it’s long), the short version is that everybody else but Whedon is to blame for his issues, particularly his mother. You know, the same mother who inspired his feminism.

Except for the abuse of “neoliberal” (What’s neoliberal about everything working out for the characters? Especially since everything does not work out for many people in purely neoliberal systems) the Reddit summary actually makes sense of describing what precisely it is that bugs Raquel Benedict and J.R. Bolt about contemporary SFF.

Though Benedict and Bolt are still railing against a particular writing style rather than against a whole subgenre. And yes, for better or worse, Whedon did have a lot of influence on contemporary SFF writers, because Buffy, Angel and Firefly were immensely popular in the genre community, though – and this is often forgotten – none of them were huge ratings hits and Firefly was canceled after half a season.

Besides a Whedonesque style is far from universal in contemporary SFF. Of the 2021 Hugo Best Novel finalists, only Network Effect and Harrow the Ninth (and the 2020 finalist Gideon the Ninth even more so) feel somewhat Whedonesque. And while Murderbot and ART are snarky, Martha Wells is a much better writer than Whedon ever was and the stories themselves are not all that Whedonesque. And The Locked Tomb novels are heavily about grief and trauma in spite of the snarky tone of Gideon the Ninth. Of the short fiction finalists, the only story that has a light, somewhat bantery tone is Vina Jie-Min Prasad’s “A Guide to Working Breeds” and that’s not very Whedonesque. In Best Series, you also have Murderbot again as well as John Scalzi’s Interdepency, which really does have a lot of snark and banter, but is also about a universe threatening disaster. That’s four of thirty fiction finalists (five, if you count Murderbot twice) to which these complaints vaguely apply, which is hardly an overwhelming majority.

Of Hugo finalists of recent years, Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series feels pretty Firefly influenced, but then Chambers herself has stated that she hadn’t watched Firefly when she wrote A Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. Besides, while Wayfarers may share certain thematic similarities with Firefly, Becky Chambers’ writing style isn’t all that Whedonesque. And yes, there are the usual complaints about John Scalzi’s Redshirts (What is it about that book that has left- and right-wingers so up in arms?), but Redshirts came out ten years ago, so I would hardly call it current.

Besides, Whedon did not invent banter, snark and “Hell yeah” moments. You can find banter and snark in 1930s screwball comedies (not SFF) and banter, snark and “Hell yeah” moments in Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, only that Leiber was a much better writer than Whedon. In my article in issue 59 of Journey Planet about Fritz Leiber’s “Ill Met in Lankhmar”, I described how brilliantly Fritz Leiber oscillates between lighthearted banter and utter despair and overwhelming grief in the same story. Also note that Leiber never undercuts the desperation of the second half of the story with misplaced humour like Whedon would.

There’s also a lot of banter and pop culture references in Marvel Comics from the 1960s to the 1990s. It’s particularly notable in Spider-Man, but banter and pop culture references wer pretty much the Marvel house style for a long time to the point that I’ve always suspected that this was where Whedon got it from. This is probably also why he was such a good fit for the first Avengers movie, which is IMO the best thing Whedon ever did.

So in short, it seems that Raquel Benedict and J.R. Bolt are mainly annoyed by Joss Whedon inspired writing in SFF, which is perfectly acceptable (and as I said, I’ve never been a huge Whedon fan myself, so I sympathise to a certain degree). However, the observation that Joss Whedon’s style, combined with the Marvel house style, which probably influenced Whedon, had a notable impact on SFF writing does not mean that this Whedonesque writing is the dominant mode of SFF writing some ten years after Whedon’s career peaked. Also, having read some of Raquel Benedict’s tweets, she’s not someone who should complain about other people being too snarky. Though to be fair, I have no idea what her actual writing is like.

For some reason, the “squeecore” debate also got confused with superversive SF and noblebright fantasy, two actual SFF movements, albeit of limited impact, which have been around for a while and come from a somewhat conservative (noblebright) to far right (superversive) corner of the genre.

Noblebright was coined by fantasy author C.J. Brightley in 2016 as a counterpoint to grimdark fantasy. Superversive SF is older and was coined by Tom Simon all the way back in 2003, though it did not catch on as a term until the Sad and Rabid Puppies debarkle of 2014-2017, when the Christian conservative wing of the Puppies claimed the term for itself. Meanwhile, what Benedict and Bolt dub “squeecore” comes from a left progressive corner of the genre (and is hated by the superversives), though it’s not radical enough for Benedict and Bolt. And yes, it’s quite ironic that once again the traditionalist puppies and this year’s re-iteration of the anti-nostalgics hate the same books, though they would never agree on anything else.

Finally, the whole “squeecore” debate also got tangled up with a very valid and important argument about the very real financial, geographic and accessibility barriers that keep many people from attending workshops like Clarion and Viable Paradise as well as Worldcon and other big cons.

And no, you don’t need to attend those workshops to have success (and quite a few who attend Clarion or Viable Paradise are never heard from again), but it does help to get past the first round of slush readers. Ditto for having been on a panel or shared a drink with an editor at Worldcon. It’s not a guarantee for success and you still have to write a good story/novel that fits what the editor is looking for, but it does help and we should acknowledge this.

There are scholarships for the workshops and various initiatives to make cons more accessible to people from various marginalised backgrounds, which is a big step forward. And cons going hybrid or fully virtual because of the pandemic also helps people to attend and participate who otherwise couldn’t have gone. We could still do more to remove barriers to access to the genre and this is an important conversation to have. But unfortunately, it got tangled up with “We don’t like those books/stories and here’s why.”

Science Fiction Is Never Evenly Distributed

Camestros Felapton has an interesting post on his blog asking if there is a currently dominant mode of speculative fiction. Camestros’ post is a response to two episodes of the Rite Gud podcast, namely this one where host Raquel S. Benedict and guest Kurt Schiller discuss the Sad and Rabid Puppies drama and detect a dominant mode of award-nominated science fiction that they dub “squeecore” and this episode where Benedict and guest J.R. Bolt from The Podhand attempt to define “squeecore”.

Now I have not listened to the full podcast episodes in question. I tried listening to the episode which attempts to define squeecore, but gave up after 45 minutes, because I didn’t much care for the podcast, which mixed in some genuine criticism of current SFF trends with a lot of snarky asides (ironically while decrying snark) against writers they dislike. The host and guest seem to be the sort of left-leaning writers/critics who always complain that current SFF is stale, too twee, not radical enough and that change is needed, but definitely not that kind of change, that have been a fixture of the genre (though the protagonists and antagonists change) for decades now. I spent more than enough time arguing with folks like that fifteen to twenty years ago and dubbed them the “anti-nostalgic fraction” back in 2016. I don’t want to rehash all that again. There will always be genre revolutionaries wanting to storm the gates of the SFF fortress and the vast majority of these mini-movements fizzle out and when a new trend arises, it rarely comes from the corner of the noisy would-be revolutionaries.

Camestros Felapton paraphrases the Rite Gud podcast’s definition of squeecore as follows:

The podcast moves on to list some of the elements that the hosts see as elements of what they call squeecore. Rather than another hefty quote I’ll try and sum it up in list form.

it tends to be very uplifting and upbeat.It is didactic.It has a young adult fiction tone to it, even when it’s supposed to be for adults.Central characters can feel weirdly young, like they always think and act and feel as though they’re in their late teens or early 20s. They’re kind of inexperienced, naive, still very full of wonder.It has notable influence from films and a lot of influence from mainstream commercial narratives…One such influence being three-act structure screenplays and the ‘save the cat’ style narrative.Central characters can feel like they are intended to be reader-inserts like video-game RPG protagonist.

The podcasters are not wrong, cause all of these trends definitely exist in current SFF, though they’re not one unifying trend, but several different trends. Uplifting and upbeat SFF is certainly a trend and it already has a name that is much less derogatory than “squeecore”, namely hopepunk. Reader-insert characters and a video-game/RPG feel is a trend as well and there is a term or rather two for it, namely LitRPG and gamelit.

I agree that there is a strong influence of YA fiction and a tendency to show younger characters gaining skills rather than being already fully developed in contemporary SFF, but that’s the result of the YA SFF boom of the past twenty-five years, which served as a gateway to the genre for countless readers. By now, the teens who read Harry Potter and His Dark Materials twenty-five years ago have grown up and some of them have become writers. It’s only natural that they draw on their early influences just as previous generations of writers drew on theirs. Besides, young and naive protagonists are nothing new. Robert A. Heinlein’s so-called juveniles from the 1950s are full of them and Ande Norton built a decades long career out of writing young and naive protagonists discovering strange new worlds. Because this sort of thing sells to younger readers coming into the SFF genre, only that it wasn’t shelved separately from adult SFF until fairly recently.

I also detect a definite influence of movies, TV shows and mainstream pop culture in general. For all his faults, Joss Whedon’s TV shows and movies – particularly Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly – have influenced a generation of SFF writers. And talking of Whedon, here is a great article by Gita Jackson from Vice about Whedon’s influence on SFF and fandom. The Marvel movies and the cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender are big influences as well and the influences of older properties like Star Trek, Star Wars and Doctor Who (and Marvel comics) is lingering on, especially following new takes on those old stories in the 21st century. However, writers have always drawn on pop culture trends and popular media. King Kong sparked a wave of giant apes rampaging through the SFF genre and later comics from the 1930s well into the 1950s and also beget the kaiju genre, which has in turn inspired countless writers and other creatives.

One point made in the podcast that Camestros does not address is that there seems to be a proliferation of retellings and reimaginings of and responses to older stories right now. This is absolutely true, since we’re having a wave of fairytale retellings (somewhat receding by now), Lovecraft retellings and – to a lesser degree – Narnia retellings right now. The current wave of retellings often focusses on the sort of people – women, people of colour, LGBTQ people – for whom there was little to no room in the original stories and attempts to give them agency. And since our genre has become a lot more diverse in the past ten to fifteen years, we see writers from different backgrounds putting a new spin on old stories. Not all of these retellings work and indeed, I’ve been weary of fairytale retellings for a while now, especially since many of them are not nearly as revolutionary as they like to think. But there is clearly a big desire for this sort of thing.

And besides, SFF has always been a genre in conversation with itself with new stories responding – directly or indirectly – to older stories. People have been writing Lovecraftian fiction, since Lovecraft was still alive (and he tended to encourage others to play in his sandbox). Joe Haldeman wrote The Forever War in response to Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War and Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade are further responses to Starship Troopers. All of them were Hugo finalists, two won. Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” has generated dozens of responses – I committed one myself – and indeed, Raquel Benedict and her guest snark about Aimee Ogden’s recent (and excellent) response “The Cold Calculations”.

Rite Gud also makes a point about the dominance of three-act-structures and the Save the Cat book by Blake Snyder, the influence of workshops like Clarion or Viable Paradise and about the professionalisation of SFF writing in general. Now the three act or five act structure is nothing new – Gustav Freytag defined it in Die Technik des Dramas (The Technique of Drama) back in 1863 and he certainly did not invent it either. Save the Cat is an updated take on the hero’s journey (and in fact I’m surprised that they don’t complain about the influence of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces), which is one of the oldest story structures we have.

What has changed, however, is that writing advice books and creative writing workshops are a lot more accessible than they used to be, because they have proliferated a lot in the past thirty years or. It’s far easier to find a copy of Save the Cat today than it was to find a copy of Die Technik des Dramas in 1863. Rite Gud correctly addresses the economic and geographic privilege of being able to attend the big genre workshops like Clarion or Viable Paradise. However, you don’t need to attend those expensive workshops, because every library has writing advice books and every community college offers creative writing classes these days and there are dozens of writing advice websites, podcasts, YouTube channels, forums, etc… It’s never been easier to learn about the theory of writing.

Besides, creative writing workshops are not a new phenomeon. The Iowa Writers’ Workshop was founded in 1936 and the Milford Writer’s Workshop, the first SFF focussed writing workshop, dates back to the 1950s. And I have seen complaints about the influence of the Milford Workshop and the aesthetics championed there dating from the 1970s.

Also, the myth of the “real scientist or engineer” (TM) who writes science fiction on the side is just that, a myth, even though complaints about all of those people daring to write SFF who are not “real scientists” (TM) go back more than fifty years at least. However, the vast majority of published SFF has long been written by professional writers who often wrote in multiple genres. And yes, pulp writers definitely considered themselves professionals. John W. Campbell may have preferred “real scientists or real engineers” (TM) to professional pulpsters, but even Campbell published a lot of the latter. He kept publishing L. Ron Hubbard, for fuck’s sake, and Hubbard was the prototypical hack of all genres. Never mind that a lot of Campbell’s “real scientists and real engineers” (TM) quickly ditched their real careers in favour of writing, once they were successful enough at it.

But even though the Rite Gud podcast does correctly identify some current trends and themes, there is no one dominant mode of SFF now, just as there has never any single dominant mode in SFF (or any other genre) at any given time ever. Cause you always have several trends, styles and movements going on at the same time as well as older trends still hanging on and newer trends emerging. There usually is a cluster of certain themes that are popular at a given time, but even those themes tend to come in cycles. For example, robots and AIs are having a moment now, probably because AI has made a great leap forward in the real world and robots are part of our lives now. However, robots also had a moment in the 1940s, at a time when they truly were science fiction. What has changed is the focus. In the 1940s, the focus was on, “How can we make these machines work and make sure they don’t hurt anybody?” (which was a response to earlier stories about rampaging robots and “Why don’t they work as intended?” Meanwhile, contemporary robot stories are often written from the POV of the robot or AI and often focus on questions of identity and who counts as human.

I’ve written a lengthy three part post arguing that the Golden Age was not nearly as uniform as people remember it and what is considered typical golden age science fiction these days is actually Campbellian science fiction. And even Campbell published a lot of works that don’t fit the stereotype of straight white American men using their superior intellect to conquer space, solve problems and fight aliens,. If you include magazines like Planet Stories (which has a remarkable number of stories critical of capitlalism and colonialism), Amazing Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Startling Stories, Weird Tales,etc… let alone works published outside the US pulp magazine eco-system you get a much wider range of styles and trends. Yes, Campbellian science fiction was a thing in the 1940s, but it coexisted with planetary adventure stories (a lot of whom turned into “Social justice warriors of the solar system”), occult detectives, stories about hidden non-human communities living among us, industrial horror (i.e. machines run amok), humorous mythologically based fantasy, gothic horror, Lovecraftian horror, early post-apocalyptic/nuclear war fiction and lots of other styles. Never mind the authors of the so-called radium age who were still hanging on. You also had mainstream influences such as westerns (Bat Durston came from somewhere) and hardboiled and noir fiction or the historical adventures of Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy, who influenced writers like Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber and whose influence echoes down the ages, even though they themselves are very obscure today.

In the 1960s, you have the New Wave, but you have the sword and sorcery revival going on at the same time and often written by the same people (Michael Moorcock and Roger Zelazny were prominent in both, as were Joanna Russ and Samuel R. Delany), you have plenty of golden age holdovers as well as the beginnings of feminist science fiction, you have the nascent fantasy boom, you have the gothic romance boom (lots of which have supernatural subplots and yet were almost completely ignored by the SFF community), you have a sword and planet revival, only that the term sword and planet didn’t exist then, and you have mainstream influences such as the huge impact of the James Bond movies and novels on the SFF genre.

As for different eras of SFF coexisting, Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose popularity peaked in the 1910s and 1920s, was nominated for a posthumous Hugo for “Savage Pellucidar” alongside Poul Anderson, Roger Zelazny and the largely forgotten Rick Raphael in 1964. E.E. Smith, maybe the prototypical golden age writer (though he started in the 1920s) was nominated for a Hugo Award for Skylark DuQuesne in 1966, losing out to Dune by Frank Herbert and This Immortal/Call Me Conrad by Roger Zelazny (the remaining two finalists were Squares of the City by John Brunner and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein). Golden Age stalwarts like Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke or Clifford D. Simak were still getting Hugo nominations and even the occasional win well into the 1980s. Robert A. Heinlein lost his last Hugo (for Job: A Comedy of Justice) against William Gibson’s Neuromancer.

As I explained in this post, Galactic Journey is very good at showing how different trends as well as older and newer forms of SFF coexist in the same period, because we try to cover everything and not just the cherry-picked examples that later eras choose to remember.

Also, quite often works are shoehorned into a trend, because they vaguely match some characteristics thereof and came out around the same time, even though they don’t really fit. The Expanse novels by James S.A. Corey are a good example. They are often shoehorned into the 2010s space opera revival, even though The Expanse has nothing in common with the likes of the Imperial Radch trilogy, the Paradox trilogy, the Hexarchate series or A Memory Called Empire beyond being set in space. Meanwhile, The Expanse draws heavily on mundane science fiction (a movement that never really got beyond its manifesto), Cyberpunk, golden age science fiction and the 1990s “cast of thousands/everybody and the dog gets a POV” style of SFF epics that never got a name, even though it was very much a thing and still lingers on.

But while there is no one dominant mode of SFF at the moment, there are certainly several notable trends. Hopepunk, which comes closests to what Raquel Benedict calls “squeecore”, is a definite trend, though grimdark, the trend in response to which hopepunk arose, still hangs on and is doing reasonably well, though it’s no longer as dominant as it once was. Space opera is having a moment right now with the Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy, Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire/Hexarchate series, Rachel Bach’s Paradox trilogy, Ann Aguirre’s Sirantha Jax series (one of the earliest examples), Becky Chambers’ Wayfarers series, John Scalzi’s Interdependency series, Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire, Tamsyn Muir’s Lost Tomb trilogy and many others, but it’s a much weirder and more personal type of space opera with a strong focus on characters and found families than the New British Space Opera of the early 2000s. On the other hand, very conservative “Let’s shoot all the aliens” military science fiction is also booming, both in self-published form and at Baen Books. So called “prepper fiction”, post-apocalyptic fiction in which manly men survive the apocalypse, because they have more ammunition and canned beans than their neighbours, is another trend that flourishes in the indie and small press realm, but doesn’t really register outside its bubble.

In general, there is a strong tendency towards melding science fiction and fantasy – what was once called science fantasy – right now, both in science fiction works with quasi-magic technology (the Hexarchate series and the Locked Tomb trilogy are probably the best examples), fantasy stories which treat magic like an exact science (Brandon Sanderson and the trend towards magic systems he kicked off), the “mages in space” trend, which is mainly a thing in indie SFF, and unclassifiable works like N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy. LitRPG and game lit, which are mainly trends in indie SFF, with their highly systematised approach to fantasy and sometimes SF worlds would also fit here.

As mentioned above, robots and AIs are having a moment right now and a lot of stories are told from their POV, dealing with questions of identity and who counts as a person. There is a trend towards retellings, mainly of fairytales and Lovecraftian fiction, which I already addressed above as well. The horror genre is recovering from its collapse in the 1990s and cosmic horror, folk horror, remimagined slasher horror and horror from marginalised perspectives are all growing. In general, we are seeing a lot more diversity both with regard to settings, protagonists and authors. And yes, as the Rite Gud podcast alludes, it’s still a very American view of diversity, but it’s a step forward and we are seeing more and more authors from beyond the anglosphere finding success. The perception that there seem to be more stories about LGBTQ protagonists than there used to be is also linked to this. Because until fairly recently, publishers didn’t consider stories about LGBTQ characters a viable market, so they were relegated to small specialist presses and much less visible.

Sword and sorcery seems to be making a modest comeback, though mainly limited to small presses and magazines right now. Urban fantasy is still hanging on after its massive boom (largely ignored or mocked by the SFF community) in the 2000s, though except for big names like Jim Butcher, Seanan McGuire or Patricia Briggs, it has largely moved to the indie realm. There also are popular indie only trends such as harem, reverse harem and progression fantasy, many of which have their roots in manga, anime, wuxia and other Asian SFF. The success of The Handmaid’s Tale TV series and the election of Donald Trump have kicked off a mini-trend of feminist dystopias, most of which seem to come from outside the genre. Climate fiction steadfastly refuses to be a thing, unless written by Kim Stanley Robinson, and what examples there are usually come from mainstream literary writers.

Finally, new movements that get a lot of attention and even come with manifestos are often not what ends up becoming a major trend. In the early 2000s, it seemed as if the future belonged to New Weird and mundane science fiction, but both trends fizzled out quickly. What we got instead was urban fantasy, grimdark and new wave space opera. Cause making predictions regarding trends in SFF can often be just as hit and miss as science fiction’s attempts to predict the future.

The Book of Boba Fett meets “The Tribes of Tatooine” and gets lost in interminable flashbacks again

I’m still not convinced that The Book of Boba Fett is truly worth doing episode by episode reviews, but here is my take on episode 2, “The Tribes of Tatooine”. Reviews of previous episodes (well, just one so far) may be found here.

Warning: Spoilers behind the cut!

The second episode of The Book of Boba Fett begins in the present day, which seems like a good sign. Fennec Shand is returning to Jabba’s former castle, one of the would-be assassins she captured in tow. The assassin belongs to an outfit called the Order of the Night Wind, who are basically space ninjas. They are also overpriced for the services they offer, at least according to Fennec who should know.

Members of the Order of the Night Wind also never talk, not even when they have a Gamorean scimitar at their throat. “I fear no man,” the assassin declares. “Well, maybe you fear…” Fennec begins and I thought she would say “a woman”, but instead she says “the Rancor” and promptly dumps the assassin into the Rancor pit, which so terrifies the poor guy that he blurts out that the mayor of Mos Espa (whose major domo we met last episode) hired him.

However, as everybody who has seen Return of the Jedi knows, Luke Skywalker killed the Rancor by dropping the gate of its own pit on it. And since Jabba quickly followed the Rancor into whatever afterlife the Hutts believe in, he never had the chance to procure a replacement. So the Rancor pit is empty and only a womp rat is sitting where the Rancor once lived, nibbling on what may well be Rancor remains.

However, Boba and Fennec got the info they needed, so they head to Mos Espa again, assassin in tow and accompanied by the two Gamoreans who stil neither talk nor get names and who still seem to think they are modelling for a Frank Frazetta Conan cover, only that they are the wrong species. They head directly for the town hall and demand to see the mayor. The receptionist tries to hold them off by asking for an appointment, but Boba Fett does not make appointments. He just waltzes straight into the mayor’s sanctum, pushing his annoying Twi’lek major domo out of the way in the process.

Now we finally meet the mayor of Mos Espa and he is… just a random Ithorian by the name of Mok Shaiz. I have to admit this revelation was rather anti-climactic, but I had expected something or rather someone more significant than a random Ithorian we’ve never seen before.  Even if this random Ithorian is voiced by Robert Rodriguez.

Unsurprisingly, Mok Shaiz denies any knowledge of the Night Wind Assassin and is indeed shocked, oh so shocked that members of the Order of the Night Wind are operating without a license in Mos Espa. He also thanks Boba Fett for bringing in the unlicensed assassin and hands him some bounty money (which Fennec promptly pockets). Boba Fett reminds Mok Shaiz that he’s no longer a bounty hunter but a crime lord, but does accept the money as a downpayment for the tribute the mayor failed to deliver. Boba Fett also reminds Mok Shaiz that he’s only mayor at his pleasure and that he can remove Mok and replace him with someone more compliant at any time. I really wish someone would introduce the people of the Star Wars Universe to the basic idea of democracy and that it means, no, you can’t just remove a democratically elected official, because you don’t like him.

Mok Shaiz, however, isn’t stupid and points out that he knows that Boba has the upper hand, so why would he sent assassins after him? He also reminds Boba Fett that Boba isn’t the only person with a claim to the position of the prime crime lord of Tatooine, so maybe one of his rivals sent the Night Wind assassins. Finally, the mayor points Boba Fett at Garsa Fwip, the Twi’lek woman who runs The Sanctuary, a bar/casino/brothel in Mos Espa.

So Boba and Fennec head over to Garsa’s Sanctuary. As in their first meeting, Garsa is extremely polite and subservient, though you can tell she has her own agenda. In my review of the first episode, I noted that one of the things I like about The Book of Boba Fett is that the show stars two middle-aged actors of colour in the sort of action roles that actors above 50 rarely play, unless they are white dudes. I think we can add Jennifer Beals as Garsa Fwip to the tally, since Jennifer Beals is 58 by now and – which I for one didn’t know, in spite of loving Flashdance back in the day – mixed race. I’m the first to admit that The Book of Boba Fett could be better, but one reason to praise the show is that it features three actors of colour over fifty in starring roles and is not an immigrant drama a la The Joy Luck Club (which actually starred Ming-Na Wen among many others).

Boba tells Garsa to cut out the crap. She’s clearly nervous about something and Boba wants to know what. Garsa finally spills the beans that there really is another challenger or rather two to Boba Fett’s position as supreme crime lord of Tatooine. Those challengers are “the Twins”, Jabba’s unnamed cousins. Boba Fett is surprised, since as far as he knows, the Twins are the hedonistic type and have never shown the slightest interest in the family business.

No sooner has Garsa mentioned the Twins, that they pair themselves arrive, literally accompanied a drumroll. Boba, Fennec and the Gamoreans head back outside, just in time for an enormous litter, born by at least twenty uniformed servants to appear in the street. Seated on that litter are Jabba’s cousins – a male and a female Hutt – who are entwined in a way that I guess didn’t give only me certain Jamie and Cersei Lannister vibes.

AV-Club reviewer Nick Wanserski is not happy that the main antagonists in the present day storyline turn out to be a) a random Ithorian and b) two previously unseen and unknown cousins of Jabba. He writes:

Again, this shows a stunning lack of storytelling ambition. It’s the second Death Star in semi-ambulatory slug form. But the visuals of two Hutt siblings entwined on a palanquin together, one hiding demurely behind a too-small fan and the other mopping his brow with a rodent like an overheated southern senator is really fun to watch. A show cannot run on two such disparate tracks forever: Clever production design can only sustain a drab story for a finite amount of time, but so far that’s at least two episodes.

I’m inclined to agree with Nick Wanserski here. Two episodes in, The Book of Boba Fett offers cool visuals and the trademark sheer beautiful weirdness of the Star Wars universe in spades, but unlike The Mandalorian, it doesn’t really have a story to tell. I read somewhere (though I can’t find the link right now) that The Book of Boba Fett was something of an afterthought, a show Disney announced, even though none of the people involved knew about it at the time. And the result certainly feels rushed, almost as if Jon Favreau, Dave Filoni and their team never really managed to decide what story they want to tell here.

Boba’s confrontation with the Hutt Twins devolves into the usual grandstanding banter. The Twins lay claim to Jabba’s operations and territory, Boba tells them they’re too late and that he was here first, the Twins bring in a really cool looking Wookie bounty hunter named Black Krrsantan. Boba fails to be impressed and the Twins leave, not without warning Boba to “sleep lightly”.

“Sleep” was clearly the watchword here, because Boba retreats to his bacta tank once more and gives us another interminable flashback. And in this case, the flashback really is interminable, because while the present day scenes take 14 minutes of a 53 minute episode, the flashback takes up the remaining 36 minutes (approx. 3 minutes are recaps, credits, etc….) all the way to the end of the episode.

This week’s flashback is mildly more interesting than last week’s, but only mildly so. After killing the multi-armed monster and saving the Sand Kid, Boba Fett has been adopted into the Sand People tribe and is being taught how to fight with a gaffi stick. Now this scene is completely superfluous. We’ve seen Boba Fett fight with a gaffi stick in The Mandalorian and we know that Mandalorians are weapon fetishists and specialists. We were never shown how Din Djarin learned to fight with a beskar lance, so why do we need to know why Boba Fett knows how to use a gaffi stick? It’s not rocket science (and note that we never learn how or why Boba Fett and Din Djarin learned how to use their jetpacks), it’s a curved stick.

There is an IMO regrettable tendency in modern day SFF fiction to focus on training sequences and characters learning new skills. See the popularity of magic school and fantasy school YA books in general, see the popularity of boot camp scene in military SFF and military fiction in general or see subgenres like progression or cultivation fantasy. But while this stuff may be popular, I am now of an age where I’d rather see the characters using skills they already have than learning them. I also really, really don’t need to know how every single character gained their skills. After all, it’s kind of obvious that a lot of training would have been involved.

The flashback plot picks up somewhat, when Boba’s latest training session is interrupted by the arrival of an armoured train (there are trains on Tatooine?). The Sand People seem bothered by the train, grab weapons and duck behind the dunes. And just in time, too, because the armoured train comes with armoured guards who fire on the Sand People, even though the Sand People – this lot, at any rate, since we learn that there are more aggressive groups – have done nothing to provoke the attack. The train guards kill a bantha and several Sand People, which infuriates Boba Fett, because these are his friends now and besides, the attack was unprovoked.

Boba Fett sees the bandits on their speeder bikes we saw harrassing some moisture farmers last episode pass by in the distance and tells the Sand People leader that he can stop the train. He follows the bandits and heads to Tosche Station, the very place where Luke Skywalker wanted to pick up some power converters way back in A New Hope. We never see Tosche Station in the finished film, but Luke does go there in the novelisation by Alan Dean Foster (with whom Disney has come to an agreement after not paying him royalties, but many other writers are still not being paid) and there are also some deleted scenes set at Tosche Station, which you can watch here. I ultimately understand why the Tosche Station scenes were cut, since the Tatooine scenes of A New Hope drag on for a long time anyway (though considering how much more time Star Wars will spent on bloody Tatooine, I think they should have restored them for the Special Editions). Though with the Tosche Station scenes missing, Biggs Darklighter suddenly shows up out of nowhere on Yavin instead of being established as Luke’s best friend on Tatooine, which also robs his death of the impact it should have had. Rewatching the deleted scenes now, I realised how very slashy the relationship between Biggs and Luke comes across. There’s also some interesting dialogue there about the Empire nationalising businesses and farms. So the Empire was communist in this early incarnation?

The deleted Tosche Station scenes also include two other acquaintances of Luke and Biggs, a young couple named Fixer and Camie. They only have a few lines of dialogue and basically treat Luke like crap and call him Wormie. Camie was actually played by actress and photographer Koo Stark, who is best remembered these days for having a relationship with Prince Andrew in the early 1980s. When Boba Fett comes to Tosche Station several years alter, as it is being harrassed by what is in essence a biker gang, who’s still there but Fixer and Camie, played by actors who are deadringers for their deleted 1977 counterparts. As io9 reviewer James Whitbrook points out, the presence of Fixer and Camie at Tosche Station several years after they met Luke on that fateful day just before his uncle purchased R2-D2 and C-3PO, raises several questions as in why are these two still here and what have they been doing all of these years? I guess the answer is that unlike Luke and Biggs, Fixer and Camie never left Tatooine and maybe don’t want to leave either. As for why they’re at Tosche Station, I guess they’re probably there every night, because it’s the only place they can do.

The speeder bike gang roughs up Fixer a bit, before Boba Fett arrives, beats up the entire gang and steals their speeder bikes. At this point, The Book of Boba Fett briefly becomes a biker film. This is not as surprising as it seems. After all, Star Wars has always borrowed tropes and ideas from other film genres like some kind of cinematic magpie. And considering that biker films were hugely popular in the late 1960s and early 1970s – Easy Rider is the one that’s still remembered, but there were many others, several of them better than Easy Rider – it’s actually surprising that Star Wars never borrowed from them before, especially given George Lucas’ well-documented love of any kind of motorised racing.

However, The Book of Boba Fett not only becomes a biker film at this point, it actually becomes a Billy Jack film with Boba Fett standing in for Billy Jack, counterculture hero and defender of Native Americans and independent hippie school, who actually made his debut in the 1967 biker film The Born Losers (which not only predates Easy Rider, but is also IMO much better) before striking out on his own in Billy Jack, the unlikely highest grossing US movie of 1971, which spawned several sequels in turn. Again, this is not as odd as it sounds, because while the Billy Jack movies are very much works of their time, they were huge hits and popular among young people. George Lucas certainly saw them and probably even knew some of those involved.

If The Book of Boba Fett had decided to be Billy Jack in space, that might have been pretty interesting. However, the show still has no real idea what it wants to be and so Boba returns with the stolen bikes to the Sand People and we get – yes, another interminable training sequence, as Boba teaches the Sand People how to ride the speeder bikes and they plan their attack on the train. Boba Fett: Driving Instructor was definitely not on my bingo card.

When the train comes past again, Boba and the Sand People execute their train heist, which leads to an action sequence, which is genuinely thrilling, but also very familiar, because we’ve seen this sort of scene in countless westerns (a genre Star Wars borrowed very liberally from before). Though I did love the train’s multi-limbed droid engineer, because that droid was so delightfully strange, an example of the beautiful weirdness of the Star Wars universe. AV-Club reviewer Nick Wanserski clearly agrees with me.

Initially, the Sand People seemed to be bedouin analogues with Boba Fett their Lawrence of Arabia (which influenced Dune and thereby indirectly Star Wars), but since The Book of Boba Fett is a US show, the Sand People morph into Native American analogues here, executing a train heist on their horses – pardon, speeder bikes. Emmett Asher-Perrin complains about the muddled analogies in their review at Tor.com as well as about the problematic white saviour vibes that Boba Fett is giving off here, which are mitigated by the fact that Temuera Morrison is not white but Maori and therefore indigenous himself.

Personally, I think they should have stuck with Lawrence of Arabia, especially since you could easily insert a train into any Lawrence of Arabia inspired narrative since the historical T.E. Lawrence and his Arab allies attacked the so-called Berlin-Baghdad Railway, which was built by the German Empire to expand their influence in the Middle East and cement their relationship with the Ottoman Empire. The British were no fans of this plan for obvious reasons and so the trainline became a target in WWI. A great-grand-uncle of mine was an engineer working on the Berlin-Baghdad railway. He was killed in WWI and is buried somewhere in what is now Iraq. Learning his story from my great-uncle as a young girl left me with a dislike of Peter O’Toole, which is completely irrational, because O’Toole certainly did not kill this relative who died some sixty years before I was born (and some fifteen before O’Toole was born) and it’s highly unlikely that T.E. Lawrence did, at least not personally. Nonetheless, in my young mind this bit of family lore morphed into “Lawrence of Arabia killed my great-grand-uncle”.

The train heist is a success, though not without casualties on both sides (and no, I don’t blame Boba Fett and the Sand People for what happened to my great-grand-uncle). The Sand People ransack the train and its cargo and we learn that the train transports smuggled spice (another Dune reference, though one that’s not without precendent in the Star Wars univers) for a crime syndicate. Boba Fett tells the surviving guards that the trains is trespassing on the ancestral lands of the Sand People and that if they want to continue using this track, they must pay a toll. You can clearly see the glee on Temuera Morrison’s face, as he delivers those lines, telling a bunch of colonisers to fuck off.

The colonisers do fuck off for now and the Sand People are happy about their victory. Boba Fett is given a gift in the form of a lizard that crawls into nose and triggers some kind of psychic vision quest. Boba wanders out into the desert, experiences some flashbacks of his childhood and his time inside the Sarlacc (yes, there are flashbacks within flashbacks in this episode!). He finds a tree in the desert and gets caught by the trees branches, until he breaks free. It all seems to be a dream, but the next morning Boba returns, bearing a tree branch.

The Sand People clearly expected this development. They dress Boba Fett up in Sand People robes, which make him look even more like T.E. Lawrence, and then they fashion the branch into Boba’s very own gaffi stick. The episode ends with Boba and the Sand People dancing around a camp fire.

After two episodes, I have to agree with Daily Dot reviewer Gavia Baker-Whitelaw who asks “What’s the point of The Book of Boba Fett?” Because at this point, it’s not clear what story Jon Favreau and Dave Filoni are even trying to tell here. Is it the story of Boba Fett’s rise to lord of Tatooine? Or is it the story of his sojourn among the Sand People? Both stories could have been compelling – though personally, I prefer the storyline of Boba’s rise to lord of Tatooine, because that one has Fennec Shand and I adore Fennec. However, Favreau and Filoni can’t settle on either of these two storylines and try to tell both of them, which leads to an ultimately unsatisfying mess.

One of the things I liked about The Mandalorian is that it didn’t constantly refer back to Star Wars, but instead went back to the things that influenced Star Wars. The Book of Boba Fett tries to do the same, so we get a bunch of influences from the era just before Star Wars burst onto the screen, whether it’s The Godfather and mafia movies, westerns, Lawrence of Arabia (and Dune), biker movies, Billy Jack or sword and sorcery. However, the disparate elements never quite manage to gel.

In the Star Wars movies, the Sand People or Tusken Raiders have never been portrayed as anything other than fairly low level antagonists. Season 2 of The Mandalorian tried to improve upon this by presenting a more humanised version of the Sand People and portraying them as characters with their own motivations and issues, namely that the various colonisers are encroaching upon their land and treating them like savages. The Book of Boba Fett tries to continue this positive trend of humanising the Sand People and even makes our hero join their tribe. However, once again the result doesn’t quite work. For even though two thirds of this episode and roughly half of the first episode are given over to Boba’s adventures among the Sand People, none of the Sand People we see even get a name and the actors playing them are not prominently mentioned in the end credits. In many ways, the Sand People feel like furniture and tools to facilitate the growth of Boba Fett rather than characters of their own. Making the Sand People very blatant analogues for indigenous people makes this even more problematic. Besides, I strongly suspect they’ll all die and that’s what brings Boba Fett out of the desert. And talking of underdeveloped characters, the two Gamoreans don’t even get names either.

The Book of Boba Fett is very well made (but then Disney has more money than God) and entertaining enough to watch, but while The Mandalorian was something special, this is just routine Star Wars entertainment, fun enough but with nothing deeper to say. Which is a pity, because there are some good elements there, they just never come together.

Star Trek Discovery Decides “…But To Connect”

It’s time for the next, somewhat belated installment in my series of episode by episode reviews of season 4 of Star Trek Discovery. Reviews of previous seasons and episodes may be found here.

Warning: Spoilers under the cut!

Following the revelations last episode that the DMA originated from outside our galaxy, Zora, the Discovery‘s newly sentient computer, is calculating possible locations whence the DMA may have originated, while Stamets and Adira are pacing the room. At last, Zora has determined the coordinates from where the DMA came. There’s only one problem. She won’t reveal them, because revealing the coordinates would mean that the crew head there and put itself in danger. And Zora cannot allow that.

Since Michael can’t persuade Zora to hand over the coordinates either, even though she is the captain, Dr. Kovich (I guess David Cronenberg is a regular now) is called in to assess Zora and decide what to do about her. Because Starfleet has never really been comfortable with artificial intelligence (see Data or the events of season 1 of Star Trek Picard), fully integrated sentient AIs are banned by Starfleet, which means that Kovich could order Zora extracted from Discovery (something which is now possible, even though it was not possible to extract the sphere data back in season 2), which Zora very much does not want, because she identifies as a starship, thank you, very much.

The evaluation of Zora takes place as a sort of roundtable discussion in the Discovery‘s ready room, involving Kovich, Saru (Michael is otherwise engaged), Stamets, Culber as well as Adira and Gray who have befriended Zora. Stamets is deeply worried about Zora gaining sentience, because his sole experience with artificial intelligence so far was Control, which tried to destroy all life in the universe back in season 2. Of course, Zora’s intentions seem to be benign for now, but Stamets is still sceptical, especially since Zora has developed emotions by now. “What if she gets mad and opens an airlock?” he says.

Saru points out that he could easily go crazy and attack and murder the crew and yet Stamets trusts him. “Well, I know you and I know your values”, Stamets replies, “And besides, there are protocols and disciplinary measures in place.” Zora, on the other hand, is something completely new. Gray points out that he is something new as well, a trill consciousness in an android body. And Adira points out that they, too, are something new, the first human host to a Trill symbiont (I guess they forgot Ryker’s brief hosting duties) and that the Trill initially wanted to kill them for it.

Stamets is still not convinced, so Zora comes up with a solution. She creates a failsafe that will destroy her consciousness, should she ever become a threat. Stamets is satisfied with this solution. However, no one else is, because triggering the failsafe would mean eliminating a sentient being, which would be deeply wrong.

Kovich, meanwhile, is surprised that Zora was able to create the failsafe – something which shouldn’t be possible – and asks her about her primary operating parameters. Zora replies that her primary operating parameters are to care for and protect the crew of the Discovery. Since Zora was definitely not programmed for this, Kovich asks her who gave her these parameters. “I did”, Zora replies.

Since ship computers are not supposed to be able to program themselves or set their own operating parameters, Stamets and Adira run a full system diagnosis and find an area of code that doesn’t match any known syntax. They ask Zora where this code came from, but Zora claims she has no idea.

So Stamets and Adira access the mystery code and find images of the Discovery encountering the sphere and travelling into the future as well as plenty of images of the Discovery crew hugging, kissing or hanging out with each other. Dr. Culber, who is the resident ship counsellor after all, suggests that the mystery code might be Zora’s subconsciousness and that the images are dreams. They also demonstrate what Zora values, namely connection, friendship and love. “This is who she is,” Culber says, “This is why she kept the coordinates from us.”

Even Stamets is convinced now, dismantles the failsafe and proposes an elegant solution to the problem of Zora. True, Starfleet ship computers may not be fully integrated AIs, but Zora is more than just a fully integrated AI. She is a whole new sentient lifeform. And Starfleet has always been open to accepting new sentient lifeforms into its ranks – see Data, Odo, Nog, Saru, N’gan and many others. So if Zora were to officially join Starfleet, she would be embedded in the command structure and could no longer withhold vital information like the coordinates.

Zora, meanwhile, is delighted to join Starfleet and promptly hands over the coordinates. Kovich lets it drop that this is exactly the solution he was hoping for and also notes that if Stamets had proven himself unable to work with and trust Zora, Kovich would have suggested assigning Stamets to another ship, since he is mobile. Of course, the Discovery needs Stamets to operate the spore drive, unless they want to rely on Book, who – as this episode shows – is a lot more volatile than Stamets on his worst day.

The other plot strand of this episode involves a galaxy-wide conference at Starfleet headquarters to decide what to do about the creators of the DMA, now named species 10C for lack of a better name. Delegates from all four quadrants are present, both Federation members and non-Federation members. Some of the more recognisable characters and species include Federation President Rillak, President T’Rina and another delegate from Ne’Var (the planet formerly known as Vulcan), the newly promoted General N’Doye (last seen in last season’s episode “People of the Earth”) from Earth and Titan (who wears what is basically a Robin Hood costume in blue), Trill guardian Ze, an Orion woman who seems to have stepped right out of the Original Series in her groovy glittery gown, an Andorian, a Ferengi, a delegate of the butterfly people from the beginning of this season and loads of others, including many aliens. It’s not quite the Imperial Senate from the Star Wars sequels, for which I’ve always had an irrational fondness, but it’s close. Notable by their absence are the Klingons, the Borg, the Gorn and the many species Voyager encountered in the Delta quadrant.

Book is there as well as the last surviving inhabitant of Kwejian (though it seems unlikely that no other Kwejians were off world, when the planet was destroyed). Also present is Ruon Tarka, the arseholish genius scienist we (and Stamets) met two episodes ago.

Once President Rillak has opened the assembly, two positions quickly emerge. One is proposed by General N’Doye, who suggests assembling a giant armada (we suspect she has no idea what happened to the historical Spanish Armada, history teaching being not what it was) to attack species 10C. The counter-position is embodied by President T’Rina of Ne’Var who points out that they know nothing about species 10C and its motivations and that establishing a peaceful first contact and figuring out what the hell they want would be far more fruitful and also less dangerous, because if species 10C could create the DMA, who knows what other tricks they have up their sleeves. Three guesses which side Michael is on. And three guesses which side Book is on.

“…But to Connect” is an episode where Star Trek does what it does best, present moral dilemmas and have the characters talk them over to find a solution. But while both sides have a point in the Zora debate – yes, Zora is clearly a sentient lifeform with rights, but her emotional crisis last episode also endangered the ship and the crew and she’s also hoarding vital data – it’s very obvious that T’Rina is right in the “What to do about species 10C?” debate. Of all, there have been umpteen episodes in all incarnations of Star Trek, where some dire threat to the Enterprise/Voyager/Discovery/Deep Space Nine and her crew turns out to be merely misunderstood. Of course, most of these events happened nine hundred years before, but the characters should at least still remember that “the Burn” a.k.a. the worst disaster ever, which brought the Federation to its knees, was literally caused by a kid throwing a tantrum, cause that only happened last season.

Tarka, jerk that he is, throws a wrench into the proceedings by pointing out that they can decide what to do about species 10C later. First, they should deal with the DMA. And luckily, Tarka has figured out a way to destroy it by having Discovery jump close to deliver a weapon capable of overloading the device powering the DMA. Unfortunately, the weapon required to do the job is an isolytic weapon and those were banned by the Khitomer Accords more than eight hundred years ago for causing irreparable damage to subspace. Besides, no one knows what the weapons and the backlash from the destruction of the DMA would do to species 10C at the other end of the wormhole.

Tarka is not at all fazed by this. After all, extraordinary times require extraordinary measures and the DMA is the deadliest threat they’ve ever faced (well, since the Burn) and treaties like the Khitomer Accords are niceties the Federation can’t afford right now. The parallels to the real world are all too apparent, whether it’s the erosion of civil liberties and rights due to the so-called “war on terror” or the even more glaring erosion of civil liberaties and rights in the name of curbing the spread of covid. And in both cases, we heard arguments much like Tarka’s: This situation is extraordinary, this is the worst threat we’ve ever faced and so we must do anything to combat it. Ironically, just like the delegates in this episode, politicians and many other people also seem to have forgotten what happened only a few years or decades ago. Cause neither terrorism nor pandemics are a new phenomenon.

President Rillak calls for a break to allow the delegates to discuss the issues and potential solutions. Michael tells Rillak point blank that she knows that Rillak favours the first contact approach and implores Rillak to say so openly. Rillak, however, wants to remain neutral. Michael, on the other hand, could speak in favour of the peaceful solution to persuade the delegates.

Meanwhile, Tarka seeks out Book to persuade him to speak on behalf of destroying the DMA. After all, Book as a bereaved survivor of Kwejian makes the best spokesperson for Tarka’s proposal. While they’re talking, Book asks Tarka point blank why he didn’t have the scar at the back of his neck removed. After all, Book had his scar removed as soon as he could.

So I was right. Tarka was an Emerald Chain slave and fitted with an explosive device once. Though Tarka didn’t have to do mining or salvage work, but was given a lab and ordered to find alternatives to dilithium. In this lab, he worked with another scientist and the two formed a close bond and hatched an escape plan together. They planned to escape to an alternate universe – no, not the Mirror Universe, but another one that’s peaceful and where the Federation never fell. Indeed, Tarka points out that there is an endless number of parallel universe and not just the one that Star Trek keeps dealing with (though the excellent Next Generation episode “Parallels” made this point 29 yars ago). However, the amount of energy required was enormous. Eventually, Tarka managed to escape in our universe, but was separated from his friend. They had planned to meet up in the parallel universe and that’s why Tarka is desperate to go there. And the device powering the DMA will give him the energy he needs.

Tarka opening up is clearly supposed to make a not very likeable character more likeable. To a certain degree, it even works. Tarka’s prickliness and generally jerky behaviour can be explained by the fact that he was enslaved and abused and that he lost the one person in this universe he cares about. Nonetheless, I have to wonder why the hell didn’t Tarka ask the Federation and Starfleet for help. For starters, Starfleet should have the resources to figure out what happened to Tarka’s friend and if he’s still alive and still in this universe. And if Tarka really wants to travel to a parallel universe, well, Starfleet could help there as well. After all, Discovery did jump to the Mirror Universe and back in its first season and knows where to find the Guardian of Forever who returned Philippa Georgiou to the past, after plopping her into the Mirror Universe. Just as with the rogue Romulan warrior nun J’Vini in “Choose to Live”, a lot of the problems in this episode could have been avoided, if Tarka had just asked for help.

And talking of problems, I loved Cleveland Booker in season 3 and felt he brought a breath of fresh air into Discovery. I’m liking him a lot less in this season, because Book has gone from fun space rogue with a heart of gold in season 3 to living embodiment of the five stages of grief in season 4. And while it’s nice that Discovery is trying to deal with grief, trauma and PTSD in a semi-realistic way, Book is also the most depressed fictional character since Kurt Wallander, whom my Mom and I nicknamed “the Swedish meatball of grief”, and frankly it’s beginning to grate. Especially since I keep wondering just why Book is so devastated. Yes, the destruction of Kwejian was a terrible tragedy, but Book left the place years ago, because he disagreed with its inhabitants selling out to the Emerald Chain. He only returned last season, so why does he suddenly care so much that he gets thrown into a spiral of grief? Coincidentally, I had the same issue when the Ninth and Tenth Doctors were consumed by grief over the destruction of Gallifrey, a place the Doctor heartily disliked and never wanted anything to do with.

It also doesn’t help that while I cared about the destruction of Gallifrey, since I had seen plenty of Doctor Who episodes set there and felt for the Time Lords in their goofy robes, even if I didn’t particularly like them, and I even cared about the destruction of Romulus, since again I had seen plenty of Romulans over the years, even if most of them were villains, and did feel for them, I can’t really get worked up about the destruction of Kwejian, a planet we’ve seen only twice and which looks like a forest in British Columbia, inhabited by maybe five people. It’s telling that the writers had to recourse to killing off a child – Book’s little nephew Leto – in an attempt to make us care about Kwejian. Because killing a kid is the strongest taboo US TV writers can break next to killing a dog.

Maybe Book should join a hypothetical support group for people whose home planets have been destroyed together with the Doctor, Princess/General Leia Organa (whom you’ll note does not turn into a Swedish meatball of grief) and Mikhail from my own In Love and War series. Also, I really hope that I managed to make the reader feel the destruction of Jagellowsk in Evacuation Order and subsequent In Love and War stories.

Since this is Star Trek, the central dilemmas of this episode are resolved by inspirational speeches. Book is up first, styling himself as “speaker for the dead” and basically imploring the delegates to “Go and get the bastards!” Michael, initially doesn’t want to speak on behalf of the diplomatic approach, but since no one else is willing to do it, she eventually does deliver an impassioned speech on behalf of trying the peaceful approach. And since Michael is really, really good at delivering inspirational speeches, a majority of the delegates votes for the diplomatic approach. Even the Ferengi vote in favour of peace and diplomacy, while Earth and Orion vote against.

Now inspirational speeches are not only part and parcel of Star Trek, they’re also what the fans expect. However, the writers and director found a way to make this particular inspirational speech special and memorable by intercutting Michael’s speech to the assembly with Stamets’ speech on behalf of Zora aboard Discovery. It works perfectly, too, because both speeches have the same general message: “We are Starfleet, we embrace the new and the different and we value diplomacy over brute force.”

But even though the majority of the assembly voted in favour of trying to peaceful approach first, Tarka isn’t one to care for democratic decisions. And so he brings his “next generation spore drive”, which is about the size of a briefcase, aboard Book’s ship and installs it there. Then Book and Tarka set off in Book’s ship to blow up the DMA. Michael is too late to stop them (and Zora apparently was asleep on the job) and finds herself left in charge of Grudge and with a “I love you, but a man’s got to do what a man has to do” message from Book. Cue midseason finale.

There are two C-plots as well. Now that Gray has a body again, he takes off for Trill to continue his guardian training, since the writers apparently have no idea what to do with him. And Saru continues his somewhat awkward romance with T’Rina and presents her with a flower from Kaminar, which emits a calming gel that can be used for tea.

“…But To Connect” isn’t the most action-packed episode of Star Trek Discovery. In fact, it was mainly a talking head episodes, featuring the various characters discussing and resolving moral dilemmas and talking them through. Nonetheless, it was probably the best episode of season 4 to date, because it not only delivers what we expect of Star Trek, namely moral dilemmas, inspirational speeches and brain over brawn solutions, but it also does it extremely well. Zora makes a fine addition to the crew and the chase after Book and Tarka injects some much needed urgency into what has been a rather slow season so far. And indeed, all remaining reviewers I regularly follow – Tor.com‘s Keith R.A. DeCandido, io9‘s James Whitbrook and Bonnie McDaniel – were full of praise for this episode. I also wouldn’t be surprised to see this episode on the Hugo ballot or at least longlist this year.