Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 32

Two new historical horror tales just in time for the holidays: The Witchfinder’s Apprentice and The Solstice Horror

The much delayed Hawkeye and Star Trek Discovery reviews are coming, but first of all, here is the final new release announcement for 2021. And it’s even a double new release announcement for what turned out to be a new series entitled Witchfinders.

The genesis of this series was this post by horror author Grady Hendrix at com, wherein Hendrix say that the depiction of criminal profilers in popular culture is closer to 17th century Puritan witchfinders than to actual profilers. So I thought, “Why not write a story that’s Criminal Minds, but with Puritan witch hunters?”

That story was The Witchfinder’s Apprentice and features a quartet of witchfinders that is very loosely based on the male members of the Criminal Minds team. Matthew Goodson, the titular appretice, is based of Dr. Spencer Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler) and sticks closest to the character in the TV show. Gideon Jacobs is based on Jason Gideon (Mandy Patinkin) with a dash of Inigo Montaya from The Princess Bride (also played by Patinkin) thrown in. Master Caine Hopkins is based on Aaron Hotchner (Thomas Gibson) and Fear-God Moody is based on Derek Morgan (Shemar Moore), though in the case of the last three nothing except the physical description remained of the Criminal Minds characters (and in the case of Fear-God not even that, because Shemar Moore is handsome, while Fear-God is scarred), largely because the Criminal Minds characters are heroic figures, while the witchfinders are very much not.

Criminal Minds is a mystery show at heart, so I gave my witchfinders a mystery to solve and sent them to the small Massachusetts town of Redemption, which is beset by a wave of mysterious illnesses and deaths. There is a natural explanation for these illnesses and deaths, but to a witchfinder, there can only be one solution to every mystery, namely “witches did it.”

And so the witchfinders arrest two teenaged girls, including Grace Pankhurst, whose torture and impending execution plunges Matthew into a crisis of conscience and faith.

So prepare to meet…

The Witchfinder’s Apprentice
Massachusetts in the Year of the Lord 1695: Matthew Goodson, eighteen years of age, is apprenticed to a team of experienced witchfinders, who travel from village to village and town to town to uncover witchcraft, examine the evidence, interrogate suspects and stamp out evil.

When a wave of mysterious illnesses and deaths hits the town of Redemption, the witchfinders are called in and quickly arrest a suspect, a teenaged girl named Grace Pankhurst.

Matthew has long been having his doubts about the witchfinders and the righteousness of their mission. The interrogation of Grace brings those doubts to a flashpoint. But is Grace truly innocent or has Matthew fallen under the spell of a comely witch?

This is a historical horror story of 5500 words or approximately 20 print pages by two-time Hugo finalist Cora Buhlert.

More information
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List price: 0.99 USD, EUR or GBP
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The Witchfinder’s Apprentice came out in October, though I forgot to mention it here. It was well received and readers were asking about a sequel.

Meanwhile, I was trying to come up with an idea for my annual holiday and came up empty, because I just didn’t feel the holiday spirit and wasn’t in the mood for a fluffy Christmas romance. Instead, my brain wanted to write horror or sword and sorcery.

Since sword and sorcery tends to have prehistoric or secondary world settings, a sword and sorcery Christmas story was out. However, a holiday horror story should be possible. Matthew and Grace were also still very much on my mind, so I came up with the brilliant idea to write a historical holiday horror story as a sequel to The Witchfinder’s Apprentice.

This plan quickly ran into a problem, because it turned out that the Puritans, notorious killjoys that they are, did not celebrate Christmas and that Christmas was actually banned in Massachusetts for several years. However, there were not just Puritans (and witches) living in Massachusetts, so I could have a Christmas celebration after all and also give Matthew yet more reason to question the prejudices installed by his Puritan upbringing.

Of course, the witchfinders – now reduced to a trio – reappear as well and they’re as dogged and fanatical as ever. We do learn a bit more about Fear-God Moody – who, even though he is the executioner and torturer, is the most sympathetic of the three witchfinders – and how he came to join the witchfinders in this story.

While I was writing The Solstice Horror, I was rereading the adventures of Robert E. Howard’s Puritan avenger Solomon Kane (who is a fascinating character, about whom I should write a standalone post some time), so there is a bit of Solomon Kane in this story as well.

In The Witchfinder’s Apprentice, the only supernatural element was that some witches are real. The Solstice Horror, however, introduces a more overt supernatural element in the form of Lovecraftian monsters. For where would you find them, if not in New England?

So follow Grace and Matthew, as they face down…

The Solstice Horror
Massachusetts in the Year of the Lord 1695: Apprentice witchfinder Matthew Goodson, and condemned witch Grace Pankhurst have been on the run from Matthew’s former masters for months now.

Shortly before Christmas, Matthew and Grace find shelter with the Whitelaw family in the town of Cold Hollow. But the witchfinders are on their trail, so Matthew and Grace have to flee again on the day of the winter solstice.

Many dangers lurk in the dense woods of Massachusetts Bay Colony. But which is the greater threat, the witchfinders or the thing from beyond that dwells in the woods and hunts on the darkest nights of the year?

This is a historical holiday horror novelette of 11100 words or approximately 40 print pages by two-time Hugo finalist Cora Buhlert.

More information.
Length: 11100 words
List price: 0.99 USD, EUR or GBP
Buy it at Amazon US, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon France, Amazon Netherlands, Amazon Spain, Amazon Italy, Amazon Canada, Amazon Australia, Amazon Brazil, Amazon Japan, Amazon India, Amazon Mexico, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBooks, Google Play, Scribd, Smashwords, Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Buecher.de, DriveThruFiction, Casa del Libro, Vivlio and XinXii.

Some Thoughts on the 2021 Hugo Award Winners and the Ceremony in general

The latest Star Trek Discovery and Hawkeye reviews is coming, but for now, let’s talk about the 2021 Hugo Award winners. I’d hoped to get this post up a few days ago, but I was busy, so it’s a few days late.

This is not quite the post I hoped to write. The post that I hoped to write was, “Hey, I won a Hugo. Go me!” However, Elsa Sjunneson won and a most deserving winner she is, too. I came in second. But then, the whole Fan Writer category was full of awesome people, everyone of whom would have been a highly deserving winner.  And in fact, the speech I never got to hold would have specifically said that as far as I am concerned, everybody in the Fan Writer category is a winner.

The full list of winners is here and the voting and nominations break-down is here. Also check out the Hugo commentary by Nicholas Whyte, Font Folly, Doris V. Sutherland as well as multiple posts by Camestros Felapton. There’s also an article by David Barnett about the Hugos in The Guardian, which focusses only on the winners in the fiction categories.  I’m happy that mainstream newspapers like The Guardian report about the Hugos, but would it kill them to print the full list of winners.?

As you probably know, I was a Hugo finalist for Best Fan Writer this year. However, due to the continuing covid pandemic and the generally terrible timing of having a Worldcon on the fourth advent weekend, I couldn’t attend in person. Luckily, DisCon III was a hybrid event and while the virtual components didn’t always work as well as they should have (a full DisCon III report is coming, though likely after the holidays), DisCon III did a really good job taking care of the Hugo finalists both virtually on on site.

Due to the six hour time difference between Washington DC and Germany, the ceremony was supposed to start at 2 AM my time. An added complication was that I had a German class in the morning, so no sleeping in, and a Worldcon panel in the afternoon, so no afternoon nap either. I did manage to take a nap from 8 to 9 PM, but I was still pretty tired.

In the late afternoon, I did dress up in my full Hugo outfit – evening gown, tiara, jewellery, etc… – so my Dad could take a few photos. Unfortunately, he’s not nearly as good a photographer as Olav Rokne and Amanda Wakaruk of the Best Fanzine finalist Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog who did the official photos this year, which you can see here.

Meanwhile, here are the pics my Dad took of me in my parents’ living room:

Behold my Hugo gown and tiara. I think I look like I just stepped out of the cover of a late 1920s issue of Weird Tales.

And here is another photo, where you can see the necklace and tiara better.

Here’s a close-up look at my Hugo tiara/circlet. It’s flexible, so it fits around the head, though I had to fasten it with hairpins.

Once my Dad had taken the photos, I changed to regular house clothes again, because the ceremony was still several hours away and while the gown is not uncomfortable, it’s also for those wide sleeves to get caught on something. Plus, the tiara tends to slip after a while.

The Hugo ceremony was supposed to start at 2 AM. Sometime during Saturday evening, I got an e-mail that it would be delayed and start an hour later, i.e. 3 AM my time, due to a technical issue, which later turned out to be a small electrical fire in the ballroom where the Hugo ceremony was due to be held.

The pre-Hugo reception was still supposed to start two hours before the ceremony and there was a virtual version via Zoom. So I dialled into Zoom at a little after midnight and hung out with Best Novelette finalist (and eventual winner) Sarah Pinsker, who tested positive for covid (thankfully asymptomatic) on the day before the con and couldn’t attend in person, Best Editor finalists Navah Wolfe and Sheila E. Gilbert, Best Pro Artist finalist and friend Alyssa Winans, Best Short Story finalist John Wiswell and Brandon O’Brien, poetry editor of the Best Semiprozine finalist (and eventual winner) FIYAH as well as Alyshondra Meacham, who played hostess for the virtual finalists. We admired each other’s outfits, Alyssa’s freshly baked crab bread and the antics of Sarah’s dog.

The Zoom party was beamed into the main party via a tablet or laptop, so we could see our fellow finalists in Washington DC and could talk to them. Plenty of people came over to say hello and good luck. Outfits were admired – and honestly, the Hugos have the best range of outfits. It’s like the Oscars, only crazier. After all, we had two of Santa’s elves there, otherwise known as John and Krissy Scalzi. And best of all, you have a lot of people with realistic bodies at the Hugos. The masks made it a bit difficult to recognise people, even if I knew them, though thankfully Sarah was really good at recognising people under their masks. The noise level in the ballroom also made it difficult to talk, so we made signs to hold up saying things like “Good luck!”, “Great dress/suit/outfit” and – this was John Wiswell’s – “I’m rooting for you and only you, I promise.” I enjoyed the whole set-up a lot and hope that future Worldcons adopt this idea, so even finalists who cannot be present in person get a taste of the ceremony.

About 45 minutes before the ceremony was due to start, we were transferred to the finalist Zoom green room. I did a mike and light check, redonned my gown and tiara and waited for the show to start. There was a brief announcement that the Hugo Awards were sponsored by Google and another company whose name I did not catch, though my Dad did and remarked, “Raytheon Technologies: They make radar systems.” And this was literally all I noticed about what would turn out to be the night’s biggest scandal until I woke up the next day around noon and saw people deeply upset about a sponsor. Though I did find it a little weird that sponsors were named before the start of the Hugo ceremony, because I had never experienced this before.

If you were on the ground in Washington DC, the Raytheon sponsorship would have been a bit more visible, since there logo appears in the Hugo ceremony program and was also plastered all over a red carpet photo area. Though most finalists failed to notice this, because if you’re a Hugo finalist, you’re nervous and the sponsor name and logo are the least of your concerns. Even if you notice the logo and sponsor name, you’re unlikely to google them in the middle of the ceremony, simply because you have other concerns at the time. And indeed, the sponsor never even came up in conversation during the virtual after-party (more on that later), most likely because no one had registered what sort of company was sponsoring the event at the time.

Considering how little the Raytheon sponsorship pinged on my radar and anybody else’s at the time, it’s ironic that now that’s the only topic everybody is talking about, overshadowing the actual winners, which is a pity. You can read a not very good article about the Raytheon sponsorship controversy at io9 and a much better one at Andrew Liptak’s newsletter. Camestros Felapton also goes into DisCon III’s very frustrating lack of explanation regarding how the fuck this sponsorship came to be, even after several finalists had been harrassed about their supposed association with a weapons manufacturer and for not distancing themselves from Raytheon quickly enough.

I don’t really want to talk about the sponsors of the Hugo ceremony here, but about the wonderful winners. However, since we’re apparently obliged to offer our two cents on the Raytheon controversy, here are mine: Having a company like Raytheon Technologies, even their Space and Intelligence division, sponsor a Worldcon and the Hugo ceremony was a spectacularly bad and tone-deaf decision. Worldcon is an international convention and its membership includes people from countries, whose inhabitants have found themselves on the wrong side of a Raytheon made missile. Honestly, how could anybody ever think that this decision was remotely acceptable. It was also apparently illegal, because an individual Worldcon can’t sell sponsorships for the Hugos, only the WSFS can and they had no idea about the sponsorship until the ceremony.

Also, none of the finalists were informed about the sponsors in any of the umpteen e-mails we got from DisCon III. Pretty much all finalists are angry to utterly furious about this decision. There are finalists whose religious beliefs are violated by being associated with a weapons manufacturer, finalists who are getting massive pushback from their fans, finalists who worry about professional consequences, because they work for peace and human rights organisations in their day job. If the Raytheon thing had been known beforehand, there would have been massive pushback, and part of me suspects that this is precisely the reason why no one knew until the night of the ceremony. Yet, now the finalists and winners are being harrassed about the whole thing and suddenly associated with a company none of us want anything to do with. See this open letter by Worldcon member Jake Casella Brookins who wonders how complicit the Hugo finalists are in the Raytheon thing.

However, what makes this whole Raytheon thing even more infuriating – beyond the fact that it happened in the first place – is that it’s sucking all the air out of the room. Instead of celebrating the many great works that won a Hugo, we’re arguing about Raytheon and giving them free publicity. Yes, it’s mostly bad publicity, but even that is giving them attention. Plus, much of the harassment of Hugo finalists is coming from a clique surrounding what is essentially a troll with an agenda that I’m pretty sure goes far beyond outrage about a weapons manufacturer sponsoring the Hugos. Especially since the same clique was involved in another harassment incident less then a month ago. Personally, I think that we should no more feed trolls than feed Raytheon.

Now I’ve wasted way too many words on DisCon’s bad decisions and a terrible company, let’s get to the actual ceremony, which was very good indeed, especially after last year’s complete and utter disaster. Hosts Sheree Renee Thomas and Andrea Hairston did a great job and made the ceremony move along at a snappy pace. And after last year, we all appreciated a snappy pace.

So let’s finally get to the actual Hugo winners:

Best Novel

The 2021 Hugo Award for Best Novel goes to Network Effect by Martha Wells, which wasn’t exactly a surprise, considering how beloved the Murderbot series is by pretty much everybody. A look at the voting breakdown shows Network Effect leading by a large margin from the start, but then everybody loves Murderbot. I’m a bit surprised that Harrow the Ninth finished in last place, but then it was not only a sequel, but also something of a Marmite book.

If you look at the nominations, Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia barely missed the ballot, which is a pity, since I enjoyed it more than some of the books that actually made the ballot.

The usual suspects who worry about the lack of men on the Best Novel ballot will be pleased to note the presence of Kim Stanley Robinson, John Scalzi and T.J. Klune on the longlist. The longlist also offers something of a surprise, because at No. 14 there is a novel called The Rude Eye of Rebellion by one J.R.H. Lawless. I had never heard of either the novel or the author, which is extremely unusual for the Hugo longlist. A look at the EPH distribution also shows that there was little overlap with other novels nominated in the same category. I guess this is a case of enthusiastic fans of one author buying Worldcon memberships to nominate them, especially since J.R.H. Lawless also shows up on the longlist for the Astounding Award.

Best Novella

The winner of the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Novella is The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo. I have to admit this win surprised me, because while I have read the novella, I remember barely anything about it only a few months later. There usually is one Hugo finalist like this for me – a book or story I read and promptly forget, so that come voting time I have to remind myself what that one was about. It’s usually not a story I dislike, because I do remember the ones I didn’t like.

There are no real surprises on the longlist except maybe for The Stone Weta by New Zealand author Octavia Cade, which wasn’t on my radar at all. But then, Worldcon was theoretically in New Zealand last year.

Best Novelette

The 2021 Hugo Award for Best Novelette goes to Sarah Pinsker for “Two Truths and a Lie” and a most deserved win it is, too. But then, the novelette category was very strong this year with only one story I didn’t like.

The voting breakdown shows that the infamous “Helicopter Story” by Isabel Fall was leading after the first three rounds, but was then overtaken by “Two Truths and a Lie” and two other stories to finish in fifth place. I guess this is due to the fact that it’s very much a Marmite story. Those who enjoyed it love it very much indeed, but it generated little support (and even intense dislike) outside its fanbase. I’m one of those who disliked the story, though I’m glad it was not no awarded, because Isabel Fall doesn’t deserve that. Especially since she was also dragged into the Raytheon controversy due to the theme of her story.

The longlist doesn’t offer a lot of surprised, though a story from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction made the longlist, something which is rare for the formerly Big Three print zines these days.

Best Short Story

The winner of the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Short Story is “Metal Like Blood in the Dark” by T. Kingfisher a.k.a. Ursula Vernon, who also regaled the audience with fascinating facts about slime mold in lieu of an acceptance speech.

This was another extremely strong category and indeed, any one of the six finalists would have been a most worthy winner.

If you look at the longlist, you see at No. 12, nestled inbetween C.L. Polk and Martha Wells, my story “The Cold Crowdfunding Campaign”, which makes me very happy. Thank you to everybody who nominated it.

Also on the longlist, we have “The Eight-Thousanders” by Jason Sanford, a story from Asimov’s, which proves that the so-called Big Three print mags can still make the longlist. Further downward, there is a story called “This is New Gehesran Calling” by Rebecca Fraimow, which was published on AO3, which is a first I think. Judging by the EPH data, this seems to be another case of a story was a fervent, but limited fanbase.

Best Series

The winner of the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Series is… Murderbot! But then, as I said, everybody loves Murderbot, who has won four Hugos by now, making Martha Wells one of the comparatively few people to win two Hugos in the same year.

I have said several times that IMO the Best Series Hugo (which was voted a permanent Hugo at the DisCon III business meeting) isn’t working the way it was originally intended, namely to award popular long-running series, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We do have one such series – October Daye – on the shortlist and several more – The Dresden Files, Peter Grant/Rivers of London, Foreigner or the Liaden Universe – on the longlist. But all too often, the finalists are trilogies, often ones where one or several volumes were nominated for Best Novel, or cases of “If you squint really hard, these novels set in the same universe form a series.”

But even though I’m not always happy with the finalists for Best Series, the winners so far have all been beloved and most worthy series.

Best Related

The 2021 Hugo Award for Best Related Work goes to Beowulf: A New Translation by Maria Dahvana Headley. This wasn’t my favourite in this category – that would be A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky by Lynell George – but it’s a win I’m very happy with.

It is my fervent belief that the Best Related Work category should be more non-fiction books as well as the occasional essay or documentary. In practice, however, it is increasingly turning into a grab bag category for Best Fannish Thing.  Therefore, I’m happy that an actual book – even if it was not a non-fiction book per se, but something which would not have fit any other category – won this year.

This year, there were two edge case finalists – the virtual conventions FIYAHCon and CoNZealand Fringe – on the ballot (three, if you count The Last Bronycon documentary) as well as one highly controversial finalist, Natalie Luhrs’ sweary essay about last year’s never-ending Hugo ceremony from hell. As a result, Best Related has an extremely high No Award count this year, particularly Natalie Luhrs’ essay and CoNZealand Fringe.

Meanwhile, a look at the longlist reveals just what a mess the Best Related Work category is. There are five actual non-fiction books on the longlist, several of whom would have been highly worthy finalists, as well as three articles/essays (I would be okay with those, though I prefer meatier books to articles) and two more finalists – the Concellation 2020 Facebook Group and the Hugo Spreadsheet of Doom – which, though worthy projects, don’t really belong here.

A lot of great SFF related non-fiction books have been published in 2021 and I do hope that we see some of those on the Hugo ballot next year rather than yet more Best Fannish Thing finalists.

Best Graphic Story

The winner of the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story is Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, written by Octavia Butler, adapted by Damian Duffy and illustrated by John Jennings. This is not particularly surprising, considering Parable of the Sower is a beloved (and timely) work by a beloved author.

Best Dramatic Presentation Long

The 2021 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form goes to The Old Guard, which made me very happy, since this was hands down my favourite in this category. But then, I was quite underwhelmed by the other finalists in this category.

A look at the nomination data reveals that season 2 of The Mandalorian would have made the ballot , but was disqualified due to gaining more nominations in short form. Further down the ballot, we have several TV show seasons – often better TV shows than what made the ballot in Best Related Short, including the German made Netflix show Dark. The movies that missed the ballot – the delightful Wolfwalkers, scrappy indie flick The Vast of Night and a feminist take on The Invisible Man – are better than what was actually nominated, too. I’m a bit surprised that Wonder Woman 1984 didn’t even make the longlist, because I actually enjoyed it more than the first one. But then a lot of people really seemed to dislike it.

Best Dramatic Presentation Short

The winner of the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation is once again an episode of The Good Place.

This is the one Hugo win this year I’m really unhappy with. Yes, I know a lot of people really, really love The Good Place (though a lot of people, including me, also really hate it), but did it really need to win four years in a row? Especially considering that we’re in an unprecedented age of excellent SFF TV.

And indeed, a look at the longlist gives us several episodes of Star Trek Discovery and Star Trek Picard, one episode each of Lovecraft Country, What We Do in the Shadows and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as well as additional episodes of The Mandalorian, She-Ra and Doctor Who.

Best Editor Short

The 2021 Hugo Award for Best Editor Short Form goes to Ellen Datlow. Now Ellen Datlow is undoubtedly a most accomplished editor and worthy winner. However, she has also won in this category seven times already, so I would have been happy to see someone else win.

I’m also surprised that C.C. Finlay finished in last place, since he did a great job on The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, plus this was the last chance to honour him.

Best Editor Long

The winner of the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Editor Long Form is Diana M. Pho and a most deserving winner she is, too.

A look at the nominations reveals that due to the magic of EPH Toni Weisskopf of Baen Books would have made the ballot, but declined the nomination. Now Toni Weisskopf was originally announced to be one of the Guests of Honour of DisCon III, but after Best Fan Writer finalist Jason Sanford reported that the Baen Books‘ forum Baen’s Bar hosted hate speech and incitement to terrorism on a subforum, something which got Sanford inundated with harassment and which Toni Weisskopf defended as free speech, Weisskopf withdrew from her Guest of Honour spot.

The people who nominated her for Best Editor were either infuriated by this – since Worldcon Guest of Honours withdrawing or being uninvited almost never happens – or they are die-hard Baen Books fans or both. The EPH data also shows that there was very little overlap with other finalists in this category, confirming that Baen Books has an almost cult-like following in its niche, but increasingly less relevance in the wider genre.  Personally, I also think Toni Weisskopf was probably wise to withdraw, because the chance that she would have been no awarded again is pretty high, especially after her response to the Baen’s Bar incident.

Best Professional Artist

The 2021 Hugo Award for Best Professional Artist goes to Rovina Cai.

This was probably the most difficult category for me to rank, because all of the finalists did amazing work. And indeed, the artist I placed last only ended up there, because he had won in this category before, while the others hadn’t.

Best Semiprozine

The winner of the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine is FIYAH Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction.

I was in the bathroom, getting into more comfortable clothes, when this category was announced and my cheers were so loud that the neighbours probably woke up, because this win made me so happy. FIYAH has been doing stellar work for several years now. They’re also lovely people and I’m so happy for them that they finally won. Besides, much as I like Uncanny, there are other semiprozines doing great work out there.

Looking at the longlist, the Escape Artists podcast empire did really way with Escape Pod and Podcastle making the ballot and PseudoPod and Cast of Wonders making the longlist. Two of the magazines on the longlist, Lightspeed and Clarkesworld, are pro mags and therefore ineligible. It’s great to see Anathema recognised.

Finally, I’m very happy to see Space Cowboy Books presents Simultaneous Times on the longlist and not just because they produced several of my stories, but also because it’s a very good fiction podcast.

Best Fanzine

The 2021 Hugo Award for Best Fanzine goes to nerds of a feather. This is a highly deserved win for a fanzine that has been nominated several times, but never won so far. Plus, they’re friends.

On the longlist, we see that my other blogging home Galactic Journey just missed the ballot. There are a lot of other good fanzines on the longlist as well such as SF in Translation, Salon Futura, Women Write About Comics and The Drink Tank.

Best Fancast

The winner of the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Fancast is The Coode Street Podcast. This is another win that is not only highly deserved, but has also been a long time coming, because The Coode Street Podcast has been nominated many times, but never won so far.

The longlist has a lot of great podcasts like Octothorpe, Hugo Girl!, Hugos There and Our Opinions Are Correct. However, there are also many podcasts I’ve never heard of, even though I interviewed a whole lot of podcasters for the Fancast Spotlight project. It seems we really are in the golden age of SFF podcasting.

Best Fan Writer

As mentioned above, Elsa Sjunneson won and she is a highly deserving winner and also delivered a great acceptance speech. I finished in second place and actually led in the first round.

There are 57 Hugo voters out there who hate all of us so much – probably because we don’t write for traditional paper fanzines – that they no award the entire category. You can’t help these people and I don’t worry about them. Meanwhile, I’m happy that not a lot more people hated me personally so much that they no awarded me than no awarded the whole category.

The longlist reveals a lot of worthy candidates, including Athena Scalzi in what would be one of the very few cases (the only other one I can think of are Mike and Laura Resnick) of two generations of the same family earning Hugo nominations.

Best Fan Artist

The winner of the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Fan Artist is Sara Felix. This is the other Hugo winner that made me cheer out loud – not just because Sara does excellent work, though she does and I love her tiaras, but she is someone who has been nominated many times and even designed several Hugo bases as well as the Lodestar Award and pin and has yet never won.

The nomination data reveals that the excellent Thai artist Tithi Luadthong, whose amazing work graces the cover of my In Love and War series and several Kurval stories, actually had sufficient votes to make the ballot, but had no eligible work produced in 2021. I suspect this is due to the labyrinthine (and in dire need of an overhaul) rules for the Best Fan Artist Hugo, because I personally saw new Tithi Luadthong artwork in 2021.

Best Videogame

The 2021 Hugo Award for Best Videogame goes to Hades.

This was a one-of special Hugo awarded by DisCon III, probably as a trial to see if there is sufficient interest in a permanent videogame category.

I’m not a gamer, so I was initially sceptical about this category. Besides, there already are plenty of awards for videogames, so do they really need a Hugo, too?

However, I chanced to chat with Hades developer Greg Kasavin at the virtual Hugo after-party for a while and he was lovely and also absolutely over the moon to have won, which made me a lot more positively inclined towards that category. For even though I don’t particularly care about videogames, the Hugo Award really made someone’s day and that’s great.

Lodestar

The winner of the 2021 Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book is A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher a.k.a. Ursula Vernon, making her the second double winner of the night after Martha Wells.

I loved A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking – after all, it has magical sourdough – so I’m thrilled to see it recognised here.

The Lodestar was also reratified at the DisCon III business meeting and is now a permanent not-a-Hugo.

Astounding

The 2021 Astounding Award for Best New Writer goes to Emily Tesh.

I have to admit that this win astounded me. Not because Emily Tesh doesn’t do good work – she does – but because this category was extremely strong this year.

The runner-up on the longlist is Caitlin Starling, who would be highly deserving, only that I’m not sure she is actually eligible, since she has an active horror career.

Our friend J.R.H. Lawless shows up further down the longlist again with seventeen of his fans nominating him.

All in all, there are some excellent Hugo winners this year with only one winner (The Good Place) I’m not happy with. Even though I lost, I finished in second place again, which is great as well.

***

After the ceremony, I went for a quick walk and then attended the virtual after-party (the name Hugo Losers Party has thankfully been retired). The set-up was similar to the set-up of the reception with the virtual finalists being beamed into the main ballroom.

And so I had a great time with Sarah Pinsker and her sister Amira, Navah Wolfe, Alyssa Winans, my fellow Best Fan Writer finalist Charles Payseur, Hades developer Greg Kasavin and Brandon O’Brien with whom I have hung out at three Hugo after-parties (Dublin, CoNZealand and DisCon III) in a row now.

Around a quarter past six, the virtual party broke up and I went to bed, only to awake to the Raytheon controversy.

Still, the Raytheon thing aside, I had a great time. Besides, we have a most excellent set of Hugo winners this year and I wish we would talk more about that and less about the weapons company which managed to sponsor the Hugos.

A full con report of DisCon III is coming in a few days, once I’ve gotten past the TV show backlog.

Comments are open, but if anybody wants to troll about Baen, Raytheon or anything else, I shall be moderating with extreme prejudice.

Hawkeye Grapples with the Dark Legacy of “Ronin”

It’s time for my review of the latest episode of Hawkeye. Review of previous episodes may be found here.

Warning! Spoilers under the cut!

Like previous episodes, this episode begins with a flashback featuring a character who is not Clint Barton. In this case, we see Natasha’s foster sister Yelena Belova and fellow ex-Black Widow Sonya on their mission to free the other Black Widows from mind control, as seen in the Black Widow movie. They invade a country mansion, fight a Black Widow named Anna and give her the antidote.

However, it turns out that Anna didn’t need the antidote. She was already free from mind control and has been working as an freelance assassin, because it pays well and is the only thing she knows how to do well. Yelena excuses herself to go to the bathroom and suddenly dissolves into ash – the now familiar effects of the “Blip” – and seconds later reforms again, while the room changes around her. When Yelena emerges from the bathroom, five years have passed. Anna is still there, with her new husband (that’s an opportunity for the spin-off “I married a contract killer” right there) and young adopted daughter. Nice call back to the fact that Black Widows are forcibly sterilised and can’t have children, which was a great source of angst for Natasha in Age of Ultron.

Back in WandaVision, we already saw the Blip happening from the perspective of a victim, Monica Rambeau, and it was terrifying. But Hawkeye does that scene one better and portrays exactly terrifying and disorienting the “Blip” must have been for those who were dusted and then came back, having lost five years of their lives. io9 reviewers Germain Lussier and Charles Pulliam-Moore as well as Tor.com reviewer Keith R.A. DeCandido also praise that scene. I’m still not convinced that the Blip was a good idea, but at least Marvel addresses the trauma in its various TV shows.

Flash forward to the present, where a bruised and thoroughly dejected Kate (after Clint told her to go home and forget about him, because they are not partners) shows up at her mother’s apartment. Eleanor is understandably shocked at Kate’s wounds, but Kate tells her that it’s not Clint’s fault, that he protected her and that they’re no longer partners.

Next we see Eleanor cleaning, disinfecting and bandaging Kate’s various wounds and telling Kate that it’s okay if she will never be an Avenger and that she’ll find her path in life. This made me wonder how annoying it must be for parents who live in a world where “When I grow up, I want to be a superhero” is not as completely impossible as in our world. Because there are actual superheroes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so of course children (and others) want to emulate them.

Kate tells Eleanor that Jack is the CEO of a Sloan Ltd., a company that’s a front for the tracksuit mafia, and she believes he was involved in the murder of Armand. Of course, Jack might still be innocent, but Kate begs her mother to look into the case.

Eleanor apparently does so, for in a later scene, we see Jack being arrested and taken away to be questioned by the police. “That’s impossible,” he says when confronted with his position in Sloan Ltd., “I’ve never worked a day in my life.” I have to admit that line made me cracked up. Jack also insists that he has been framed and that he will be back in time for Eleanor’s Christmas party. In the light of revelations later in the episode, I think it’s actually possible that Jack was framed.

Meanwhile, Maya is having her injuries from the rooftop fight last episode treated and bandaged by Kazi. A lot of superhero stories and action adventure tales in general tend to shrug off injuries as if they’re no big deal and we rarely see action heroes needing time and care to heal. Therefore, it’s notable that Hawkeye puts a focus on battle injuries in general and on the cleaning, disinfecting and bandaging of wounds in particular, cause we so rarely see those things. One exception are oddly enough the stories of Robert E. Howard where you frequently have scenes of Conan, Kull or Solomon Kane cleaning and bandaging their own or someone else’s wounds. But then Howard was the son of a country doctor in the pre-antibiotic era and knew a thing or two about the dangers of infections. That’s also why the whole “Khal Drago [who is a sort of Conan stand-in and Jason Momoa even played both of them] dies because he didn’t properly clean his wounds” thing in A Song of Ice and Fire annoys me, because that sort of thing would not have happened to Conan.

Kazi also tries to persuade Maya to let go off her quest for vengeance against Ronin, but Maya won’t rest until Ronin is killed. “But once we kill him, you’ll stop,” a hopeful Kazi signs. There’s a lot of tenderness in the relationship between Maya and Kazi, though so far we don’t know if they’re a couple or just sibling-like very close friends.

Our third wounded warrior Clint shows up equally dejected and bruised at the apartment of Grill, the LARPing fire fighter. Talking of which, am I the only one who finds it strange that Kate and Clint are able to walk with bow and arrows through the crowded streets of New York City without raising any eyebrows nor getting arrested. Cause I’m pretty sure if anybody were to walk through a German city with bow and arrows not packed up like sports archers do, they would get at the very least questioned by the police. After all, arrows are deadly weapons.

Griff takes Clint in and offers him his couch (or even the bed, if Clint wants it). He also tells Clint that the costumes for him and Kate are ready, though we have to wait until next episode to see them, because Clint falls asleep, cuddling Pizza Dog, who still eats canine inappropriate foods like pizza and snack mixes.

Meanwhile, Kate returns to her burned out apartment (after it was firebombed by the tracksuit mafia in episode 2) to retrieve some things and finds herself faced with a surprise visitor, because Yelena is there and has even made herself some instant mac and cheese*, because it’s just so good and besides, she got hungry waiting for Kate.

Kate is of course shocked – what is Yelena doing there and how does she even know where to find er? – but Yelena tells Kate to relax. If she wanted to kill her, she would have done so once Kate came through the door. What follows is a fascinating scene where Yelena, who not only is younger than Natasha but also seems younger, alternately gushes about mac and cheese and shares New York City tourism tips with Kate and very matter-of-factly talks about killing Clint, cause she has been hired to do so. Florence Pugh is amazing in this scene (and she was great in Black Widow as well) and indeed reviewers German Lussier, Charles Pulliam-Moore, Keith R.A. DeCandido and The AV-Club‘s Caroline Siede all praise her performance.

Kate defends Clint – she idolises him, after all – and tells Yelena that he saved the world and that superheroics sometimes cause collateral damage (which is something that both superhero comics and movies rarely address, though Marvel at least shows scenes of civilians being evacuated, while DC hardly ever bothers). Yelena corrects Kate that it was her sister Natasha who saved the world and that Natasha definitely was not collateral damage. She is absolutely correct, too, Natasha did save the world, though I wonder how Yelena knows what happened on Vormir. After all, it’s not as if characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe had the chance to watch Avengers: Endgame.

Kate is not deterred. Clint is a hero, so whoever hired Yelena to kill him must be a bad person and maybe Yelena should look into that. Yelena thanks Kate for the girls’ night and leaves in a ridiculously show-off way.

Meanwhile, Clint has rested a bit and decides that he needs to deal with Maya once and for all, because she’s not just threatening Clint but his family. We next see him at Grand Central Station at a memorial placque commemorating the Battle of New York and the Avengers who saved the city. It’s telling that Clint is listed dead last, even though he would come second in alphabetic order. He switches off his hearing aid and talks to Natasha, asking her blessing/forgiveness for what he is about to do. It’s a beautiful scene – and Jeremy Renner once again gets to show that he is a multiple Oscar nominee for a reason – and also a stark reminder that Natasha doesn’t even have a grave where Clint can mourn, so he remembers her at the place where they both went from agents to heroes.

Next, we see Clint retrieving his Ronin gear and calling Laura to get her blessing/forgiveness. Laura tells him that she supports him and always will. I know that some people have issues with the fact that Laura is primarily portrayed as a supportive wife and mother, but I for one love Clint and Laura’s relationship, simply because characters who support their partners who work in a high-risk, high-stress job are so very rare in pop culture. If every superhero significant other in the Marvel Cinematic Universe were a supportive housewife and mother, I would complain, too, but Laura is the only one who’s currently primarily a wife and mother.

There is a hilarious scene of two tracksuit mafia goons driving around town in one of their Trust a Bro (no thanks) moving vans and discussing cool pop culture figures (Tony Soprano, Run DMC, The Royal Tennenbaums) who also favour the sort of old-fashioned tracksuits they were, when a message arrow hits their windscreen. Honestly, you couldn’t just call, Clint? The message summons Maya to the place where she first met Ronin… alone.

Of course, Maya does not come along, but brings the full force of the tracksuit mafia to the used car lot, where her father was killed. Clint takes them out one by one and then fights Maya in his Ronin garb. It’s a hard fight, but Clint wins and knocks Maya to the ground. Maya expects that he will kill her, but Clint does not kill young women in need of a parent figure. Instead, he takes off his mask, shows her his face and says that he wants her to know who he is, that he doesn’t want to kill her, but that he will, if she harms his family. He also tells Maya that her father’s boss – the Big Man – tipped him off that night and that apparently wanted Maya’s father dead and maybe she should look into that.

Keith R.A. DeCandido praises how this scene handles Maya’s deafness, since we see her confrontation with Clint from her POV without sound, especially how lipreading isn’t perfect and she doesn’t get every single word. Hawkeye is offering some very good disability representation here.

While Clint is dealing with Maya, Kate has been bombarding him with messages, thanfully delivered via phone rather than arrow. Finally, she decides to track his phone and shows up just in time to save Clint with a well-placed arrow, because Maya of course refuses to accept that her Dad’s boss – the man she called “uncle” – is responsible his murder and attacks Clint.

Afterwards, Clint and Kate escape in a Uber, while a suddenly suspicious Maya confronts Kazi about why he was not at the garage on the night her father was killed, even though he was his number 2.

Reunited, Clint and Kate head back to Grill’s for breakfast, when Kate receives a message from Yelena. Yelena really did look into who hired her – I thought it was Valentina, but apparently she’s just a broker – and sends Kate a picture. Surprise, it’s Kate’s mother and the blurry photo shows her with a very familiar massive bald and white-suited figure. Yup, Wilson Fisk, New York City’s Kingpin of Crime in back and – as the end credits reveal, because the picture is too blurry to make out much – he is played by Vincent D’Onofrio again, who already played Fisk in Daredevil and did a really great job, too. But then, D’Onofrio has been great in everything I ever saw him (and he was brilliant as Robert E. Howard in The Whole Wide World) in except Law and Order: Criminal Intent, where I hated his character. So I guess the Marvel Netflix series – of whom Hawkeye is reminiscent in more than one way – are canon again and we will maybe see other characters from those shows again, too. Which I for one would welcome.

Meanwhile, Eleanor Bishop decides to throw her hate in the ring for the 2021 Darth Vader Parenthood Award for Outstandingly Terrible Fictional Parents at the last minute. There’s a reason I only announce the winners on the last few days of the year, because there are often eleventh hour entrants. That said, I already have decided who will win the 2021 Jonathan and Martha Kent Fictional Parent of the Year Award, unless Geralt of Rivia really impresses me, once The Witcher starts up again this Friday.

Hawkeye doesn’t have the sheer weirdness of WandaVision and Loki, but it has been consistently good and enjoyable. So let’s see if the final episode sticks to the landing.

*The American mac and cheese obsession is one thing I don’t get. I’ve made mac and cheese – from scratch, because the instant stuff isn’t available here and also looks dodgy to me – but it’s not something I particularly love. My go-to pasta dishes are pasta with tomato sauce or puttanesca or aglio olio or various versions of pantry pasta.

Fancast Spotlight: The Dark Crusade

It’s Worldcon weekend, so the Hawkeye and Star Trek Discovery reviews may be delayed this week. If you’re at DisCon III, either on site or virtually, here’s where you can find me.

In the meantime, I have another Fancast Spotlight for you. 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 The Dark Crusade, a podcast about the life and works of Karl Edward Wagner.

Therefore, I’m happy to welcome Jordan Douglas Smith of The Dark Crusade to my blog:

Tell us about your podcast or channel.

The Dark Crusade is dedicated to the life and work of writer/editor/publisher Karl Edward Wagner. We are systematically moving through his work, discussing it from a historical and literary lens. In addition to the podcast, we have a companion blog that covers additional facts about the stories, links to scholarship, and overviews of some of the collections Wagner has edited.

Who are the people behind your podcast or channel?  

I would say I’m (Jordan Douglas Smith) the driving force behind the project. In the first season, I was joined by F. N. York. After that, Jonathan Gelatt came on as co-host.

Why did you decide to start your podcast or channel?  

It started as an obsession with Karl Edward Wagner. I was enthralled with his ability to wear the three different hats of writer, editor, and publisher. On top of that, he was a book collector!

The more I learned about him; I began to see an emerging narrative where he was a champion of the unknown writer, both new writers on the scene and writers who were fading into obscurity. My own experience of Wagner was that he was fading into obscurity, and folks from my generation and younger weren’t familiar with his work.

I want to spread the word and make sure he remains in the conversation. And if folks want to learn more about him, they have a place to go, a place to start looking deeper. The podcast also gives me the structure to continue my research of Wagner as I try to paint my own picture of who he was.

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

We examine his stories one at a time, dedicating a whole episode to each tale or several episodes to each novel. I build each season around a book or two. Season one was his horror collection In a Lonely Place. In season two, we switched to his gothic fantasy character Kane, covering Night Winds and Bloodstone, and in season three, we returned to Kane covering Dark Crusade and Death Angel’s Shadow.

The idea is that if you can get your hands on a copy of his work, you can listen to a whole season of the show. Since a lot of his work is hard to find, especially the horror, I didn’t want to jump around a lot among his collections.

I love the individual story format. I have a background as a theater actor; one thing you do in theater is repeat the same story over and over and over, night after night. Something really unlocks when you keep examining the same story again and again. In the prep for these episodes, I try to recreate that feeling and peel the story apart, line by line, looking for every kernel of influence and nuance.

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

So many reasons. The most important reason is community. Fans can go to these focal points and meet other folks with similar interests. So many times, my base of knowledge and my exposure to work is expanded and enriched.

These fan communities can also become a breeding ground for the future editors and writers of their genres. I have seen several editorial relationships spring from these areas. It’s also the perfect realm to cut your teeth and begin building experience producing your own media and writing.

To be crass, fan projects are also helpful to sales. Fan movements tend to snowball and become large marketing machines. Honestly, that is in the back of my mind. If we can get enough Wagner fans talking about him and bring on enough new folks, someone will see the dollar signs and reissue the work in affordable versions.

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?

Hard to say. I think it’s going to continue moving into the digital realm. We’re going to see more fan YouTubers and more podcasts. At the same time, I feel like I’ve seen a yearning for physical media. Cracking the nut of funding something like that will be a determining factor, I’m sure.

I have also recently begun to go back to cons. They have been wonderful but also not nearly as packed as before. Many of the programming has been hybrid, which allows fans to experience some of the cons from home. I think some of that community fan experience will also transition online. I’m not sure if cons will be as well attended as in the past.

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?

I have been obsessed with the Whetstone discord recently. It has a welcoming vibe and a ton of enthusiasm for sword & sorcery. It is a sort of companion space to Whetstone magazine (which I’m loving).

I’m also a regular listener of Appendix N, Rogues in the House, Lovecraft eZine, and for film fans Fragments of Fear, a Giallo podcast! Can I also add Oliver Brackenbury’s podcast So I’m Writing a Novel…? It is a mix of interviews and episodes about his journey writing a novel. Oliver himself has been a champion of other folks in the community spreading the good word of fandom and helping connect people.

I also read James Maliszewski’s Grognardia and Brian Murphy’s The Silver Key.

Where can people find you?

The central hub and blog are https://thedarkcrusade.wordpress.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/darkcrusadepodcast/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/darkcrusadeKEW

Just look for The Dark Crusade wherever you listen to fine podcasts!

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

Do check out The Dark Crusade, cause it’s a great podcast celebrating an author who should be better known than he is.

***

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

Cora goes virtually to DisCon III, the 2021 Worldcon

Due to the generally bad timing and the ongoing covid pandemic, I can’t attend this year’s Worldcon, DisCon III in Washington DC, in person, but I will be there virtually.

If you’re a member of DisCon III, you can see me on the following panels:

Honoring Charles Saunders’ Sword and Soul

Congressional On-Site Viewing (Virtual), Thursday, December 16, 1:00 pm EST

Available Online

In honor of his recent passing, our panelists explore the continuing influence of Charles Saunders’ inversion of sword and sorcery — “sword and soul” — on current writers and publishers such as P. Djeli Clark, Nalo Hopkinson, Troy Wiggins, and Sheree Renée Thomas. Learn how FIYAH Magazine and others are continuing Saunders’ work of encouraging Black speculative fiction writing collectives. Hear about the efforts to turn the Imaro books into a TV series.

Type: Panel

Panelists: Carl Cipra, Sheree Renée Thomas, Milton Davis, Cora Buhlert

The late Charles R. Saunders is a writer I wish more people would read, but as happens so often with writers from marginalised backgrounds, he is not nearly as well known as he should be. I’m very happy to be on this panel and talk about his work, so drop by to learn more about Charles Saunders and then go out and buy all of his books.

 

Kaffeeklatsch — Cora Buhlert

Harris (Virtual), Friday, December 17, 10:00 am EST

Available Online

Online small group conversation with Cora Buhlert.

Advance signup is required to attend this session. Please use the “Access Virtual Link” below to register through SignupGenius. A Zoom meeting link will be emailed to registered participants 24 hours before the Kaffeeklatsch begins. The email you use to sign up must match the email associated with your DisCon III registration.

Type: Kaffeeklatsch

This is the first time I’m doing a Kaffeeklatsch (and for me it will actually be coffee time), so sign up and drop by to chat with me, so I won’t be sitting there all alone drinking coffee and eating holiday cookies.

 

Writing About the Thing We Love: Fan Writing.

Congressional On-Site Viewing (Virtual), Saturday, December 18, 10:00 am EST

Available Online

Writing passionately about our genres is, for many of us, what it’s all about. The internet has supported an explosion of fan writing in many forms, on many topics. Good-quality fan writing can now be found about almost every thing. In this panel Hugo-nominated authors will talk about their fan writing, why they write it, and what they think makes good fan writing.

Type: Panel

Panelists: Chris Garcia, Natalie Luhrs, Jason Sanford, Elsa Sjunneson, Paul Weimer, Cora Buhlert

I know everybody on this panel and they’re all awesome people, so I’m sure we’ll have a lot of fun. So why don’t you join us?

 

Finally, as regular readers of this blog will know, I’m a Hugo finalist for Best Fan Writer this year,  so of course you’ll find me (virtually) at the Hugo ceremony.

Hugo Award Ceremonies

Regency Ballroom, Saturday, December 18, 8:00 pm EST Available Online

The Hugo Awards are science fiction’s most prestigious awards. We gather together for the most prestigious ceremony in science fiction to discover the winners of the 2021 Hugo Awards.

Star Trek Discovery realises that “All Is Possible” in a Tilly-centric episode

It’s time for the latest 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!

The opening of “All Is Possible” finds the Discovery still in orbit around Ni’Var a.k.a. the planet formerly known as Vulcan, while Stamets and the Ni’Var Science Institute try to learn more about the planet-eating Dark Matter Anomaly, DMA for short. The crew is stressed out, Book is still traumatised and griefing and Dr. Culber persuades Michael to mandate downtime for everybody, though not every crewmember avails themselves of this opportunity.

Hugh Culber is filling the position of both physician and ship counsellor now. And while Deanna Troi was the first ship counsellor to play a prominent role in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Original Series actually did have a psychiatrist on board, Dr. Helen Noel, who appears in the first season episode “Dagger of the Mind”, though like so many female crewmembers, she mainly seems to serve as a love interest for Captain Kirk and doesn’t do much in the way of counselling.

“All Is Possible”, on the other hand, has a lot of therapy and counselling scenes. io9 reviewer James Whitbrook points out that the whole episode is about therapy and he’s not wrong. Which might explain my issues with this episode, because I dislike extensive therapy scenes. For starters, psychotherapy is much less common in Germany and I only know one person who ever went to a therapist, so therapy scenes feel culturally alien to me. Besides, they tend to be lazy writing, because therapy scenes give the characters an excuse to talk about their feelings without the writers actually having to do the work to show us how the characters feel. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad that Wilson Cruz is given more to do in season 4, since he’s rapidly becoming my favourite Star Trek doctor. And this episode even tapped into his Latinx heritage. Though I still wish that the script found things for Culber to do that are not sitting around, holding therapy session. Deanna Troi regularly got to do a lot more than holding therapy sessions as well.

One of the crewmembers who are receiving counselling from Dr. Culber is Tilly, who is still feeling lost and adrift. On Culber’s advice, she is trying out new experiences, but it’s not enough. Tilly still feels lost. Luckily, Dr Kovich (a most welcome reappearance by legendary director David Cronenberg who appears to be a Star Trek fan) is looking for a Discovery crew member who is willing to lead a team building exercise for some cadets of the newly reopened Starfleet Aacademy, so Culber recommends Tilly for the job. He also asks Tilly to take Adira along, since Adira is having problems making friends – unlike Gray, who not only has decided to adopt a goth look, now he has a body again, but is also befriending random crewmembers.

So Tilly and Adira set off on a routine training mission – to scan an M-class moon – with a pilot and three cadets, Val Sasha, a human who had never seen any aliens before joining Starfleet Aacademy, Taahz Gorev, a tusked alien who hates Orions, because the Emerald Chain exploited and murdered his family, and Harral, an Orion who feels he has to work twice as hard to be accepted, because of the sorry history of his species. The conflicts pretty much write themselves.

As is common with routine training exercises in Star Trek, things go wrong almost immediately. The shuttle crashes and the pilot (he does get a name, but I don’t remember it) is killed. So Tilly is stuck alone with Adira and a bunch of cadets in a damaged shuttle on a moon. Worse, they crashlanded on the wrong moon, so the USS Armstrong (they really missed the chance to insert an Easter Egg and callback to earlier Star Trek series here), which is supposed to pick them up, will be looking for them in the wrong place.

From this point on, this plot strand basically becomes a replay of the Original Series episode “The Galileo Seven”. Tilly takes charge and assigns everybody to various tasks to repair the shuttle. The flight conhtrols are fatally damaged, the coms aren’t working, but Adira succeeds in getting the sensors online again, only to pick up some strange readings. There are a lot of lifeforms on this moon and they are converging on the shuttle. The lifeforms promptly attack and it turns out they are big, ugly monster things. Tilly realises that the monsters have them mistaken for their usual prey and that they are attracted to the frequencies emitted by Starfleet equipment, so she orders all equipment switched off, so the monsters can no longer “see” the shuttle. I initially assumed that “the frequencies emitted by Starfleet equipment attract alien monsters” thing also happened in the “The Galileo Seven”, but the plot summaries don’t confirm this, so maybe I’m misremembering things.

Now Tilly and her flock have a problem. They can’t lift off and they can’t call for help or use any of their equipment, because this would attract the alien monsters. So Tilly has the brilliant idea to head outside and climb a ridge, which is hopefully inaccessible to any alien monsters, and call for help from there. As plans go, this one doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Wouldn’t they be safer inside the shuttle, which can withstand monster attacks at least for a little while? Also, it would make more sense to send just two people to the ridge to contact the Armstrong, but since this is supposed to be a teambuilding exercise, they all go together.

Of course, more trouble finds Tilly and her flock. There’s an electric storm, Taahz Gorev refuses to work with Harral, because he hates Orions, until Tilly reveals that Harral’s father was an Orion dissident who spoke out against slavery and was killed for his troubles. Next, Adira gets trapped in some kind of fast-freezing quicksand ice (I really don’t know how else to describe it) and everybody has to work together to pull them out. Finally, they make it onto the ridge, but the alien monsters are gathering below and will attack once everybody switches their communicators on and tries to hail the Armstrong. A distraction is needed. Adira offers to distract the monsters and lure them away, but Tilly insists that as the senior officer in charge of this mission, that’s her job. So Tilly tries to lure the monsters away, while Adira and the cadets hail the Armstrong. But Tilly stumbles and is about the get eaten, when the cadets fire their phasers at the monsters. The Armstrong finally responds and beams everybody to safety.

In itself, the “Tilly’s teambuilding exercise” plotline is fun enough and I liked that it gave characters who are not part of the main cast the chance to shine, similar to the Next Generation episode “Lower Decks”. However, the plotline is also too close to “The Galileo Seven” and full of holes as well. The whole plot is also really heavy-handed. Everything that happens requires the cadets, Adira and Tilly to work together as a team, i.e. exactly what this exercise was supposed to be about. At one point, Harral, the Orion cadet, asks Tilly if the crash is part of the training exercise. Tilly says “no”, but the whole thing could just as well have been a holodeck training exercise to teach the cadets the value of teamwork and not judging others by their appearance or species. Tor.com reviewer Keith R.A. DeCandido declares that the shuttlecrash plotline uses every cliché in the book, which is absolutely correct. The result is very Star Trek and also very heavy-handed, as AV-Club reviewer Zack Handlen points out.

Once they are safely back at Starfleet headquarters, Adira is thrilled that they have finally made friends. Dr. Kovich praises Tilly and tells her that she would make a great teacher and that should she ever decide to teach at the Academy, there will always be a place for her. Now the past two episodes made it clear that Tilly is looking for something new in her life and here the opportunity to do something new arrives literally on a silver platter, born by David Cronenberg no less. So Tilly decides to take up Kovich’s offer and teach at the Academy. In a tearful good-bye to Michael, Tilly also says that she desperately wanted to be a Starfleet captain to impress her overbearing mother. But now she is 900 years in the future, there really is no need to impress her mother anymore, so Tilly is reevaluating her life decisions.

In my review of last week’s episode, I wondered whether Tilly’s feelings of alienation were not a precursor to Mary Wiseman leaving the show and it appears that this is indeed the case. I suspect the reason that this whole “Tilly is feeling unmoored” plot comes a little out of nowhere (last season, Detmer was the one troubled by their one-way trip into the future) is that the writers didn’t have a lot of advance warning that Mary Wiseman was leaving and therefore only had a few episodes to writer her out. And as send-offs go, Tilly gets a pretty good one plus the option to return in the future. I hope we do get to see her again, because I liked Tilly a lot and her bubbly personality brought something to Star Trek we don’t normally see there.

The B-plot of this episode involves Ni’Var and the negotiations for them to rejoin the Federation (Ni’Var left the Federation after the Burn, even though they were a founding member). The agreement that will bring Ni’Var back into the Federation is about to be signed and President Rillak requests Michael and Saru’s presence at the signing as a substitute for Admiral Vance who has fallen ill. They are supposed “to keep their mouths shut and look official”, as Rillak puts it. Of course, expecting Michael to keep her mouth shut is about as fruitful as expecting Tilly to keep her mouth shut.

Michael doesn’t want to go – she dislikes politics, as the show has made amply clear – but she doesn’t have a choice. So Michael and Saru sit at the negotiation table, looking official, when President T’Rina of Ni’Var drops a bombshell. Ni’Var will only sign the agreement, if they are granted an exit clause. President Rillak is of course not willing to grant this, because if Ni’Var gets special terms, other worlds will demand them as well. I suspect I’m not the only one who imagines that future negotiations of the UK to rejoin the EU post-Brexit (cause you know that they will sooner or later) will go very much like this.

Michael has been explicitly instructed to keep her mouth shut, but of course she speaks up anyway and displays the one quality a Star Trek captain needs, namely the ability to hold inspirational speeches. And so she implores Ni’Var not to walk away, because doing so would not be logical. Ni’Var does not walk away just yet, so President T’Rina calls for a break and leaves to meditate.

Michael and Saru now split up to persuade Rillak and T’Rina to return to the table and compromise. Saru is sent to persuade T’Rina, who seems to have taken a liking to him. Meanwhile, Michael talks to Rillak. Rillak tells Michael that she can’t offer a compromise, because she can’t back down. But if a third party – like, say, Starfleet – were to offer a compromise that is acceptable to both Ni’Var and the Federation that might be a way out.

Meanwhile, T’Rina confesses to Saru that she was forced to push for the exit clause, because this was the only way of getting the Vulcan purists (likely the descendants of the Vulcan logic terrorists from season 2) on board. And since Ni’Var is a democracy, T’Rina needs their vote. However, a compromise proposed by a third party would allow her to save face and satisfy the Vulcan purists.

So Michael and Saru get everybody back to the negotiation table and propose just such a compromise. It is understandable that not all worlds rejoining the Federation will fully trust the Federation again, so an independent committee will be set up to discuss any issues and grievances member worlds might have before they become too big to resolve. Furthermore, Michael offers to serve on this committee, because as a Federation citizen and Starfleet officer, who was raised on Ni’Var, attended the Vulcan Science Academy and also happens to be the adopted sister of Spock, the great unifier, she is in a unique position to understand both sides. Everybody agree that this compromise is acceptable, the agreement is signed and Ni’Var is a member of the Federation again.

Afterwards, Michael goes to see President Rillak and tells her point blank that she knows that Rillak only requested her and Saru’s presence, because she knew such a situation might come up and because she also knew that Michael’s human and Vulcan heritage as well as her customary bluntness and her bad case of saviour syndrome would come in handy. Rillak doesn’t deny this – turns out T’Rina tipped her off about the exit clause amendment. Michael tells Rillak that if she needed her help she should have just asked and that she hopes Rillak will be more transparent in the future. Rillak nods.

To tie up some loose ends from last episode, T’Rina informs Michael that J’Vini, the wayward Qowat Milat nun who murdered a Starfleet officer, will be going on a meditation retreat in a secluded location under the supervision of Michael’s Mom and that she will also “make amends” to the family of the murdered Starfleet officer.

While it’s nice that the planet formerly known as Vulcan is part of the Federation again, I found the whole Ni’Var plot rather dull, to be honest. In many ways, it felt like watching EU membership negotiations, where several member states all want their little extra clauses, and the whole thing was also about as thrilling as watching a EU parliament debate.

Another issue with the Ni’Var plot is that the solution once again comes down to Michael being super-duper special. Now I like Michael and she is the star of the show, so it’s only to be expected that many episodes will center on her. However, Discovery makes Michael the pivotal figure in all sorts of galaxy-shaking crises. In four season, Michael singlehandedly started and then ended a war with the Klingons, she saved the universe from a rogue AI that wanted to eexterminate all organic life, she travelled into future and solved the mystery of the Burn, was largely responsible for rebuilding the Federation and now is the only person who can bring Ni’Var back into the fold. Even if you like Micheal – and I do – it’s all a bit much for one person. And indeed, Keith R.A. DeCandido, James Whitbrook and Zack Handlen all make similar points in their reviews.

The C-plot of this episode involves Book and his continuing struggle to process his grief over losing his family and his homeworld. Book is having regular therapy sessions with Dr. Culber now and if one person aboard Discovery could benefit from therapy, it’s Book. Dr. Culber starts off by putting Book at ease by telling him about the funeral of his uncle and the struggle to put playing cards (the uncle was a poker player) into the embalmed hand and how it made him laugh, even though Culber missed his uncle very much, and that there is no wrong or right way to grieve. Then they try a Kwejian healing ritual involving a mandala drawn into sand – only that the sand is programmable matter and not the right kind of sand from Kwejian, cause Kwejian doesn’t exist anymore.

Those scenes are well acted by David Ajala and Wilson Cruz and I also liked that the writers incorporated Wilson Cruz’ Latinx background via the uncle story. That said, I’m not a huge fan of therapy scenes, as I’ve said above, and this episode had way too many therapy scenes for my liking. Also, the therapy scenes with Book don’t really go anywhere. He’s clearly still grieving and traumatised.

Last season, Book was my favourite new addition to the Discovery cast. Space rogue, cat owner, all around good guy and smoking hot, too. What’s not to like? This season, however, Book has turned into a walking, talking embodiment of the five stages of grief and I find his character much less compelling. It’s doesn’t help that we only saw Book’s brother and nephew in two episodes, so we have no real connection to them. Yes, the destruction of Kwejian and the deaths of Kyheem and Leto are sad, but we barely knew them and their planet.

Meanwhile, the Dark Matter Anomaly plot has not advanced at all and we’re still no closer to knowing what the DMA is than we were last week. I also still don’t find the DMA particularly compelling as an overarching season plot, because it’s basically just a bigger and badder version of a bog-standard Star Trek anomaly.

Star Trek usually shines in standalone rather than arc episodes, so I don’t mind if the writers ditch the arc plot for a standalone episode once in a while. However, while both “Choose to Live” and “All Is Possible” largely stand alone, they’re not all that interesting.

So far, season 4 of Star Trek Discovery definitely feels like Star Trek – which is an improvement compared to season 1, which barely felt like Star Trek at times. However, it’s also very middle of the road Star Trek, comparable to a solid but unremarkable mid-season episode of The Next Generation. Star Trek is very much comfort viewing for me and season 4 of Discovery certainly delivers that. But I still think the show could do more than that.

Hawkeye wonders whether it’s “Partners, Am I Right?”

It’s time for my review of the latest episode of Hawkeye. Review of previous episodes (well, just one so far) may be found here.

This Monday, I was also over at Galactic Journey to talk about “The Space Trap”, the penultimate episode of Space Patrol Orion, so check it out.

Warning! Spoilers under the cut!

When we last saw our intrepid archers, they had just snuck into the apartment of Kate’s Mom, which was supposed to be empty, in order to access her computer to get some intel on the tracksuit mafia. However, the apartment was not as empty as they assumed and so Clint finds himself with his own retractable Ronin sword at his throat, courtesy of Jack Duquesne.

As cliffhangers go, this one is resolved very quickly. First, Kate shows up, yelling at Jack to leave Clint alone, because he’s with her. Then Kate’s Mom Eleanor appears and wants to know what on Earth an Avenger is doing in her apartment, whereupon Jack recognises (or pretends to recognise, since I don’t trust Jack any further than Clint could throw him) Clint. Kate replies that she’s helping Clint with a case and that they really need to go now, but her Mom isn’t having any of that. First, they’re going to sit down and have a chat.

This results in an uncomfortable conversation over coffee. Eleanor quizzes Clint, who clearly wishes he were somewhere, anywhere else, while Kate gushes that they’re partners, which Clint half-heartedly denies. Jack manages a “Thank you for saving us”, which sounds as rote as the “Thank you for serving” that US soldiers commonly hear from random civilians.

Clint finally manages to extricate himself from the situation, though Kate is still trapped with her Mom and stepfather-to-be. Eleanor accompanies Clint to the elevator and explicitly tells him that Kate is no superhero, no matter how skilled she is. She then invokes Black Widow, which is a low blow, and asks Clint if he has kids (“I assume you have kids.”) which is another low blow. I also wonder how Eleanor knows about the connection between Clint and Natasha (especially since Natasha is not the only dead Avenger, yet she doesn’t invoke Tony Stark or Vision) and how she can guess that he has kids. Yes, the Avengers are public figures and celebrities in this world, but Clint always kept a low profile. Even his own team mates didn’t know that he was married and had a family for a long time. This is just another moment that makes me wonder whether Eleanor is really just the concerned mother she appears to be or whether she is the villain (or one of them) behind all this. Further evidence in that direction is provided by a mysterious phonecall where a panicked Eleanor talks to an unknown person.

Eleanor asks Clint to drop the case. Clint tells her he can’t do that, but that he will keep Kate safe. Clint also appropriate the Ronin sword, but then he is its legitimate owner. Next we see him talking on the phone to Laura, asking her to check out Sloan Ltd., the company which appears to be a front for the tracksuit mafia. She also notes that the CEO of Sloan Ltd. is none other than Jack Duquesne. Laura abruptly switches to (not very good) German and also asks about a Rolex watch that was found at the Avengers compound, the same watch the tracksuit mafia stole at the illegal auction in part 1. The two oldest Barton kids, Lila and Cooper, immediately know that something is up.

Daily Dot reviewer Gavia Baker-Whitelaw criticises Laura Barton for being a cypher and having little personality aside from being a wife and a mother. I still think this is unfair, for even though Laura doesn’t get a lot of screentime, we still learn things about her character. As I pointed out before, Laura knows that Clint is Hawkeye and that he was Ronin. This is not a case of a superhero keeping his identity secret even from his loved ones, a trope that I hate (and that Masters of the Universe: Revelation just brilliantly interrogated). Nor is Laura the nagging and whining “Oh no, how can you go off to save the world, when today is our anniversary? You don’t care about Meee” wife, another trope I really, really hate. And yes, sometimes the whining partner is male – see Rhys from Torchwood – but mostly it’s a woman. Laura knows what Clint does and she supports him and that alone is rare enough.

But this episode actually hints that Laura likely was a S.H.I.E.L.D operative herself, as Tor.com reviewer Emmet Asher-Perrin points out. And this makes sense, because not only do most people meet their partners at work, but particularly people in high pressure professions tend to choose a partner in the same profession. The hints are also there all the way back in Avengers: Age of Ultron, where Tony Stark remarks upon first meeting Laura, “She’s an agent” and Clint says that Nick Fury set up the quiet and safe house for his family for him. Tony was very likely right. Laura was a S.H.I.E.L.D agent. She also is Clint’s wife and the mother of his kids. I still wish that Laura got more screentime, but she is an interesting character.

Meanwhile, Kate is subjected to her Mom and Jack talking about her (“She idolises Clint Barton”, Eleanor says) and then to Jack serenading and dancing with her Mom). Even for someone who’s not related to either of them, that display of affection was cringeworthy, so Kate takes the first chance she has to flee. She returns to her aunt’s apartment, where she finds Clint cooling his myriad injuries with packages of frozen fruit juice or ready-mixed cocktails or whatever that stuff is. One thing I like about Hawkeye is that unlike the other Avengers, Clint and Kate get hurt and their wounds take time to heal. They may be superheroes (or about to be in Kate’s case), but they’re not superhuman.

Kate also brings a bunch of bags with her to have an impromptu Christmas party with Clint, since he has missed much of the Barton family’s pre-Christmas celebrations. There are goofy Christmas sweaters and holiday movies, since Kate apparently overheard that the Bartons were planning to have a holiday movie night with Christmas sweaters. We also see Clint and Kate decorating the Christmas tree – one of those silvery aluminium foil trees with colourful lights – putting all the frozen fruit juice or whatever it is packs to good use and just generally hanging out together with Pizza Dog. The apartment of Kate’s aunt feels lived in, something TV homes rarely do. Plus, the aunt has a menorah (suggesting that she won’t be too keen on having her halls decked with boughs of holly) and a “Thanos Was Right” cup, which Clint of all people drinks from. The aunt won’t be pleased either that Kate messed up one of the posters on her wall by using it as an improvised dry-erase board. Finally, Clint teaches Kate how the flip a coin, so he can use it to switch off the lights and the TV (and potentially take an opponent out), which is playing It’s a Wonderful Life, of course.

Now I don’t particularly care for It’s a Wonderful Life, but I know it’s hugely popular in the US. It also is public domain due to a copyright registration error, so it makes sense that so many holiday themed movies or TV episodes include characters watching It’s a Wonderful Life. However, Marvel is owned by Disney and Disney is a behemoth which owns loads of copyrights, including likely very many beloved holiday movies. So why go with the unadventurous choice of It’s a Wonderful Life? Maybe it’s because the movie is about a man and the relationship to his family, but then many, if not most Christmas movies are about family.

The festive scenes of Kate, Clint and Pizza Dog hanging out in the apartment of Kate’s aunt also give the show a much needed breather and the chance for some bonding and character development, as both AV-Club reviewer Caroline Siede and io9 reviewer Germain Lussier point out. And so Kate asks Clint about the best shot he ever took and he replies that was the shot he didn’t take, the one that should have taken out Black Widow. Clint, however, saw something in her, decided to spare her and they became lifelong friends. Kate also realises that Clint lost his whole family in the blip and that he used to be Ronin. Those scenes are quieter than usual for this show, but really well acted by Jeremy Renner, whose grief for Natasha is literally edged into his face, and Hailee Steinfeld. Also, I love it that Jeremy Renner is allowed to look fifty.

That night, we see Clint having nightmares about Natasha’s death, losing his family and his time as Ronin. The next morning, Clint and Kate split up. Clint sends Kate to retrieve what’s left of his trick arrows from the NYPD, enlisting the aid of their LARPer acquaintances, most of whom happen to be first responders. Then he goes to see Kazi.

So Clint pays a visit to Kazi, Maya’s lieutenant in the tracksuit mafia. He lies in wait for Kazi in the backseat of his car and divests Kazi of his various weapons, too. Then he tells Kazi that by the (admittedly low) standards of the tracksuit mafia, Kazi is actually intelligent (Way to make a compliment, Clint) and more importantly, Maya listens to him, whereas she would not listen to pretty much everybody else. So he tells Kazi to tell Maya to stop going after Ronin. Maya is chasing ghosts and it’s going to get her killed, if she doesn’t stop. It’s certainly telling that even though he killed a shitload of people as Ronin, Clint doesn’t want to kill Maya. Probably because he realises that she has a very good reason to be angry at him.

Meanwhile, Kate approaches the LARPers, introducing herself as a friend of Clint’s. Consindering the LARPers are all cops, firefighters and other first responders, they are remarkably easy to convince to help Clint and Kate, even if it involves stealing objects from the evidence room. However, they want something in return. This something turns out to be material for new costumes, which Kate can apparently get for them (Does she have her credit card back or does she have connections to fabric wholesalers?). The LARPers even promise to make new costumes for Clint and Kate as well.

When Clint returns to the apartment, he finds it full of LARPers. Grill, the fellow he fought in episode 2, is baking cookies, Kate and the woman with the blonde braids are trying on costumes. Most importantly, a black police officer named Wendy has retrieved Clint’s arrows, though she is very reluctant to give the bag the arrows are in to Clint, because the bag is personally embroidered and was a gift from her wife. The LARPers are supporting characters and most of them don’t even get names, though I like it that the show gives them a bit of characterisation and also injects some diversity into the still very white and straight Marvel Cinematic Universe. Gavia Baker-Whitelaw, on the other hand, is not a huge fan of the LARPers and calls the fact that they are mostly first responders a very weird example of “copaganda”.

Now “copaganda” definitely is a thing that exists, though you’re far more likely to find it in shows like The Shield, Bosch, The District and Blue Bloods, the first two of which literally let their police officer protagonists get away with murder, while the last two rigged its storylines so that the police was always right. However, I don’t see what’s so bad about having a handful of goofy LARPers who also happen to be cops and firefighters.

Clint gets a text message from Laura confirming that the mysterious Rolex watch (which is equipped with a tracker) was not destroyed and that it is in a certain apartment in New York City. So Clint and Kate set out to retrieve the Rolex. The apartment where the Rolax is located does not look particularly impressive – in fact, it looks a little like social housing – which suggest that whoever has the Rolex now is not one of the wealthy people who were going to bid on it. Never mind that we last saw the Rolex in the hands of the tracksuit mafia.

Clint and Kate watch the apartment from the opposite roof. Clint wants to break in, but Kate preempts him and gets into the building by helping an old man carry his groceries inside. It’s effective, charming and also shows the different approach that Kate and Clint have to things. Then Clint berates Kate about not following orders, Kate replies audibly and then tells the very confused elderly man that she has an Avenger in her ear, which persuades the old man that Kate is nuts.

Kate manages to break into the apartment without problems, but suddenly she triggers flashing strobe lights, which she takes out with two of Clint’s putty arrows. Kate finds the Rolex and – more worryingly – a handwritten list with details about Clint and his family. Kate warns Clint about this, just as Clint realises what those flashing strobe lights were. They’re a silent alarm. The apartment Kate broke into belongs to Maya Lopez. “Get out!” Clint tells Kate, but it’s too late. Kate is attacked by Maya.

Meanwhile, on the rooftop opposite, Clint has problems of his own, when a black-clad woman with a nightvision mask attacks him. He assumes it’s Maya, but since Maya is fighting Kate on the other side of the street, how can that be?

The situation quickly turns into a roof-top free for all. Clint is fighting the black clad woman on the roof and still manages to shoot a grapling line arrow to the other side of the street, allowing Kate to escape via a zip line. Only that Kate gets stuck dangling above the street and that Maya also knows how to use ziplines.

At one point during the fight, Kate gets knocked off the roof and is dangling only on a ropeline. When Clint bends down to pull her up, he isn’t the only one who realises how very similar the situation is to Natasha’s death on Vormir in Avengers: Endgame, a death which still haunts Clint.

Natasha never really had a choice to get involved first in the shadow world of espionage and later in the world of superheroes. Clint probably did have a choice, but he made that choice a long time ago and is only now beginning to realise the price. So he decides to make Kate’s choice for her. He won’t lose her like he lost Natasha and she won’t have the regrets Clint has. So instead of hauling her up, Clint cuts the line and lets Kate fall to the street below. Luckily, her fall is broken by several strings of Christmas lights strung out over the street. The shot of Kate dangling above the Christmas lights was brilliant and perfectly encapsulates what this show is about.

But just because Clint made a decision doesn’t mean Kate has to accept it. And so she makes her way back onto the roof and breaks up the brawl with a sonic arrow, knocking everybody out. Kate wounds Maya with an arrow, which causes her to run. Then she aims another arrow at the mystery woman in black, but does not shoot, when the mystery woman takes off her mask and reveals herself to be none other than Yelena Barakova (Florence Pugh), Natasha’s adopted sister.

The suprise appearance of Yelena would have worked better, if we hadn’t known it was coming. However, Comtessa Valentina explicitly sends Yelena after Clint in the post-credits scene of Black Widow, so it was only a matter of time before she would catch up with him. Never mind that Yelena uses the very recognisable widow’s bite shockers that Natasha always used. Their fighting styles are similar as well.

Clint is shocked that he not only has an angry gangster orphan after him, but a Black Widow assassin as well, though it’s not clear if he recognises Yelena. At any rate, he tells Kate to go home and forget about him. They’re not partners and never were.

Two episodes from the end, Hawkeye feels more and more like the gritty and lower stakes Marvel Netflix series of a few years ago, only with a higher budget and sprinkled with a bit of holiday cheer. The rooftop fight was very reminiscent of similar scenes in the Daredevil series. Like Daredevil, which handled Matt Murdock’s blindness very well, Hawkeye also has good disability representation. Though unlike any of the Netflix series except season 1 of Jessica Jones, Hawkeye also has things to say about PTSD, grief, aging and the cost of being a superhero.

In The Guardian, James Hanton notes that Hawkeye has the lowest viewing figures of all Disney Plus Marvel series and that the Marvel machine seems to be in trouble. Personally, I don’t think Marvel is in trouble, even if its 2021 movie drew fewer viewers than usual. But many people are not comfortable going to a movie theatre during the covid pandemic and sometimes, theatres are not open or they require a negative test in addition to proof of vaccination, which makes going there a hassle. Also, while I liked the Black Widow movie, the movie came out about five years too late. Eternals was always going to be a gamble, since those characters are very hard to like. And Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings seems generally well regarded.

As for Hawkeye, I suspect the reason it’s not performing as well as the other Disney Plus Marvel shows is that the streaming services are drowning viewers in good SFF series.  Star Trek Discovery, Doctor Who, The Wheel of Time, the live action Cowboy Bebop, Lost in Space and The Expanse are all running concurrently with Hawkeye. It’s too much for one person to watch, especially in the busy run-up period to the holidays. But then I suspect the streaming services assume that all of their customers are young men with nothing to do, while the women are supposed to watch stuff like The Great British Bake-off or The Crown. Also note that there are very few soap opera-ish series aimed at women running right now, probably because the streaming services know that their target audience is too busy to watch much TV.

Though I wish they would also realise that there are plenty of women who love SFF shows, but would not be caught dead watching The Crown or Bridgerton or The Great British Bake-off.

 

First Monday Free Fiction: Revolt at the North Pole

Welcome to the December 2021 edition of First Monday Free Fiction.

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

December 6 is St. Nicholas Day, so this month’s free story is a holiday horror tale named Revolt at the North Pole, in which Santa’s myriad helpers conspire against him. It’s no happy holiday season for Santa, but rest assured, cause Christmas will be saved.

Even though there is a…

Revolt at the North Pole

Discontent had been brewing in Santa’s workshop at the North Pole since September.

“The old man is working us to the bone,” Frosty Busynight, elf second class, whispered to his colleague Noel Happyglitter, as they stood on the assembly line, painting an endless succession of wooden toys.

“Sixteen to eighteen hour shifts, shitty pay, no overtime, no days off till January…”

“I know,” Noel Happyglitter whispered back, painting a red nose onto what had to be the thousandth nutcracker today, “But what can we do? Jobs ain’t exactly easy to come by, here at the North Pole.”

“Unionise,” an elderly elf named Yule Ciderspirit said, as he inserted glass eyes into an angel-haired baby doll, “If we’re all unite and threaten to strike, the old man has to hear our demands.”

“Are you crazy?” Noel Happyglitter hissed, “Don’t you remember what happened to the last elves who tried to unionise? They were kicked out into the cold and the snow to starve.”

Noel Happyglitter took off his cap in remembrance of those poor elven souls. Frosty Busynight and Yule Ciderspirit did likewise.

“What’s the matter, you lazy bums?”

The fore-elf Rusty Shelfelf cracked his jingle-bell studded whip, causing Jolly and Frosty to flinch. Only Yule, who’d seen it all, did not flinch, but glared icicles at Rusty.

“If you don’t finish your quota by shift end, I’ll make sure to have your pay docked.”

“What pay?” Frosty whispered, once Rusty was out of earshot, “We’re already working for a pittance.”

“Fucking class traitor,” Yule grumbled, still glaring icicles at Rusty, “Used to be that he only spied on the kids, not on his own.”

Noel shrugged. “You know Rusty. Always brownnosing Santa and always eager to rat out anybody for a pat on the head. I just hope he didn’t overhear us talking about…” He cast a glance over his shoulder. “…the u-word.”

“We shouldn’t bother with the u-word,” an elf named Cinnamon Firelog said, her fingers forming air quotes, “The u-word doesn’t work. What we need is the r-word?”

“R-word?” Frosty asked, “R as in reindeer?”

“No, R as in revolution,” Cinnamon replied.

“Be silent,” Yule hissed at her. Frosty clamped his hand over Cinnamon’s mouth and Noel all but fainted.

“You don’t say that word, not even in jest,” Yule continued, “Cause if the old man should hear…”

“Or Rusty Shelfelf,” Noel added ominously.

“Then what?” Cinnamon replied, shaking off Frosty, “He’ll dock our pay, increase our work hours and kick us out into the cold to starve? Wake up! He already does that. He does it all the time.”

“Exactly,” Noel hissed, “And if you keep talking like that, you’ll be next.”

“And we’ll get kicked out into the cold, too, just because we happened to be nearby, when you said the… the…” Frosty couldn’t even say the word out loud.

“Yes, maybe the old man will kick us out,” Cinnamon said, “But our lives are already miserable, brutish and short. Every week, at least one of us succumbs to a workplace injury. And the old man doesn’t care. He never cared and he never will. That’s why we need a r…”

“Shush,” Noel and Yule hissed as one, while Frosty clamped his hand over Cinnamon’s mouth again.

“Get back to work, you lazy bums, and keep the heavy petting to your off-hours,” Rusty Shelfelf called in the distance.

***

But once the r-word has been said, it could not be taken back. The genie was out of the bottle and nothing and nobody could stuff it back in.

And so whispers of revolution could be heard in the elf barracks by night, when Rusty Shelfelf and his ilk were fast asleep.

“But how can we pull it off?” Frosty wanted to know.

“By the sheer weight of numbers,” Yule replied, “If we all work together, even Santa Claus himself can’t stand against us.”

“We’re still too weak,” Noel said, “Remember what happened the last time there was an elf uprising? Santa sicced the reindeer and even…” Noel shuddered in horror. “…the Krampus onto the rebels until the snow ran red with their blood.”

“It was a massacre for the ages,” Yule added and took off his cap in remembrance of the dead.

“That’s because they did it wrong,” Cinnamon declared, “Cause Yule is right. We all have to work together. Not just us elves. We have to involve the reindeer, too.”

“The reindeer?” Noel exclaimed in horror, “But they’re fanatically loyal to the old man.”

“Maybe once upon a time,” Cinnamon said, “But not anymore. They’re suffering just as we are. Too little pay, too little food, too much work. Just look at how thin they’re grown.”

“Plus the old man is playing them against each other…” Yule said, “…pitting Dasher against Dancer, Prancer against Vixen, Comet against Cupid and Donder against Blitzen and everybody against Rudolph. Why do you think they’re constantly locking horns?”

Frosty nodded. “It’s murder in the reindeer pens.”

“So we all agree?” Cinnamon asked, “We ally with the reindeer?”

All hands went up in agreement.

***

“I’m just saying…” Cinnamon whispered to Dasher during a casual visit to the reindeer enclosure, “…that we’re all in this together. Elves, reindeer, that old tyrant is exploiting us all.”

Dasher nodded thoughtfully. “Aye. But what can we do? If we refuse to do the job, there’s a hundred reindeer just waiting for the opportunity. That’s how we ended up with that red-nosed piece of shit Rudolph, after all.”

Dasher glared at Rudolph, whose bright red nose was glowing in the polar night.

Cinnamon decided to let those prejudices go… for now.

“Us elves, we’re not going to take it anymore. We’ll get rid of Santa. But we can’t do it without your help.”

“I’d help you in a heartbeat,” Dasher replied, “And so would Vixen, Comet, Donder and Blitzen. But Dancer is a jerk, Prancer is a brownnoser, Cupid is terminally stupid and Rudolph… well, Rudolph is Rudolph.”

“Then talk to them,” Cinnamon whispered, pretending to feed some hay to Dasher, because Rusty Shelfelf was skulking about again, “First to the ones you know are with us and then with the others.”

She gave Dasher a carrot, this time for real.

“Remember, united we stand, divided we fall.”

Dasher chomped on the carrot and nodded. “United we stand.”

***

A few days later, a delegation of elves consisting of Cinnamon, Noel, Frosty and Yule met with a delegation of reindeer consisting of Dasher, Donder, Blitzen and Comet at the edge of the compound.

“The reindeer are in,” Dasher said with a conspiratorial nod.

“All of you?” Cinnamon asked breathlessly.

“All of us,” Dasher confirmed.

“Even Rudolph,” Comet added.

“What about the elves?” Donder wanted to know, his voice a low rumble.

“All in,” Cinnamon said.

“Except for Rusty Shelfelf and the other fore-elves,” Yule added.

“Those fore-elves are dangerous,” Noel said, “They’ll always side with Santa over their own, all for nicer quarters, a softer bed and an extra ration of rum.”

“Scum,” Frosty spat out.

“But we’ll have to be careful and make sure that Rusty and the other fore-elves don’t learn of our plan,” Yule whispered, “Or this revolution will be over before it’s begun.”

“Leave the fore-elves to us,” Blitzen said, an angry fire blazing in her eyes, “We shall deal with them.”

“The elf that can stand against a reindeer’s antlers has yet to be born,” Donder added darkly.

Frosty and Noel shuddered, while Cinnamon patted Dasher’s neck.

“And that’s why we wanted to work with you,” she said, “Because Santa is pitting all of us against each other.”

“However, the fore-elves are not the only danger,” Blitzen pointed out, “There are also Santa’s helpers, Ruprecht and Piet.”

“We can take them,” Donder rumbled, “Ruprecht is a washed up drunk and Piet is a pushover.”

“But that’s not all.” Comet lowered her voice and cast a glance over her shoulder. “There’s also…” Now her voice had dropped to barely a whisper. “…the Krampus.”

In response, everybody shuddered, even the pine trees that surrounded the compound. For in Santa’s workshop at the North Pole, none was more feared than the Krampus, the horned and hoofed monster that Santa kept in a padlocked shack at the far edge of the compound.

No one knew exactly why Santa kept a monster in his compound, though rumours were flying high, rumours that Santa fed the Krampus with naughty children, recalcitrant elves and reindeer too old to work. Whether those rumours were true or not didn’t matter. For terror reigned at the North Pole and so the mere fear of being thrown to the Krampus kept everybody in line.

“We must call everything off,” the ever-timid Noel exclaimed, “Cause if Santa should unleash the Krampus upon us…” He shuddered once more.

“Shut up,” Cinnamon hissed, “We’re not going to give up now that we’ve come so far.”

Yule turned to the four reindeer. “Can’t you deal with Krampus?” he asked, “After all, your antlers are mighty.”

Dasher shook his head. “Not that mighty.”

“Plus, we’re not suicidal,” Blitzen added.

Cinnamon sighed. “You’re cowards, all of you. Yes, Krampus is a potential obstacle to our plan. So we’ll just have to take him out of the game.”

“And how do you plan to do that?” Frosty asked.

Cinnamon scratched behind her pointed ears, because that was a good question. Then she had an idea.

“We’ll poison him,” she said.

“And how?” Yule wanted to know, “Lead and arsenic based paint might have done the trick, but that was phased out ages ago.”

“Who needs paint?” Cinnamon countered, “After all, we have mistletoe. Plenty of mistletoe. And mistletoe happens to be toxic.”

All around, eyebrows arched and ears pricked up.

Encouraged, Cinnamon continued. “So here’s what we’ll do. I’ll gather mistletoe and then I’ll boil it to make an elixir. And this elixir, I’ll serve to Krampus…”

“In a platter of sugar cookies,” Frosty suggested.

“Or a nice gingerbread man,” Noel added.

“Or some candy canes,” Comet piped in.

Cinnamon shook her head. “Now, I’ll put the elixir into a jug of mulled wine. If I add a bit of extra sugar, he won’t even notice the taste.”

***

On the night before the planned revolt, Cinnamon snuck out of the elves’ barracks with a jug of mulled wine spiked with mistletoe elixir.

Shivering, she traipsed through the snow, out to the padlocked shack at the far edge of the compound that was home to Santa’s most fearsome enforcer. From afar, she could hear the Krampus howling in the night, howling at the solstice moon.

Her heart beating like the little drummer boy on caffeine, she crept closer. With stiff and blue fingers, she opened the flap through which Krampus received his food.

“Krampus,” she called, “Hey, Krampus! I’ve got an extra ration of mulled wine for you with Santa’s compliments.”

A clawed and furry hand shot out of flap and grabbed the jug of mulled wine. There was a gurgling sound. Cinnamon smiled and slowly retreated.

But then Krampus spoke, his voice like the rumble of winter thunder.

“Krampus knows,” the voice said, “Krampus knows what you’re planning.”

Cinnamon froze. “We’re planning Christmas, like every year. And now drink your mulled wine, before it goes cold.”

“Not like every year. This year is different. This year, you are planning to overthrow Santa.”

“You’re drunk,” Cinnamon countered, trying to ignore that her heart was hammering like all eleven drummers drumming now, “You’re speaking nonsense.”

“Not drunk. Krampus knows. Krampus heard you whisper in the dark, the elves and the reindeer.”

At this moment, even an elf as brave as Cinnamon would have turned tail and ran, ran until the ice and the cold claimed her. For that was still better than the fate that awaited her at the claws of the Krampus.

But to her horror, she found that she could not move. And so she stood frozen in place, like a statue made of ice.

“Krampus wants in,” the grunting voice continued.

Cinnamon could see his face now, half hidden in shadow. But even the deepest shadows of the polar night could not hide the fangs and the horns of the Krampus.

“Krampus wants to help. Krampus hates Santa, too. Krampus wants to kill Santa.”

Cinnamon emitted a puff of relief. “Then why didn’t you just say so, buddy. We’re grateful for every helping hand. Or claw.”

“You didn’t ask,” Krampus said, a hint of accusation in his voice, “You never talk to Krampus.”

“I’m sorry, okay. We thought you were on his side and we couldn’t risk…”

“Not on Santa’s side,” Krampus grumbled, “Never on Santa’s side. Santa treats Krampus like monster, like pet.”

“Uhm, buddy, then maybe you shouldn’t drink that mulled wine…”

“Why not? Krampus already drank mulled wine. Was tasty. Very tasty. Elf girl makes good mulled wine.”

“Are you feeling faint maybe? Tired?” Cinnamon asked cautiously.

“No, Krampus feels fine. Krampus feels strong enough to tear Santa apart with his bare claws.”

“You’ll have to wait until shift start for that,” Cinnamon said.

***

The next morning, shortly after four AM, when the day’s shift began, Rusty Shelfelf advanced upon an aged elf named Chestnut Gingersnap who was on fruitcake baking duty.

“What’s the matter, you lazy bitch! Get back to work!”

“I’m sorry,” Chestnut replied, leaning against the oven. Her voice was weak. “It’s just… I’m so tired.”

“Get back to work or I’ll make you,” Rusty thundered. He cracked his whip, the bells jingling.

Normally, the sound of Rusty’s jingle bell whip was enough to strike fear and terror into the hearts of all elves. But not this time.

And so the other elves on the bakery line surrounded Rusty.

“No,” Yule said, offering his arm to Chestnut, “This stops now.”

“Get back to work,” Rusty screamed, his ruddy cheeks turning even redder. He cracked his jingle bell whip and this time, he drew blood.

But then Frosty, Noel and Cinnamon placed themselves between Yule and poor Chestnut.

“No,” Frosty said, “We’re not working eighteen hour shifts anymore.”

“And we’re not going to live in fear anymore either,” Noel added.

“In case you hadn’t noticed, this is the revolution,” Cinnamon said with a sweet smile, “Your reign of terror is over.”

“You’ll pay for this,” Rusty yelled, “You’ll all pay for this.” He cracked his whip, the bells jingling. “Fore-elves, upon them!”

All over the factory, the fore-elves grabbed their clubs and cracked their whips in anticipation. But then, the doors flew open and all nine reindeer stormed in, followed by Krampus himself.

“Freedom,” Dasher cried.

“Long live the Revolution,” Prancer exclaimed.

“Proletarians of the world unite,” roared Donder.

“Fresh hay and cranberries for all,” Rudolph called out. The other reindeer just rolled their eyes.

“Krampus hungry,” Krampus roared like an avalanche rolling down a mountain slope.

Then the fight began. Several fore-elves made the intimate acquaintance of reindeer antlers. Rusty Shelfelf was thrown into a vat of glitter glue. And Krampus ate a particularly hated fore-elf named Evergreen Frostivy.

Realising that they were outnumbered, the fore-elves ran. They ran out into the snow and the cold and the endless polar night, the elves and the reindeer and Krampus in hot pursuit.

“All right,” Yule finally said as they reached the perimeter fence and watched the fore-elves retreating into the night, Rusty Shelfelf clearly visible by the trail of glitter he left behind, “We won’t be seeing them again.”

“Next stop, Santa,” Dasher added grimly.

“To Santa’s mansion, troops,” Cinnamon exclaimed.

“Krampus hungry,” Krampus grumbled.

***

So Krampus knocked down the door to Santa’s mansion. Elves and reindeer swarmed out, marvelling at the luxuries with which Santa surrounded himself, while his workers starved.

They found Ruprecht, one of Santa’s helpers, passed out in front of the TV that was playing It’s a Wonderful Life on an endless loop. Twigs and holly leaves were sticking in Ruprecht’s bushy black beard.

Yule sniffed the sleeping Ruprecht. “Eggnog and rum,” he announced, “He won’t be up for a while.”

“And onwards, troops,” Cinnamon cried.

Krampus found the kitchen and ate twenty-seven mince pies, the equivalent of a light snack for him. He also found a jug of mulled wine and emptied it in one draught.

Meanwhile, the revolutionaries searched the rest of the house and finally found Santa in the master bedroom, snoring in his king-size bed.

His wife, Mrs. Claus, had left him years ago and retired to Hawaii. Nonetheless, Santa was not alone. For his current lovers, the curvaceous Merry Mistletoe and the well-endowed Holly Jinglebells, were snuggled up in bed beside him, passed out from a night of hard cider, harder partying and sugar cookies dusted with cocaine.

“What is it?” Holly grunted, as the revolutionaries broke into the bedroom, “Morning already?”

“Let me sleep,” Merry grumbled and turned over in bed.

Santa still snored. Only when Dasher poked him with his antlers, did he finally wake up.

Santa opened one eye, only to find himself faced with some very angry reindeer and equally angry elves.

“What do you want? Christmas is in four days. And now get back to work, you slackers!”

“No,” Yule declared, “We won’t be working for a slave driver like you anymore.”

Now Santa did open both eyes. “Oh, is this another strike? Well then, you’re fired, all of you.”

“No, Santa, it’s you who’s fired,” Dasher countered.

“This is the revolution and you, Santa, are history,” Cinnamon added.

At this moment, a hidden door opened and Piet, Santa’s other helper and servant, entered, bearing a flambéed Christmas pudding.

“Oh, I’m sorry. If this is a bad time, I’ll come back later.”

“No, Piet, you’re right on time. These idiots are plotting treason and revolution,” Santa said with a dismissive wave of his hand towards the assembled elves and reindeer, “Kindly take out the trash and check what those snow-blasted fore-elves are doing.”

“Revolution?” Piet exclaimed, his eyes wide in his dark face, “Really?”

“Really,” Dasher said gravely, “And now get out of the way, Piet. We don’t want to hurt you.”

“Get out of the way?” Piet repeated, “No way, I’m joining you. He…” Piet poked an accusing finger at Santa, “…has been treating me like crap for years, chasing me about, making me wear silly clothes…”

“I plucked you from obscurity and made you one of my helpers and this is how you thank me?” Santa roared, “You’re fired, Piet, fired.”

“Fired?” Piet countered, “I quit. And by the way, you fat piece of shit, slavery was outlawed two hundred years ago.”

Piet hurled the flaming Christmas pudding at Santa. He missed, but managed to set the bedclothes aflame. Merry Mistletoe and Holly Jinglebells screamed and ran out into the snow, bells jingling all the way.

By now, Santa’s cheeks had turned as red as his suit with pure fury. He advanced upon the rebels, eyes blazing.

“So you think, you can stand up to me, you ungrateful bastards? Well, you’re all on my naughty list now. And I’ll show you. I’ll show you all…”

At this moment, Krampus burst into the master bedroom. He’d eaten all the food that was to be found in the kitchen and then followed the scent of flaming Christmas pudding.

“Krampus hungry,” he announced. Then he spotted Santa.

“Santa!” he roared.

“Ah, Krampus, right on time. Would you deal with these…” Santa pointed at his opponents. “…traitors?”

“No,” Krampus thundered, his fangs dripping mulled wine. At least, the assembled elves and reindeer hoped that it was mulled wine, because the alternative was too disturbing.

“Krampus quits. Krampus hates Santa. Krampus will kill Santa.”

Now Santa paled. He jumped out of the bed, pushed through the assembled elves and reindeer and ran. He dashed through the hidden door and ran, out into the cold and the ice and the snow. And Krampus set off after him, fangs bared and claws flexing, his horns outlined sharply against the solstice moon.

When they were gone, everybody looked at each other. Piet grabbed a quilt and began to beat out the flames that still danced on the bed. “I guess I’d better clean this place up,” he said, “And I should see if I can wake Ruprecht.”

Yule nodded. “And we’d better get back to work, too. After all, Christmas is in four days and we still have much work to do.”

“Reindeer with me,” Dasher ordered, “We must discuss this year’s sleigh formation.”

“Can I be the lead again?” Rudolph asked.

“No,” eight reindeer said as one.

***

Merry Mistletoe and Holly Jinglebells eventually made it to a polar research station, much to the delight of the resident scientists, who decided to consider their guests an early and very welcome Christmas present.

The fore-elves built a shantytown on the polar wastes, gazing longingly at the brightly lit compound on the horizon, knowing they were forever cast out of that particular paradise.

Krampus returned to the compound two hours later, claws and fangs and even horns dripping with blood. He belched, announced that he was tired and promptly fell asleep in Santa’s big king-sized bed. Nobody asked what had happened, for nobody dared.

Two days later, Inspector Aki Lipponen of the Lapland police was called to the site of a grisly find. Two polar researchers had come across a blood trail on the ice. They’d followed the trail and found a body, frozen stiff.

“So what do we have here?” Inspector Lipponen asked his medical examiner, Doctor Tarja Latvala.

“The poor fellow was gutted. Polar bear attack, most likely.” She shook her head. “Stupid tourists. Don’t they know that the polar regions are dangerous?”

“Do we have an ID?” Lipponen asked.

Doctor Latvala nodded. “Name’s Kris Kringle, would you believe it?”

Lipponen shook his head. “And two days before Christmas, too. Poor bastard.”

***

On Christmas Eve, the elves finished loading up the sleigh. The reindeer were prancing in their harnesses. Against all intentions, Rudolph did take the lead again, because it was a foggy Christmas night and his glowing red nose did come in handy to avoid collisions with planes and helicopters.

Piet strutted out onto the runway, clad in one of Santa’s spare suits that Cinnamon and Chestnut had altered to fit him. He’d asked Ruprecht to come along, but Ruprecht was drunk again after the previous night’s victory party.

Yule handed Piet a clipboard. “Here’s the list. Good luck.”

The ground shook with heavy footsteps.

“Krampus come, too,” a roaring voice announced.

“All right, hop on in,” Piet said, if only because when Krampus wanted something, it was unwise to refuse, “But no eating naughty children, okay?”

Krampus pouted. “Spoilsport.” He shot Piet a hopeful look. “Can I eat naughty adults?”

Piet sighed. “You can eat Donald Trump, okay? Ain’t no one gonna miss him.”

***

That Christmas, all presents were delivered as expected and no one noticed anything amiss, except that their fridges had gone mysterious empty overnight.

A little boy living on the South Side of Chicago announced joyfully the next morning that he’d seen Santa Claus and that he was black.

Several children reported that they’d heard a crackling “Ho, ho, ho” that didn’t sound very jolly at all. And in Upstate New York, a little girl refused to sleep for three days, because she’d seen Santa, too, and he was a monster.

But apart from those little hiccups, it was as good a Christmas as any and the dawn of a new era of freedom and democracy at the North Pole.

The End

***

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

Star Trek Discovery Decides to “Choose to Live”

It’s time for the latest 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!

“Choose to Live”, the latest episode of Star Trek Discovery, opens with a heist. A Starfleet ship is about to deliver a goodwill gift of dilithium to a random world, when two guys dressed as ninjas and a sword-wielding Romulan woman beam aboard to steal the dilithium. The First Officer of the Starfleet vesse tries to stop them. “Choose to live”, the Romulan woman says to the officer, indicating that she is a member of the Qowat Milat, the order of Romulan warrior nuns that we’ve seen before in Star Trek Picard and Star Trek Discovery. The Starfleet does not choose to live, i.e. stand down, and is promptly killed.

The scene now switches to a conference room in Starfleet Headquarters, where Admiral Vance, President Rillak of the Federation, President T’Rina of Ni’Var (a.k.a. the planet formerly known as Vulcan) and Michael discuss the case. It turns out that there has been a series of dilithium heists, which now culminated in the death of a Starfleet officer. They know who’s responsible, a Qowat Milat nun named J’Vini, and since the latest dilithium shipment was equipped with a tracker, they know where she’s hiding.

President T’Rina is respectively horrified, but insists that the Qowat Milat deal with the issue. President Rillak, ever the diplomat (Ni’Var left the Federation and Rillak is desperate for them to rejoin), proposes a joint mission and so Michael finds herself paired with her mother Gabrielle(a welcome reappearance by Sonja Sohn), who had joined the Qowat Milat upon ending up in the 31st century. President T’Rina also offers the help of the Vulcan Science Academy in determing the nature of the planet-eating anomaly that the Discovery investigated last episode. So Stamets and Book as the sole witness to the destruction of Kwejian due to the anomaly are dispatched to Ni’Var in the B-plot, while Michael and Gabrielle hunt down the wayward nun in the A-plot. Gabrielle has brought another Qowat Milat sister with her, so Michael also brings along a second Starfleet officer. Saru suggests Tilly, who is having trouble adjusting to everything that happened to her and is looking for new experiences. Michael points out that Tilly has many strengths, but combat is not one of them, whereupon Saru notes that with two Qowat Milat nuns and Michael along for the mission, there are plenty of combat specialists, but they might need someone as likeable as Tilly.

Things go wrong almost at once. Gabrielle insists that Michael and Tilly leave behind their phasers in favour of swords, the Qowat Milat’s preferred weapon. Michael also learns why Gabrielle is so insistent that J’Vini must have good reasons for doing what she does. Because J’Vini was the Qowat Milat sister who found Gabrielle, when she was flung into the 31st century, and nursed her back to health. They land on what appears to be a barren moon. However, a scan detects lifesigns in a cavern under the surface. Those lifesigns soon beam aboard Book’s ship, which Michael borrowed for this mission, and a fight with J’Vini’s goons ensues. The Qowat Milat hold their own, but Michael and particularly Tilly, who are not used to swordfighting, have problems. However, in the end it’s the Qowat Milat sister who is not Gabrielle who gets killed.

J’Vini herself also beams aboard Book’s ship. She tells Gabrielle, Michael and Tilly that she did not want the sister to be killed and that she didn’t want to kill the Starfleet officer either.  She also warns Gabrielle, Michael and Tilly to leave or face the consequences. “Choose to live,” J’Vini says ominously.

Of course, Michael, Tilly and Gabrielle don’t leave but beam into the subterranean cavern, which turns out to be no cave at all, but what appears to be an alien crypt or tomb. They find hundreds of aliens in coffin-like pods. One of the pods has been broken open by graverobbers, the body therein belongs to a species no one has ever seen before. It is also covered up with a Qowat Milat cloak. J’Vini definitely was there.

When the crypt suddenly experiences something seismic instabilites, Michael and Tilly realise that the asteroid is no asteroid at all, but a spaceship, which reminded me of the original series episode “For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”, which also has the distinction of being the first Star Trek episode I ever watched. J’Vini stole the dilithium to power up the asteroid/spaceship. Also, they aliens are not dead, but in cryosleep.

Michael, Tilly and Gabrielle find the engine and Tilly removes the dilithium to shut it down, whereupon J’Vini appears.  After a brief fight, she takes Gabrielle hostage and places her sword at her throat and demands that Tilly and Michael power up the asteroid again. Michael and Tilly stall, while Gabrielle finally get J’Vini to tell the full story, corroborated by some mural and reliefs on the walls of the cave.

The homeworld of the aliens (I don’t think their species even gets a name) was destroyed when their sun went nova. The aliens hollowed out a moon and turned it into a spaceship. Then they set course for their new home and went into cryosleep. Somehow all this happens without the Federation having the slightest idea about it. However, something went wrong and though the aliens have long since reached their destination, they won’t wake up. Furthermore, the bodies of the aliens also happen to have a high content of Latinum (the element which the Ferengi use as a currency), which attracts scavengers who have no moral qualms about harvesting Latinum from aliens in cryosleep.

This happened to the mutilated alien whose body Michael, Tilly and Gabrielle found earlier. And since the alien woke up, when they were being harvested, and since the aliens just happen to be telepathic, this alien sent out a telepathic distress signal that was received by J’Vini, who was too late to save this alien, but decided to make the rest of their species her lost cause. While I was watching the episode, all this made perfect sense. However, typing it up now I realise that there are a lot of coincidences here and that the whole aliens in cryosleep plot doesn’t make a lot of sense.

As for why J’Vini needs the dilithium, the aliens’ asteroid spaceship happens to be in the likely path of the planet-killing anomaly (Stamets has called it “Dark Matter Anomaly”, DMA for short), so J’Vini needs to reactivate the drive in order to move it when necessary.

“Why didn’t you just ask the Federation for dilithium?” Michael wants to know. J’Vini points out that the Federation is only giving dilithium to organisations and planets, not to individuals, at least not without knowing the reason they need it. Once again, this makes no sense, because why would J’Vini not simply inform the Federation of her discovery? It’s the Federation, for heavens’ sake. They won’t cut up these poor aliens for latinum.

The whole alien plot is potentially interesting and helping an unknown species in trouble is a very Star Trek thing to do, but the plot strand also feels underdeveloped. AV-Club reviewer Zack Handlen points out that the aliens basically serve as a Macguffin in this story. The show isn’t interested in the aliens or their story or their culture and indeed, we never even meet one of them who’s still alive. They’re merely a plot device to give Michael some quality time with her Mom. Come to think of it, the dead Starfleet officer is more plot device than person as well. He’s literally a random redshirt. We don’t even learn his name or the fact that he has a family until the end of the episode.

And now J’Vini has her sword at the throat of Michael’s Mom and demands that Michael and Tilly fix the drive. Michael also points out that the aliens should have woken up a long time ago, but that something went wrong. However, Michael is going to fix it. How does Michael fix an issue with the computer of the spaceship of a species the Federation had never even heard of until that day? The story neither asks nor addresses those questions.

At any rate, Michael and Tilly are successful. The warpdrive works again and the aliens wake up to settle their new homeworld (which conveniently is not occupied by anybody else). Gabrielle informs J’Vini that she has fulfilled her vow to the aliens and that this path has ended and a new path has begun. J’Vini allows Gabrielle to take her into custody. Michael assures Gabrielle and J’Vini that her motives will be taken account when the Federation puts her on trial. Gabrielle also has a little heart to heart with Tilly about paths ending and new paths beginning and maybe Tilly’s issues are due to the fact that a path has ended for her. Hmm, does Mary Wiseman want to leave the show?

Back at Starfleet headquarters, J’Vini is not put on trial but handed over to the Ni’Var authorities who may well turn a blind eye to J’Vini’s crimes. Michael is angry about this – something I found difficult to understand given her not so great experiences with Federation justice. Vance is resigned and Rillak wants to salvage the relationship with Ni’Var at all costs.

In the B-plot, Stamets and Book travel to Ni’Var to visit the Vulcan Science Academy. Stamets believes that the anomaly might be a primordial wormhole and lays out his evidence, whereupon the assembled Vulcans and Romulans close their eyes. “Now is not naptime”, Stamets, who just can’t resist sticking his foot into his mouth, exclaims, whereupon President T’Rina calmly explains that the Vulcan scientists are meditating. No one can delivery technobabble and make it compelling like Anthony Rapp. And considering Stamets was somewhat sidelined in season 3, I’m happy that he gets plenty to do in season 4. Though I do miss Jet Reno.

While Stamets is waiting for the Vulcans to finish meditating, President T’Rina approaches Book and offers him some calming tea. Book asks if his emotional turmoil is that obvious even to a Vulcan, whereupon T’Rina replies that Vulcans do have emotions, they just choose to suppress them in favour of a more logical approach to life. “Can you teach me how to do that?” Book asks, whereupon T’Rina explains that it requires a lifetime of training and that for an empath like Book, suppressing his emotions would be dangerous. The scenes between Book and T’Rina were some of my favourites in this episode. I also really like T’Rina and hope that we will see more of her.

Once the Vulcans have finished meditating, they shoot down Stamets’ theory by pointing out that there is no evidence of tachyons around the anomaly, but that tachyons would be present, if it truly were a primordial wormhole. Of course, Stamets already knows that. President T’Rina points out that tachyons cause a distinctive blue glow and that they have a witness to the destruction of Kwejian around in the form of Book. So why not ask him if he observed a blue glow? And yes, if you thought, “A blue glow. Well, that narrows it down, since everything in Star Trek Discovery has a blue glow”, then you’re not the only one.

Book has racked his memories several times, but can’t recall any blue glow. T’Rina suggests that a mind meld might help Book recover suppressed memories. Stamets, whose hypothesis is on the chopping block after all, immediately jumps in to defend Book and tells him that he doesn’t have to relive traumatic memories again. Stamets is not the most empathetic person, but nonetheless he immediately sticks up for Book, so Book won’t be retraumatised. But then, Stamets knows a thing or two about grief.

Book, on the other hand, desperately wants to help and agrees to the mind meld. He sees the dead birds again and Kwejian blowing up. “There was no blue glow”, T’Rina announces, except that there is, because every cosmic effect in Star Trek Discovery has a blue glow. Maybe they should have just made the telltale glow a different colour. Still, Stamets’ hypothesis could not be proven. Whatever the anomaly is, it’s not a primordial wormhole.

T’Rina wants to end the mind meld, but Book tells her there is another memory he wants to relive. T’Rina warns him that he can only observe, not interfere or alter the memory, but Book still wants to relive it. And so Book sees himself with his brother Kyheem and nephew Leto in the forest on Kwejian again. Leto runs off, but this time, Book sees Leto turn around and smile at him, a detail he had forgotten. This actually gives Book some peace, because he now knows that Leto knew that Book loved him.

Back aboard Discovery, Book projects a holographic representation of the late forests of Kwejian onto the ceiling of his ship, something that would have been too painful for him to do earlier. He also is wearing the glass capsule pendant that all Kwejian empaths wear again – even though he ditched the pendant when he first left Kwejian. Book is still far from healed, but he’s doing better.

I also really like T’Rina and hope we see more of her. Star Trek doesn’t always know what to do with Vulcans not named Spock or Sarek, but T’Rina is both very Vulcan and also remarkably empathetic.

The third plot strand in this episode involves Gray and his quest to regain a body. The android body that has been prepared for Gray is ready and Gray and Adira admire it. But in order to transfer Gray’s ghost/consciousness/whatever it is into the android body, the Trill elder Ze needs to be present (virtually as a hologram) as well. Elder Ze warns Gray that the transfer process is not without risks. It’s possible that Gray’s consciousness will be lost in transit. Gray, however, is willing to take that risk. So are Adira and Tal, their symbiont.

So Doctor Culber initiates the transfer process. It appears to be successful, cause Adira can’t hear or see Gray anymore. However, android Gray doesn’t wake up. Culber comforts Adira – and unlike Stamets, he’s actually good at comforting people. Eventually Adira goes into sickbay again to talk to Gray and maybe serve as a guide for his consciousness to find its way. Finally, Adira falls asleep by Gray’s side. And lo and behold, Gray wakes up, kisses Adira and hugs Culber.

Adira and Gray are just the sweetest couple. And Doctor Culber is fast becoming my favourite Star Trek doctor of all time, which is interesting because I don’t normally like medical dramas and don’t usually particularly like the resident doctors aboard the various Starfleet vessels. Sure, some of them are fun characters like the Emergency Medical Hologram from Voyager or Doctor Phlox from Enterprise. And all of them are clearly competent. But Culber is not just competent, he’s also empathetic and just immensely likeable in general. I’m so glad that the showrunners reversed the decision to kill him off in season 1.

During season 1 and parts of seaon 2, I often complained that Discovery felt more like the new Battlestar Galactica or Game of Thrones in space than like Star Trek. Now that the show has overcome its growing pains (and season 1 and 2 are so different from what came after that it’s barely the same show), Discovery finally feels like Star Trek. And “Choose to Live” was a very typical Star Trek episode. There’s a mystery to solve. There is a hostile character who turns out to have a reason for their behaviour. There is an alien species in dire need of aid and Starfleet manages to save the day (for the aliens). In many ways, “Choose to Live” feels like a middling episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation and that’s perfectly fine. It did deliver what I expect from a Star Trek show and I had fun watching it.

That said, “Choose to Live” is also a fairly forgettable episode. The alien plot feels undercooked and we never really get invested in their plight, since the aliens are only a plot device to give J’Vini a motive for her behaviour and to give Michael and Gabrielle some quality time together.

It also doesn’t help that I don’t find the overarching plot of the Dark Matter Anomaly particularly compelling. Yes, the anomaly destroyed Kwejian and killed Stationmaster Redshirt and that’s very sad. But it’s also an evil black space cloud and weird space phenomena are dime a dozen in Star Trek. The fact that everybody behaves as if they had never seen a dangerous spacial anomaly before – in a Star Trek show of all things – doesn’t help either. I hope Stamets finds out something juicy about the anomaly soon that makes it more exciting than just another dangerous space phenomenon.

What makes Star Trek Discovery (and any other TV show, Star Trek or not) are the characters. And while previous seasons of Discovery tended to focus on Michael to the expense of other characters, season 4 seems to be more balanced. Yes, the Qowat Milat plot focussed on Michael, but the Stamets/Book and Culber/Gray/Adira plots gave other characters a much needed spotlight. I particularly like that Stamets and Culber get more to do this season, since they often were sidelined in season 3. io9 reviewer James Whitbrook also points out that the characterisation is what makes a very average episode shine, while Tor.com reviewer Keith R.A. DeCandido praises that “Choose to Live” also offers plenty of characterisation for supporting characters like Admiral Vance, Gabrielle Burnham, President T’Rina and President Lara Rillack.

This is not a Discovery episode that will set the world on fire. But it’s a pleasant way to spend fifty minutes hanging out with characters we’ve come to like.

 

Hawkeye Experiences “Echoes”

I had barely finished the review of the two-part series premiere of Hawkeye that the next episode aired. Review of previous episodes (well, just one so far) may be found here.

Warning! Spoilers under the cut!

When we last saw our two crack archers, they had just been captured by the tracksuit mafia – after Kate unfortunately messed up Clint’s plan by an ill-advised rescue attempt, and had been tied to wobbly animals (which the tracksuit mafia just loved to activate – now torture by wobbly animal is truly a new one), since the tracksuit mafia has set up camp in an abandoned toy store, cause all the nice empty warehouses in New York City are being converted into lofts. Gentrification is a bitch, even for organised crime.

But before the show returns to that cliffhanger, we get yet another flashback to the childhood of another little girl, just like episode 1 opened with a flashback to the traumatic experience that set Kate Bishop on the path to becoming a superhero. The little girl we see in “Echoes” is Maya Lopez, a deaf girl with a prosthetic foot. We first see Maya struggling in a regular school, because she can’t read the teacher’s lips (it was a surprise to see a teacher wearing a hijab, since public school teachers are not allowed to wear hijabs and other religious symbols in many countries). However, Maya is also smart and determined. We next see her during a martial arts tournament, where she knocks a much bigger boy to the mat, and later during a boxing match, where she knocks out her opponent.

We also see Maya with her father (we never her mother). Maya clearly has a loving relationship with her father, though the family seems to have financial issues (come to think of it, there were hints of financial issues in Kate’s flashback, too), since Maya’s Dad can’t afford to send her to a special school for the hearing impaired. But going to a regular school will probably be better for Maya, her Dad says, because this way she will learn to live in two worlds.

But even though Maya’s Dad is a good father, not everything is right with this little family. Because it gradually becomes clear that Maya’s Dad is a criminal and the leader of the tracksuit mafia. He also reports to a higher ranking criminal – Maya calls him “uncle” – who is hinted to be Wilson Fisk a.k.a. Kingpin. Fisk was last seen in Daredevil and The Defenders, played by Vincent D’Onofrio, who did a great job, though no one is sure whether the Marvel Netflix shows are still canon or not.

After her boxing match, Maya returns to a garage run by the tracksuit mafia and witnesses Ronin killing them all, including her father. Maya vows revenge and we can absolutely understand her.

The opening flashback featuring Maya’s backstory is very strong, as AV-Club reviewer Caroline Siede and io9 reviewer Germain Lussier point out, and the parallels between Kate and Maya are very obvious. Both lose their fathers young and in both cases, Clint is connected to the deaths, only that he saved Kate, but not her Dad, from the Chitauri and killed Maya’s Dad during his Ronin phase.

Now any kind of media featuring any kind of superheroic and/or vigilante action (I don’t exclude myself here) tends to ignore the fact that villains and their henchpeople are still human beings with families and loved ones to make it easier to kill them off indiscriminately. In my own work, I’m not a huge fan of indiscriminately killing off villains and henchpeople and I have written action tales with no bodycount. Nonetheless, killing off villains and henchpeople can’t always be avoided or at least I haven’t figured out how.

So it’s good that Hawkeye reminds us that yes, even bad guys have families and loved ones and even villains can be good parents. It’s also nice that Hawkeye does not let Clint off the hook for the things he did while he was Ronin. Daily Dot reviewer Gavia Baker-Whitelaw is not entirely sure how the series will handle the fact that Clint killed a shitload of people with little to no excuse and I’m not sure how they will resolve this without a cop-out either. Especially since I strongly suspect that several members of the tracksuit mafia did not survive their encounter with Clint and Kate.

Maya Lopez a.k.a. Echo is a character from the comics and her backstory is very similar to the one in Hawkeye, only that the superhero Maya vows revenge upon for the murder of her father is Daredevil and not Hawkeye/Ronin. In the comics, Maya eventually learns that Daredevil is innocent and that Wilson Fisk killed her father and framed Daredevil. Will the series go the same route (which would offer an overly neat resolution to the issue that Clint is both a gruff father figure and cold-blooded killer)? We’ll see.

In the present day, Maya (played by Alaqua Cox in what according to Tor.com reviewer Annika Rollock is her first ever acting role) is the leader of the tracksuit mafia and Kazi, who appeared to be their leader in the first two episodes, is her chief henchman.

When Maya spots Clint’s hearing aid, she begins signing, but Clint is not very good at signing and can’t read lips at all. “You rely too much on technology”, Maya tells Clint. But then Maya was either born deaf or lost her hearing at a very young age and grew up with signing and lip reading, whereas Clint lost his hearing as an adult and is more likely to rely on technology. Traditionally, Marvel has been better with regard to disability representation than many others – not that that’s a high bar – and had disabled characters (Daredevil, Professor X, Nick Fury) as early as the 1960s. Nonetheless, it’s great to see not one but two deaf characters in a superhero show of all things. I also liked it how the sound of altogether absent or heavily muted whenever we’re viewing the action from the POV of Clint or Maya.

Maya – with Kazi serving as her interpreter – has no idea that Clint used to be Ronin, but think that it’s Kate. Clint points out that this makes no sense, because Kate is much too young. He also tells Maya that Ronin is dead. “Who got him?” Maya wants to know. “Black Widow”, Clint replies, which from his POV is absolutely true. He was Ronin until Black Widow tracked him down and he became Hawkeye again. Maya, on the other hand, is not convinced, since Black Widow is conveniently dead and can neither deny nor confirm that she stopped Ronin.

The interrogation ends when Clint frees from himself from his duct tape bonds and proceeds to mop up the tracksuit mafia, using various toys and even a ball pit as weapons. But Maya is still a damned good martial artist. She manages to knock Clint’s hearing aid out of his ear and promptly steps on it, leaving Clint at a serious disadvantage. However, once Clint grabs hold of his bow and arrows, the tide turns. He nails Maya to the nearest wall and frees Kate, who has been struggling with her own duct tape bonds.

Clint and Kate flee the toy store. Outside, Kate wants to “borrow” a vintage Dodge Challenger, but Clint points out that car is much too pretty to destroy and instead hotwires an equally old, but much less flashy model. Clint wants Kate to drive, but she hops into the passenger seat (and in fact, I wondered whether Kate, who appears to be a lifelong New Yorker, can’t drive, since she never had to), so Clint has to drive, while Kate holds off the pursuing tracksuit mafia (including Maya driving the Dodge Challenger Clint wanted to spare) with Clint’s stash of trick arrows.

Compared to what Alarm für Cobra 11 has been dishing up for twenty-five years now, car chases in US TV shows are often underwhelming and this includes Marvel shows that such The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Therefore, I was thrilled how good the car chase in Hawkeye was. Very different from Alarm für Cobra 11, but just as action-packed.

A large part of the fun is that Clint does not label his trick arrows and Kate has no idea what each one does. The effects range from a putty arrow (which turns the windshield of Kazi’s truck into a big mess of purple putty) via a suction cup arrow (which does nothing in this context, but proves useful later on), an arrow which emits purple smoke, an explosive arrow, which takes out a carload of tracksuit mafia goons, an arrow which emits grappling hooks which draw in Christmas trees during a chase across a Christmas tree lot.

The chase comes to a head on one of New York City’s many suspension bridges (Tor.com reviewer Annika Rollock claims it’s the Triborough Bridge, though the suspension bridge in Hawkeye has a second deck for subway train, which the Triborough Bridge does not appear to have), when Clint and Kate are forced to brake to avoid crashing into a car ahead of them. Clint tells Kate to trust him and fire a regular, non-trick arrow into the air. Once she does, Clint hits it with an arrow labelled PYM (well, at least that one was labelled), which uses a small quantity of Pym particles to turn Kate’s arrow into a giant arrow, which smashed and disables the tracksuit mafia’s cars (and very likely damages whatever bridge it is). The Dodge Challenger is also destroyed, much to Clint’s chagrin. Before the tracksuit mafia catches up with Clint and Kate on foot, they both dive off the bridge, using Clint’s grapling hook arrow trick from Avengers to land on a subway car on the lower deck of the bridge. Kate also learns what suction cup arrows are good for.

We next see Clint and Kate aboard the subway, where Clint praises Kate’s archery skills, while they both realise almost simultaneously that they need to walk the dog Kate rescued (who acquires a name – Pizza Dog – in this episode). We now get several nice scenes of character development and bonding between Clint and Kate. The most touching of these scene is when Clint’s phone rings, while Clint’s hearing aid is still out of comission, and Kate has to scribble the replies of Clint’s little son Nathaniel on a notepad, so Clint can talk to him in real time. That moment made me misty-eyed (and not just me, both Caroline Siede and Germain Lussier also call that scene heartbreaking), especially when Nathaniel tells Clint that it’s okay if he can’t be home for Christmas. Both Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld show some great acting here, Renner as the world-weary superhero who really just wants to be home with his family, but has to mop of his own and Kate’s messes, and Steinfeld as the young woman who’s lost her father and now witnesses the love of another father for his kid.

Once Clint has gotten his hearing aid repaired, courtesy of a slightly dodgy doctor, there is another great scene in a diner, where Kate continues her efforts to improve Clint’s branding by designing a new costume for him, which is basically Jack Kirby’s classic Hawkeye costume (only that Kate can’t draw, unlike Kirby) and which Clint categorically refuses to wear. Kate also tells Clint that she is finally what she always wanted to be, a heroine who protects others. Clint cautions her that yes, he knows how she feels, cause he’s been there, but that there is a price as well. He also tells Kate that he’s no one’s role model (much to the shock of Kate who has idolised Hawkeye since she was a little girl) and that his job was basically to be a ghost, to come and do the job and go unnoticed.

It’s worthwhile remembering that Clint was never supposed to be an Avenger. He was not supposed to be a part of Nick Fury’s Avengers initiative, and only got dragged into the whole mess because Loki took over his mind. And the only reason the newly deprogrammed Clint winds up joining the Avengers is because he happens to be with Black Widow when Steve and Tony come to fetch her and because he can fly the Quinjet. Like Kate, Clint, the invisible and silent S.H.I.E.L.D. agent clearly relished the opportunity to finally be a hero out in the open. Unlike Kate, he also knows what his job has cost him, namely his health and almost his family.

I noted in my review of the first two episodes that Hawkeye, Star Trek Discovery and Masters of the Universe: Revelation all deal with the themes of trauma, grief and how to overcome them. However, in this episode Hawkeye also delves into the theme of how to combine heroics with family life and if this is possible at all, a theme that also loomed large in Masters of the Universe: Revelation, where various characters have very different approaches of combining family and heroics. We have the original Sorceress who leaves her partner and baby daughter, because she believes that she cannot combine her duties as the sorceress with having a family. We have Duncan a.k.a. Man-at-Arms who somehow manages to combine his life as a hero with being a single Dad to Teela and adopting every stray he comes across. We have Adam who keeps his heroic identity as He-Man a secret to protect the people he loves and only winds up hurting them. And we have Teela who realises that becoming the Sorceress does not have to mean giving up the people you love.

Clint handles balancing heroics and family life similar to Duncan, only that unlike Single Dad Duncan, Clint has the benefit of a supportive partner. And while Clint may not be perfect as a Dad and husband, he actually does okay. He never keeps his identity a secret, his family knows what he does and support him. And while Clint may not always be there and probably missed a lot of moments in his kids’ lives, he tries to be there for them as much as he can. As for Kate, we don’t know where her path will lead. Right now, she’s young and has no attachments except for her mother (and that relationship is complicated) and her dog, so a superhero career seems attractive. In ten or twenty years… who knows?

Clint knows that Maya is not the true leader of the tracksuit mafia, but that there’s someone above her, someone dangerous, possibly Wilson Fisk. Meawhile, Kate is still suspicious of her Mom’s fiancé Jack Duquesne and with good reason, too. So she suggests sneaking into the penthouse of her Mom, while her Mom is away, and hack into the databases of her Mom’s security company to find out more about the tracksuit mafia. So that’s what they do. Clint wanders the house, impressed by the lavish home Kate grew up in (does he recognise the building from the Battle of New York, we wonder), while Kate manages to find a mysterious company named Sloan Limited listed as Kazi’s employer (but how does Kate know his name, let alone how to spell it?). Her attempt to dig up dirt on Jack gets her locked out of the system, however. Though Kate and Clint will have the chance to ask the man himself, once Clint finds his own retractable Ronin sword at his throat, since the apartment was not as empty as Clint and Kate though after all.

This episode doesn’t do a lot to advance the plot beyond introducing Maya’s backstory, though it does have both nice action sequences and character moments. In many ways, Hawkeye reminds me of the Netflix Marvel series (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, The Defenders), only that it balances the grittiness and fairly small scale street level threats better with humour and banter, whereas the Netflix series often became annoyingly grim to the point that I quickly stopped watching them, even though I initially enjoyed them. The holiday setting adds some much needed cheer to the proceedings and the fact that Hawkeye is short, only six episodes, also means it won’t get bogged down with padding like the Marvel Netflix series. Plus, Hawkeye also has some interesting things to say about grief, family and the costs of being a hero, whereas the Netflix series (except for series 1 of Jessica Jones) didn’t have a lot to say.

All in all, I’m enjoying it and looking forward to the back half of Hawkeye.