Christopher L. Bennett's Blog, page 6

Thoughts on GODZILLA MINUS ONE (Spoilers)

I immediately renewed my Netflix subscription on the morning of June 1, 2024 when I learned that Godzilla Minus One had been released on the streamer without prior warning. I wonder if there’s some metatextual joke there, given how often Godzilla’s own attacks come without warning. This film certainly left an impact as powerful as any of Godzilla’s rampages.

Godzilla Minus One (its actual original title, Gojira Mainasu Wan, rendered in print as ゴジラ -1.0
(マイナスワン) is written, directed, and supervised in its visual effects by Takashi Yamazaki, who made a splash in 2007 with a Godzilla-attack fantasy sequence in the historical drama film Always Sunday on Third Street 2. He’s directed two films that I’ve seen and had a good opinion of, both based on established franchises: the 2010 live-action adaptation of Space Battleship Yamato (aka Star Blazers), which he did not write, and the 2019 3D-animated Lupin III: The First, which he did.

The title was reportedly chosen to symbolize its post-WWII setting, a Japan that’s been blasted back to zero by the war and is then pushed into the negative by Godzilla’s attack. But I suspect there’s another meaning to it, in that it’s the first Godzilla film set chronologically earlier than the original 1954 film (discounting flashbacks and time travel). Of course, it’s not in continuity with any prior Godzilla universe, but it can still be seen as a “G minus one” appearance preceding his usual debut date. The only other instances I know of where a Godzilla story focused on the period between WWII and 1954 were both in flashbacks in the Legendary Monsterverse: the comic Godzilla: Awakening and the TV series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which offer two contradictory versions of the discovery of Godzilla and the origin of the Monarch organization.

The film begins in 1945, near the end of the war, with kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) landing on a repair base on Odoshima (Odo Island), the site used since the 1954 film as Godzilla’s home territory. (He’s addressed mostly as Shikishima, but Koichi is easier to type.) He claims that mechanical trouble kept him from fulfilling his suicide run, but head mechanic Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki) finds nothing wrong with the plane. He initially approves of Koichi refusing to throw his life away pointlessly in a war Japan is losing. But that night, they’re attacked by a dinosaur-sized “kaibutsu” (monster) that one mechanic reports is called Gojira by the Odo natives, who subsist in part on the deep-sea fish he brings up in his wake. Tachibana orders Koichi to shoot the beast with his plane’s heavy gun, but Koichi hesitates and everyone but himself and Tachibana is killed. Tachibana despises him for his cowardice.

Back home, Koichi finds his Tokyo neighborhood firebombed to rubble, his family and neighbors killed. The sole surviving neighbor, Sumiko Ota (Sakura Ando), blames him for failing to do his job of dying in battle, out of the mistaken belief that his death would have somehow spared Tokyo. He stumbles into helping a scavenger, Noriko Oishi (Minami Hamabe), care for an orphaned infant named Akiko that neither one could abandon. With the city in ruins and the government doing nothing, there’s nobody to care for an orphan except the two of them, and Sumiko, who grudgingly helps out when neither of them has any idea how to feed a nursing baby.

Koichi and Noriko get in the habit of serving in loco parentis to Akiko-chan, but Koichi keeps his distance, haunted by nightmares of the war and Godzilla. To support his pseudo-family, he takes a job on a minesweeping boat clearing the waters around Japan — dangerous, but safer than kamikaze work. Noriko orders him not to die.

Koichi is dismayed by the run-down, tiny wooden minesweeper until the crew explains it’s immune to magnetic mines. The crew of the Shinseimaru — meaning the S.S. Rebirth — includes Captain Seiji Akitsu (Kuranosuke Sasaki), young apprentice Shiro Mizushima (Yuki Yamada), and Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), an ex-Navy scientist, which will obviously make him important later.

We’re in 1946 now, and there’s a brief cutaway to Godzilla being irradiated by American nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll, while Koichi gets to know his crew. When they dine at his rebuilt home, they’re surprised to learn he and Noriko aren’t married, and angered when he chastises toddler Akiko (Sae Nagatani) for calling him “father.” He still refuses to let go of his shame and embrace his new life. Recognizing that he’s unlikely to take her as his wife, Noriko ends up taking a desk job in the rebuilt, prosperous Ginza district to support herself.

A montage reveals that the US military and Japanese government are aware of Godzilla, now mutated to giant size by their nuclear tests, the same origin used in the Heisei-era Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah. However, the United States refuses to risk escalating tensions with the Soviets by intervening, leaving the impoverished Japan to fend for itself. The Shinseimaru and its sister craft (which drag a cable between them to cut through mines’ anchor chains) are assigned to delay Godzilla with salvaged mines until the cruiser Takao arrives, but Goji takes out the sister boat in one bite. The now-iconic boat chase scene ensues, and when Koichi manages to set off a mine in Godzilla’s mouth, it does significant damage, but Goji regenerates in a matter of moments, an ability added to the character in the Millennium film series, though his regeneration is far faster here. (Both the radiation-induced gigantism and the regeneration ability are traits that originated with Frankenstein in Toho’s Frankenstein Conquers the World before being given to Godzilla decades later.) The Takao finally arrives and saves the minesweeper crew, but it falls prey to Goji’s atomic ray. Koichi is wounded in the blast and wakes up in the hospital. He learns that the government is covering up what happened and making no effort to evacuate Tokyo in advance of Godzilla’s inevitable landfall.

At home, challenged by Noriko, he finally reveals what happened on Odo Island and tells her he felt just as helpless at Godzilla’s return. He’s suffering deep PTSD to the point of believing he may have died on Odo Island with everything since being a dying dream. Noriko holds him and urges him to feel that they’re alive. She tells him that her parents ordered her to live with their dying breaths (resonating with what she said to Koichi before), so she feels a duty to stay alive for them.

But just as Koichi finally feels ready to make peace with the past and move forward, Godzilla attacks Ginza. Noriko barely survives when her train car is dragged into the air by Godzilla (the guy loves eating trains). This is perhaps the most implausible part of the film, both in Noriko’s survival and in the unlikelihood that she, of all the people in Ginza, would have been the one person to have such a close encounter with Godzilla and survive it. It feels like something tacked on from a sillier movie.

Yet as Noriko flees with the other citizens, she’s so paralyzed by fear that she almost forgets her own words about staying alive, until Koichi shows up to drag her away. But then Godzilla fires his atomic ray at the defending tanks, causing a blast like a small nuclear bomb, and Noriko pushes Koichi into an alley just before she’s blown away by the gale-force blast wave. Koichi is plunged back into despair, feeling that the ghosts of the Odo Island mechanics are punishing him for daring to move on with his life.

Still, Noda and the Shinseimaru crew convince Koichi to join them at a meeting of ex-Navy personnel led by former captain Tatsuo Hotta (Mio Tanaka). Since the government has abandoned them, they’ve organized their own plan devised by Noda, and it’s brilliant. Noda plans to defeat Godzilla with physics, wrapping him in freon canisters that will encase him in bubbles, removing his buoyancy and dropping him into a deep offshore trench, causing a rapid pressure increase no living organism could withstand. Failing that, a local balloon factory is supplying some fast-inflating marine salvage balloons that will drag him back up and kill him with rapid decompression if the rapid compression didn’t do it. The attendees are skeptical and concerned at the risk, but Hotta assures them that it’s strictly a volunteer mission. Some men leave to be with their families, but the rest remain, wanting to do their part to protect Japan.

Koichi is still doubtful of Noda’s plan to lure Godzilla with a recording of his roar. He asks if the group can muster up a fighter plane from which he can strafe Godzilla and anger him into following the plane to the trench. Captain Akitsu suspects he has a death wish, and Koichi doesn’t deny it.

Noda rustles up a Kyushu J7W Shinden, a prototype fighter designed for defense in a land invasion that never came, so it’s deteriorated and unflyable. Koichi goes to great lengths to find the missing Tachibana, giving him a chance to share in the revenge on Godzilla, and eventually lures him out with a letter pretending to blame him for the Odo Island massacre so he’ll come demanding an apology. Tachibana goes along when Koichi reveals his plan to load the plane with bombs and fly it into Godzilla’s mouth, blowing him apart from the inside (since he saw that the mine in Goji’s mouth did more damage than external attacks).

In a speech to his team, Noda brings the film’s subtextual themes into explicit text, denouncing the wartime government that treated the Japanese people’s lives as disposable and the postwar government that’s done little better. He declares that their goal is to defeat Godzilla with zero casualties, to live for the future rather than dying for it. Yet Koichi still seems bent on fulfilling his kamikaze mission at last, leaving Akiko in Sumiko’s care. Captain Akitsu and Noda order young apprentice Shiro to stay behind; Shiro fears it’s because he was too young to fight in the war and isn’t good enough, but Akitsu tells him that not knowing war is something to be proud of, and something the nation will need going forward.

Inevitably, no plan survives its encounter with Godzilla. He arrives on land too early, but Noda orders the destroyers to launch, since getting Goji over the trench is their only shot. It’s up to Koichi to anger him with gunfire and lure him back out to sea. Once there, the plan goes off as Noda hoped, but it’s unclear if it worked, and Goji tears through the balloons before they lift him back to the surface. The two surviving destroyers aren’t powerful enough to lift him the rest of the way, but a flotilla of civilian craft (with Shiro aboard despite Akitsu’s orders) comes out to lend a hand and lift him up. Unfortunately, he’s still alive and about to fire his ray, but Koichi plunges his plane into Godzilla’s mouth and blows the top of his head off.

Did he…? No. After the fleet’s crew ritually salutes their fallen foe as his body disintegrates and sinks, they spot Koichi’s parachute, and a flashback reveals that Tachibana installed an ejection seat and told Koichi to live. Not only that, but Sumiko got a telegram while he was in the air — Noriko has been found alive. Koichi rushes to her hospital room and they reunite joyfully, a family at last. (While in the depths, Godzilla begins to regenerate…)

–

Wow. This was an incredibly powerful, dramatic, exciting movie. It took them 69 years, but they finally made a Godzilla film even better than the original. Arguably it’s a film that deserves to be seen in the theater, but I’m kind of glad I didn’t, since it was powerful enough to watch on my computer, and there was a point midway through when I needed to take a break and recover. This is an intense, emotional movie, and a harrowing one. It’s as much of a powerful historical drama as it is a monster movie, and it excels at both.

It’s also intensely political, every bit as much as the original. But while the 1954 film was a disguised condemnation of America’s continued development of weapons of mass destruction, specifically its 1954 nuclear tests that irradiated or killed the crew of a Japanese fishing boat and dumped fallout onto Japanese territory, Godzilla Minus One is a scathing critique of the Imperial Japanese government’s profound devaluation of the lives of its citizens, cavalierly throwing them away as cannon fodder and doing little to prevent their homes and cities from being bombed to rubble. There’s some incidental shade thrown at postwar America for ignoring its obligations to its defeated foe and leaving it to fend for itself, but most of the film’s condemnation is toward Japan’s government, both wartime and afterward, for its profound neglect of its people. (I don’t know enough about Japanese politics to know if there’s some more current commentary intended.)

It’s interesting to compare this to Yamazaki’s Space Battleship Yamato, which by sheer coincidence I watched on the Crunchyroll streaming service a week earlier. Both films have a similarly bleak and desperate tone, a cynicism toward authority, and a spirit of a community courageously coming together to fight for the future against impossible odds. But while Yamato glorified self-sacrifice and the heroism of dying for one’s cause (to the point that, let’s just say, no sequel was ever on the table), G-1 takes the opposite view, condemning the kamikaze mentality as a symptom of the larger problem of devaluing life and arguing that it’s far more noble and important to live for your nation, and for your family. It’s a beautiful, life-affirming theme, and I was really glad to see it.

In fact — bear with me — I found some of the key plot beats of this film predictable, but in a good way. I could see the way the story was laying out the theme that living for others is more important than dying for them, so I could feel that it would be wrong for the film to end with Koichi killing himself to stop Godzilla, even though that seemed to be where he was heading the whole time. It was clear throughout that his death wish was a consequence of his trauma and guilt, and that if he’d gone through with it, even if he’d succeeded in taking Godzilla with him, it would have been a failure and a tragedy, not a victory. And as soon as Sumiko got that telegram, I could guess what it was about, and how much worse it would have made the tragedy of Koichi’s sacrifice. So I was very relieved when that parachute appeared. The climax played out the way I felt it should have.

This is an excellently made film, with impressive visual effects, if Godzilla’s design is oddly small-headed. The cast does terrific work with this dramatic, emotional, richly character-driven story. All the actors are new to me except Yuki Yamada (Shiro), whom I saw in his acting debut as Joe Gibken in the tokusatsu series Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger (which was very loosely adapted into the vastly inferior Power Rangers Super Megaforce). Joe was a cool, unflappable gunman, so it’s interesting to see Yamada play a much more boyish and insecure character. It’s also weird that the character he played at 21 was a seasoned veteran warrior, while the character he played at 33 was a youth who wasn’t old enough to fight in the recent war.

Incidentally, one other parallel between this film and Yamazaki’s Yamato is that they both feature ships named Yukikaze (Snowy Wind). Here, it’s the actual WWII destroyer of that name, the only ship of its class that survived the war (and in real life was given to China in reparations and renamed). In all incarnations of Yamato, which drew a lot on WWII iconography, it was the spaceship commanded by Mamoru Kodai (Alex Wildstar in Star Blazers), the elder brother of the protagonist Susume Kodai (Derek Wildstar), and was lost in the opening battle of the series and film.

Like Yamato, G-1 is scored by Yamazaki’s frequent collaborator Naoki Satou, also known for his work on the Rurouni Kenshin and Precure anime franchises. Satou brings in Akira Ifukube’s iconic Godzilla themes for the Ginza attack, the climactic sea battle, and the end titles, though the Ginza cue seems to be lifted from Mothra vs. Godzilla, since there are two places where the melody of “Mahara Mothra” is incongruously interpolated.

Godzilla Minus One is widely regarded one of the best Godzilla films ever and one of the best films of 2023, period. I certainly feel it deserves those accolades, and it seems surprising that its only Oscar win was for visual effects. Encouragingly, Yamazaki has said he’d be interested in doing a sequel continuing these characters’ stories and exploring the aftermath of G-1’s events. It would be great to have a new ongoing Godzilla film continuity in Japan, something we haven’t seen in live action since 2003. And it would be great to see the further development of this continuity and its characters and world. (But what would the next one be called, then? Godzilla Zero? Sounds like a diet Godzilla with no calories.)

Runaround

Update: Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories and the rest of the books in eSpec Books’ 10th-anniversary Kickstarter have met their minimum funding goal, but there’s still nearly a month to contribute and get all sorts of bonuses and stretch-goal goodies!

And now, on with the post…

I decided last Friday morning to let my new robot vacuum run in pure Auto mode until it ran down and returned to the charging base, to see whether I could trust it to run unsupervised. I quickly figured out that I can’t. Rather than starting with the main room like it did the first few times, it made an immediate right turn out of the room and spent nearly half an hour vacuuming just my kitchenette and bedroom (I had the bathroom door closed to simplify things a bit). Every time it came near the edge of the living room rug, it turned back. It did manage to get onto the carpet once, but promptly went back out after a few moments.

So eventually I got tired of waiting for it to get lucky and manually drove it into the living room, then kept sentry and blocked its path with my feet when it tried to leave the carpet again. After 20-some minutes of that, I decided to let it go where it wanted (including the bathroom) so I could see what it would do when its charge ran down. It’s supposed to return automatically to the charging base when it hits 10%, but I didn’t remember what the percentage was, so I may have jumped the gun and hit “Recharge” while it was at 11%.) Anyway, it was in my bedroom at the time and just seemed to get lost under the bed rather than heading for the charger. I figured that might be because I interrupted its auto mode and restarted it away from the charging base. The instructions say to start it from the base or it won’t remember its way back.

Anyway, I gave up, just turned it off, and carried it back to the living room. After cleaning out the very full dust compartment (at least it was effective at that), I decided to turn it upside down and check the bits on the bottom. It’s a good thing I did, since the rotating brushes had a lot of my shed long hairs tangled around them. I thought I wouldn’t have to deal with that anymore with this new vacuum, but at least it’s not as bad as it was with the old vacuum’s brush. And the rotating brushes are detachable, making them easier to clear.

I was worried at first because the app showed the battery charge draining really quickly, down to 75% in less than 3 minutes. But the draining slowed after that and it took about an hour to get down to 20%, at which point it dropped quickly again. Batteries are weird.

So anyway, surprised by how much hair the vacuum was still picking up after multiple cleanings, I decided to have a go with my hand-operated Swiffer thingy that you push across the carpet to pick up hair and debris on an adhesive strip. I still got a lot of hair, attesting to how inadequately powerful my old vacuum was and how inadequately often I’ve used it. But I tend to operate by Newton’s First Law — when I’m at rest, it’s hard to get me started, but when I do get my mind set on pursuing something, I can’t stop myself. So I went to even greater extremes — I got out my old hairbrush and ran it over the whole carpet in both rooms (Saturday night and Sunday morning, since it’s very tiring), and there was still a startling amount of hair and tiny specks of debris buried deep between the fibers.

Ironic — I got this vacuum to make it easier to keep the floors clean, and I ended up working harder at it than I ever have. Though hopefully it will be easier from now on.

Finally, I did another hour-long robo-vacuum session Sunday morning to clean up the debris I dredged up with the hairbrush, and it came out with relatively little hair in the receptacle and hardly any caught on the brushes, so hopefully I’ve finally gotten most of it. I’ll just have to use the robot more regularly to keep the carpets reasonably clean. (And it’s solidified my determination that if and when I move to a new place, it had better have hardwood floors. Shag carpets are nasty.)

This time, I was determined to let the robot run on full auto until its charge ran down, no manual intervention. Yet again it immediately turned right into the hall and refused to cross back onto the living room carpet for more than half an hour. Eventually I gave up and pushed it back onto the carpet with my foot, but I think that confused it, since it got stuck under my table for a while until I moved the chair blocking the front.

I suspect the reason for this has to do with the metal strip along the edge of the carpet reflecting the robot’s infrared eye beams and telling it there’s an obstacle or a dropoff it needs to avoid. Except it doesn’t have that problem with the edge of the bedroom carpet. I think it’s because it usually turns right to enter the bedroom while it comes at the living room head-on, so the reflection is more direct. The fact that the metal strip on the living room carpet is a bit more steeply angled might also contribute.

I looked around for my black tape to put over the edge strip, but I think it’s in the car. So I just scribbled on the edge strip with a black Sharpie… and it seemed to work. The robot crossed the threshold the first time, then avoided it a second time, perhaps because it was pointed at a less Sharpied part. So I marked up the strip more thoroughly and it crossed over again, but it did so at a diagonal, so I can’t be sure the marker was the reason. I also don’t know how long it’ll last. It didn’t rub off with a dry paper towel, but it did rub off some with a wet one.

So anyway, when I let the vacuum run down, it did indeed switch into charge mode as soon as it hit 10%. But it still had no memory of where to go. It had just turned into the bedroom again at that point, and instead of reversing course and heading back toward the charger, it just blindly groped around the edges of the room until it made its way back out, then tried to get into the kitchen until I took mercy and nudged it toward the living room. It was kind of painful to watch. I’m not sure if it’s designed to work that way, or if putting the charger underneath a metal bookcase is having a Faraday-cage effect on its homing signal. Unfortunately, there’s really no better place to put it.

Anyway, the conclusion is that I can’t depend on the robot to run completely unsupervised; at least occasional manual intervention is required. But at least I can trust it to run mostly on its own while I do other things, so I decided to schedule an automatic vacuuming every Sunday midmorning.

Meanwhile, I tried using my old vacuum in handheld mode to clean under the couch cushions, but the battery had drained completely after just a few days. I let it charge all day, but I was concerned at how hot the transformer got and didn’t want to leave it plugged in overnight, so I waited until the next day to finish charging it. Even fully charged, though, it had essentially no effect on the crumbs under the cushions. That’s probably why the carpets were such a mess — even when I did vacuum, it just didn’t do much good. So I concluded the old vacuum was a lost cause. It’s back in my closet now, but at some point I’ll take it to a recycling center.

Yesterday, I had an appointment to get new glasses, so afterward I went to the nearby superstore to get a new suitcase for the upcoming Shore Leave Convention. While I was there, since I’m on a cleaning kick, I decided to get a microfiber duster (which cost no more than a single box of disposable refills for the Swiffer duster I’ve been using, so it’s definitely a more economical choice) and a cordless mini-vacuum for spots the robot can’t reach, under the couch cushions, etc. The mini-vac is nicely compact and effective, except the thingy that’s supposed to hold the brush attachment in place on the crevice tool is too recessed and doesn’t lock it in well enough. Last night, I used it to vacuum my computer keyboard, and the brush attachment seems specifically designed for that, since it was just the right size to go over one row of keys. This morning, I did a long-overdue vacuuming of my car, and it did pretty well at that.

Incidentally, since the last time I got new glasses was before the pandemic, I was impressed by all the new eye-exam gadgetry and how it streamlined the process — like not needing eye drops to dilate my pupils anymore, so there was no waiting. I was wondering if they also had some nifty new technology that would let them complete the lenses in less than the traditional one hour. Instead, they told me they phased that out because the digital lens maker (or whatever) is too big to fit in the store, so they have to order it in and it’ll take a week to 10 days. This in a chain that, for as long as I’ve been going to them, has been defined by their “glasses ready in about an hour” promise. So progress giveth and progress taketh away.

Announcing ALEYARA’S DESCENT AND OTHER STORIES — Kickstarter campaign open now!

It’s been over a year since I had anything new published except on my Patreon, but that’s about to change. To commemorate its tenth anniversary, eSpec Books is holding a massive Kickstarter campaign for seven new books from seven authors, including my second short fiction collection for eSpec, Aleyara’s Descent and Other Stories.

Here’s the cover blurb for the collection:

Infinite Dimensions. Endless Possibilities. Universal Questions.

Across multiple realities and millennia of past and future history, heroes human and otherwise challenge their limits and brave the unknown in pursuit of the fundamental truths of the universe—and each other.

From bestselling author Christopher L. Bennett comes Aleyara’s Descent, eleven tales portraying the search for understanding, connection, and hope that unites seekers of all species, eras, and realities.

In an alien past, four impetuous youths brave a forbidden realm to discover their world’s true nature.A first contact between a UFO believer and a real alien doesn’t go the way either one expects.Scientists battling a kaiju invasion must overcome the mistrust of the insular enclave they strive to protect.A government agent’s drive to safeguard the future hits a speed bump when she questions a suspected time traveler.The inheritor of a fabled superhero name must prove herself by solving the one mystery her predecessor never could.

These and other diverse tales, many in print for the first time, bring a multiverse of aliens, monsters, time travelers, and heroes to life with plausibility and sensitivity.

Includes the brand-new tale “Nilly’s Choice,” a companion story to the Arachne novels.

Only four of the stories in this collection have been professionally published before, while all but one of the rest come from my Patreon’s Original Fiction tier (index here), which has so few subscribers that they’ll be completely new to most of my readers. They come in a mix of different continuities, breaking down thusly:

Arachne/Troubleshooter Universe:

“Conventional Powers” (Troubleshooters): Analog Sep/Oct 2019“Legacy Hero” (Troubleshooters): Patreon“Nilly’s Choice”: Patreon“Aleyara’s Descent”: Analog, May/June 2023

Braneworlds:

“What Slender Threads”: Patreon“Though Worlds Divide Us”: Amazing Stories (online), April 2023

Standalone stories:

“The Moving Finger Writes”: Patreon“Abductive Reasoning”: Analog Sep/Oct 2017“Early Warning Systems”: Never before published“The Monsters We Make”: Patreon“Growth Industry”: Patreon

I’ve revised most of the stories to offer a little something new. Mostly it’s just a few minor textual edits, but I did a substantial polish on “The Moving Finger Writes,” whose version on Patreon was a little rough. In “Conventional Powers” and “The Monsters We Make,” I restored some material I’d deleted for space, about 300 words’ worth for the former and a paragraph for the latter. In “Growth Industry,” I added a few bits that didn’t occur to me until after the story’s Patreon publication.

In addition, a digital copy of my Troubleshooter vignette “They Also Serve” is one of the campaign’s stretch goals, and the bonuses include either digital or print copies of Aleyara’s Descent, Among the Wild Cybers, and Arachne’s Crime, plus the chance to be Tuckerized in my next novel. And of course there’s a whole bunch of other stuff from the six other authors represented in this campaign.

The campaign is open until June 26! The more pledges we get, the more stretch-goal goodies the donors will get!

Little Lost Robot

Okay, my new robot vacuum isn’t lost, exactly, but it’s the closest Asimov story title I could find. After a few vacuuming runs, I find myself inclined to name the robot “Wrongway,” since it can’t seem to get the hang of navigating my apartment’s layout and keeps trying to revisit areas it’s already vacuumed while neglecting others. There are also places I can’t leave it to navigate unsupervised, like under my computer desk, since the area rug under my chair keeps curling up and preventing it from climbing onto it. It doesn’t seem to have any memory of its course, just keeps moving at random and changing direction when it bumps into things — although it does seem to have enough spatial awareness of a room to switch after a while to edge-cleaning mode.

So I doubt I’ll be able to get any use out of the scheduling function in the app, setting it up to run on its own without supervision. There are points where I have to take manual control, or at least put a foot in front of it to stop it and make it turn. Trying both the remote and the app, I find that the latter allows much finer manual control for rotating the vacuum, but you have to hold the forward and reverse arrows down to keep it moving, whereas with the remote it continues moving until you press pause. I also get the impression that manual mode drains the vacuum’s battery considerably faster.

I keep finding small tufts of fluff and debris and tiny shards of broken glass on the carpet after vacuumings. I think that means the robot is powerful enough to drag up things that my old vacuum missed and that got pushed down into the pile over the years, but not quite powerful enough to suck them in, because the carpet fibers still have a grip on them, and because it’s only got so much space in its receptacle. I guess I just need to keep picking them up manually, and keep vacuuming often enough to gradually work through it all. Incidentally, this morning, while picking up some leftover fluff around the feet of one of my media shelves, I found a decades-old 3×5 notepad that had somehow ended up under it. How the heck did that happen?

It turns out that I did need to move my wi-fi router after all; it was okay when the vacuum bumped into its front, but not so much when it pushed against the side. Fortunately, I was able to move a bookend to create just enough empty space on the bottom shelf of the bookcase behind the router that I could move it up there. I’m concerned it may have slightly less ventilation there, but I left as much space around it as I could.

–

In other news, my shoes were falling apart, so I bought a new pair. Oddly, the new shoes, which were the smallest size available of their design, seem looser than the previous pair, even though their soles are exactly the same size and shape. On my walk yesterday, my little toes got badly chafed from the shoes sliding around so much. I tried tightening the laces as much as I could, which helped some, but I guess I just have to hope they and my feet adjust to each other over time.

It’s weird — these shoes are loose on my feet at size 8, but some of my old shoeboxes I still have in the closet tell me that I used to wear size 9 or 9 1/2. Have the sizes been redefined, or am I shrinking?

Hi, robot!

I’ve taken another small step into the 21st century: I bought a robot vacuum cleaner. My old cordless vacuum (a hybrid handheld model with a wide base and detachable long handle to make it a floor vacuum) hasn’t worked well in recent years, and I had to admit to myself that I was never going to get into the habit of vacuuming as regularly as I should. So I finally decided to follow my cousins’ example and get one of those hockey-puck-shaped robot vacuums.

I was somewhat concerned about whether an automated vacuum might have problems with things like my wi-fi router, which I have to keep on the floor due to my apartment’s inconvenient layout requiring me to put the computer desk on the opposite wall from the phone jack. But I found a model that purported to avoid knocking things over due to its infrared sensors and such. It’s a black plastic puck with three wide rectangular infrared “eyes” on its front bumper, and having grown up in the ’80s, I kind of feel they should have a red light sweeping back and forth in them and going “whoo-whoo.” It’s not as good at evasion as advertised, since it does bump into things before stopping and turning around, but at least it didn’t knock the router over, just nudged it a bit. (The front bumper pushes inward, which I guess is for both detecting and softening contact with objects.)

The vacuum comes with a remote control for which batteries were not included, and I didn’t have any functional AAAs. Fortunately, it can also be operated by a phone app, which proved easy to download and set up. (The app instruction booklet contained a QR code for downloading the app. I gotta admit, that’s a handy invention.) The app not only works as a wi-fi remote control, but tracks the battery charge (which depletes fairly quickly with use) and the brush and filter usage so you know when to replace them. I got batteries in my grocery trip this afternoon, and the remote also works just fine, though it has fewer functions.

Unfortunately, it seems the poor little guy was built to rove in wider spaces than my cluttered apartment, and often seemed to get confused trying to navigate around things in auto mode. This relatively basic model apparently doesn’t have the ability to map a room, just to wander around at random and remember what areas it’s already covered, or so the online reviews claimed. It actually ended up revisiting a lot of the same areas and giving less attention to others. I had to take manual control sometimes with the app or remote to get it into certain areas. I don’t know if it’ll be practical to schedule it to run unsupervised, as the app allows you to do.

Still, it’s certainly an improvement over my old vacuum, more powerful, easier to use, and easier to clean after use, since it doesn’t have a big roller brush to get tangled up with my long hair. (Although the instructions do say the forward caster will have to be de-haired at times.) It seems to work well so far. I used the old vacuum twice before the robot came so that it wouldn’t be too overworked on its first day (as I said, I don’t vacuum nearly often enough), but it still picked up a significant amount of hair, dust, and debris, and a moderately lesser amount the second time I used it. (I did it once this morning with the app and once this afternoon with the remote, both to test out the two control methods and because I knew the floors could use the extra attention.)

It even has a homing function to find its charging base and “climb” onto it automatically. (It doesn’t recommend you do it manually since it wouldn’t align right. Although there’s also a port on the robot’s side where you can plug in the charger cord directly.) I wasn’t sure at first where to put its charger in my compact apartment; the only place I could think of where it wouldn’t get stepped on was just a little too far from a power outlet, and in retrospect would’ve been too enclosed for its navigation. I finally thought of the space under my DVD shelf, which was stuffed with old audio and video cassette tapes I rarely if ever used. I moved the videotapes to a cardboard box that fits snugly under one of the plastic tables I use as speaker stands, and moved the audiotapes’ box to an adjacent shelf, clearing up a cozy little nest for the robot, right next to where I kept the old vacuum anyway. The instructions say you should ideally leave a couple of feet clear around the base on all sides so the robot can find it easily, and my robot did have a little trouble finding the base at one point, since it seems to default to turning counterclockwise even when it should turn clockwise. But that’s another case where I can take manual control to put it close enough to the dock. Indeed, as I wrote this, I realized that what I should do is just turn it off to empty the dust receptacle when I’m done, physically place it in front of the dock, and then turn it back on and hit the homing/recharge button.

In thinking about what to do with my old vacuum, I realized it might be worth keeping it around to use as a handheld for under the couch cushions, or to get to areas too narrow for the robot. So I decided to move its charging thingy to another outlet so I could keep its battery charged for occasional use. It’s got both a connector that goes into the vacuum and a side slot for a spare battery I don’t have anymore, so I thought I’d just use the side slot for the battery and store the old vacuum in the closet. But the contacts in the side slot were badly corroded. I had to spend some time applying vinegar, paper towels, and a nail file to scrape off enough corrosion to make a connection. As it happens, I actually have two vacuums of the same model — the result of a bad spur-of-the-moment decision a dozen years ago when I wasn’t sure if I needed to replace the vacuum or just the battery and made the wrong choice — but though the duplicate charger appeared to have pristine contacts, I couldn’t get it to work at all.

So anyway, the robot’s not perfect — in particular, it has trouble rolling onto the area rug on which my computer chair rests to protect the carpet underneath, since that rug tends to curl up at the edges — but it’s nice to have a better, easier-to-use vacuum at last, and kind of a fun, futuristic one at that. Though I intended it as a labor saver, I’m feeling an urge to pull out my fridge and the adjacent block of drawers and send it to work back there. But… not today, I think. (Indeed, the very act of writing that sentence compelled me just now to go out and try it, but I quickly rediscovered how heavy the fridge is and decided it could wait.)

Now, if only I could get a robot to do my dishes and laundry…

Thoughts on the BBC TELEVISION SHAKESPEARE, Season 1

Lately I’ve been working on a sequel to my Analog novelette “Aleyara’s Descent” from last year, featuring one of my favorite alien creations, the Biauru. They’re a flamboyant, theatrical people, and I wrote “Descent” in a prose style with a strong Shakespearean influence, even incorporating some Biauru poetry excerpts into the tale. I wanted to get myself back in that idiom for the sequel, and it occurred to me that I could fulfill two goals at once, since I’ve always wanted to do a complete Shakespeare marathon and experience every one of his plays at least once in my life.

But I realized, back when I formulated that idea however long ago, that the ideal way to experience Shakespeare’s plays is in performance, not on the page. So I decided to subscribe to the Britbox streaming service, which carries the entire 37-play run of the BBC’s The Complete Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare series which aired from 1978-85, aka the BBC Television Shakespeare. (It excludes The Two Noble Kinsmen, which is considered mostly John Fletcher’s play with portions by Shakespeare, though it includes the other plays believed to be co-authored by Fletcher.) I saw many of those productions when they first aired on PBS in my teens, but it’s been so long that I barely remember most of them.

My longtime readers may recall that I posted here back in 2010 about my rewatch of the series’s 1980 production of Hamlet starring Derek Jacobi as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart as Claudius (a role he’d reprise with far greater skill in the 2009 production with David Tennant as Hamlet). In that post, I approached the play not only in its own terms, but from the perspective of an SF/fantasy fan noting the familiar genre actors in the production. There are a lot of those in this series; as a BBC production from the ’70s-’80s, it features a lot of faces that had been or would become familiar from Doctor Who, Star Wars, Star Trek, and the like. I’m going to focus on those familiar faces in talking about the series here, as well as making brief observations about the plays and productions, though not in as much depth as my Hamlet reviews.

My initial plan was to watch the plays in the order they were written, but apparently there’s a lot of uncertainty about Shakespearean chronology. Reading up on the series on Wikipedia, I learned that it went through a lot of stylistic evolution under different producers, with original producer Cedric Messina going for a more naturalistic style and realistic (if stagey) period settings, while his successors Jonathan Miller and Shaun Sutton went in a more theatrical, interpretive direction, as well as doing more unabridged adaptations. I figured it would be worthwhile to follow that progression, even if it means jumping around in Shakespeare’s own stylistic evolution over his career. I dunno, it just feels that if I’m watching this particular series of adaptations, its own evolution should come first. Maybe if it had maintained a more consistent approach over the years, I would’ve chosen to go the other way.

So anyway, let’s get on with my thoughts and reactions.

Romeo and Juliet

I’m fairly sure I saw this version before, possibly in a classroom setting, since my feeling of being underwhelmed by Patrick Ryecart’s performance of Romeo’s melancholy in Act I is very familiar. He gets somewhat better later, and Rebecca Saire (who was only 14 at the time, playing the 13-year-old Juliet) is reasonably good, but there isn’t that much chemistry between them. Indeed, there’s no chemistry at all in the masked-ball scene where they’re supposed to fall madly in love at first sight.

The one who really steals the show is Celia Johnson, who gives a very rich and fun performance as Juliet’s Nurse. Michael Hordern, whom I knew as Gandalf in the 1981 Lord of the Rings radio series, is also excellent as Capulet, Juliet’s father. They give two of the most comical and dithyrambic performances in the play, and it’s interesting how much time Shakespeare devotes to building up these slice-of-life moments of slightly dull-witted people rambling on about everyday nonsense, in contrast to the big epic speeches about love and duty and death that we expect.

The most notable name in this production, in retrospect, is a young Alan Rickman as Tybalt, which is pretty dead-on casting. He’s just what you’d expect from Alan Rickman playing a villain, even at that age (just under 32 at taping). Lady Capulet is played by Jacqueline Hill, Doctor Who‘s original female lead — which is nice to see, except she seems too old for the role. She would’ve been about 48 at the time, but Lady Capulet says she was even younger than Juliet when she gave birth to her, which would make her no more than 25. (Even Shakespeare seems to be critiquing Verona’s custom of marrying girls off so young. Juliet’s desperation to escape an arranged marriage she doesn’t want is a major driver of the tragic outcome.) Mercutio is played very roguishly by Anthony Andrews, whom I knew from Brideshead Revisited and as the featured murderer in Columbo Goes to the Guillotine, the first episode of the Columbo revival series in 1989. The Apothecary who sells Romeo the poison is Vernon Dobtcheff, who played the War Lords’ Chief Scientist in Doctor Who: “The War Games” and was the first person ever to mention the Time Lords onscreen.

Right off the bat, watching this confirmed to me that I was right to want to see these acted out rather than just printed. The actors’ interpretations of the lines help a great deal with comprehension of the archaic and poetic language, and a lot of the performances are fun to watch. Some actors do approach the lines more as poetry to recite, pausing at the line breaks, while others have more naturalistic deliveries; I prefer the latter.

Despite being TV productions, these are approached very much as theatrical performances, with long, continuous takes that often include minor dialogue flubs and rarely cut between cameras. However, I think some of the street fight sequences in R&J were shot and edited more conventionally due to the complex stunt work.

King Richard II

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this one before, since the story seemed unfamiliar to me, aside from the “sad stories of the death of kings” bit. It’s pretty confusing, with so many historical characters thrown in and abiding loosely by the events of the real history of how Richard II was overthrown by Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV. Basically, Richard exiled Henry, then stole his family lands and wealth to fund Richard’s war efforts when Henry’s father died, so Henry came back to fight for the return of his property — the idea being, I think, that he was exiled as the Duke of Hereford, but upon his father’s death he became the more senior Duke of Lancaster, negating his exile. Henry initially says he’s only fighting for the return of his unjustly stolen birthright and will be loyal to Richard again if that happens, and Richard agrees to that — but for some reason, the very next scene is Richard’s abdication and Henry’s coronation in his place. I don’t understand what happened in between to change things, and reading Wikipedia’s article on the real history doesn’t make it any clearer.

Moreover, this adaptation edits out a lot, as I found when I compared it to my Riverside Shakespeare. It omits several scenes, a couple of which convey pretty important plot points (although none that answer the above question). I’d gone into this with the belief that these adaptations were complete, but apparently many of them make significant cuts, at least in these early seasons.

Derek Jacobi plays Richard II here, and it’s a good, soulful performance as I’d expect from him. His Richard is a vain and somewhat childlike figure, obsessed with his own status and kingly privilege over his responsibilities to his people, so his protestations of being a tragic victim are not entirely persuasive. (Gee, who does that remind me of…?) Perhaps the ease with which he caved to Henry and surrendered his throne demonstrated his weakness, at least in the play. Henry is played by Jon Finch, an actor I’m not familiar with, but he’ll reprise the role of Henry IV in his namesake plays later on in the BBC series. Accomplished Shakespearean actor Sir John Gielgud, who was the Chorus in Romeo & Juliet, plays Henry’s father John of Gaunt.

The standout performances besides Jacobi are Charles Gray and Wendy Hiller as the Duke and Duchess of York, who emerge late in the play as a comically bickering couple whose performances become quite funny bordering on farce as they come to Henry to argue over leniency for their son when his rebellion plan is exposed, one in favor and one against. Gray is probably best known as James Bond’s nemesis Blofeld in Diamonds are Forever and Mycroft Holmes in the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series.

The minor role of Henry Percy is played by Jeremy Bulloch, who was Boba Fett’s suit performer in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. He’s pretty bad, giving a shouty performance as if he doesn’t realize he’s not on stage and is trying to project to the back rows of the theater.

As You Like It

This is one of only two installments the series shot on location, at Glamis Castle in Scotland and in a presumably nearby forest representing the Forest of Arden. Unfortunately, it works against the production, since some of the castle scenes have bad, echoey acoustics, and the forest scenes (shot in May) are far too lush to fit the dialogue about the barren “desert” woods where the characters are verging on starvation.

Helen Mirren stars as Rosalind, who falls in love with Orlando (Brian Stirner), gets exiled by her cruel uncle, then impersonates a boy named Ganymede, meets Orlando in the forest, and for no particular reason, pretends to be Ganymede pretending to be Rosalind so that Orlando can practice wooing her on “him,” which gets really gender-fluid, since Orlando seems totally into the idea. I guess maybe she’s testing the sincerity of his feelings before revealing herself, or something, but it’s all very contrived. There are a bunch of other romance plots going on with the exiles in the forest, but the play is very light on plot and is mostly a series of comical vignettes and speeches, heavily featuring the cynical ramblings of the melancholy Jaques (Richard Pasco), including the “All the world’s a stage” soliloquy. Mirren and Pasco are good, and Angharad Rees is striking as Rosalind’s friend Celia.

While Helen Mirren has her share of SF/fantasy roles ranging from Captain Kirbuk in 2010: Odyssey Two to Hespera in Shazam: Fury of the Gods and the narrator in Barbie, the real genre standout here is David Prowse, Darth Vader’s suit actor and Christopher Reeve’s physical trainer for Superman, as the wrestler Charles in the first act. He was no doubt cast for his size and bodybuilder’s physique, but he gives much better line readings than Jeremy Bulloch did. (We almost had two Darths Vader in this series, since they wanted James Earl Jones to play Othello in season 4, but Actors’ Equity insisted that only British actors could do the show.)

Julius Caesar

Two returning actors from previous installments play the lead roles — Richard Pasco plays Brutus and Charles Gray plays the title character. I was struck by how small a role Julius Caesar has in the play named after him, but I guess it’s like Harry Lime in The Third Man — everything that happens is about him even if he isn’t onstage for most of it. Gray’s Caesar is aging and weak, seeming slightly senile. (The historical Caesar was 55 when he died; Gray was just under 50 when this was taped, but looked older.) The production seems more sympathetic with Brutus, who doesn’t share Cassius’s personal resentment of Caesar but reluctantly judges his assassination necessary to prevent him from becoming a tyrant. The historical Brutus was apparently a more active conspirator than Shakespeare’s version, who has to be won over as a legitimizing figurehead by the real instigator Cassius.

The introductory essay in my Riverside Shakespeare says that the assassins’ goal of preserving the Republic as a preferable form of government wasn’t popular with Elizabethan audiences, who would’ve seen Caesar and Antony’s pro-monarchy side as the more righteous one. But Brutus is written very sympathetically; I was struck by the scene in his tent where he was shown to be caring and solicitous toward his servant, which seems atypical for either Ancient Rome or Elizabethan England. Meanwhile, Keith Michell’s Antony is a conniving, two-faced figure, his “Friends, Romans, countrymen” speech a masterful exercise in propaganda and manipulation, starting out claiming to defend Brutus’s honor but then inflaming the crowd to riot against him and the other conspirators (and innocent namesakes — poor Cinna the Poet!), setting in motion the events that led to the fall of the Republic and the rise Imperial Rome.

Incidentally, I got to perform Antony’s big speech before my 9th-grade English class, even though I’d been playing Brutus for the full-class read-through of the play, because my teacher really liked my acting and asked me to do it. (I was usually the only one, or one of a couple in the class, who actually acted out the lines rather than just reading aloud, so I usually got the lead roles, though I was Mercutio when we did R&J.) Going by photos of their likenesses on Roman coins in our textbook edition of the play, I’d been modeling my performance of Brutus on William Shatner, but I modeled my Mark Antony on Mark Lenard.

Cassius is played by David Collings, who had several roles in Doctor Who — Vorus in “Revenge of the Cybermen,” Poul in the standout “The Robots of Death,” and the title character in “Mawdryn Undead.” He also appeared as Deva in the final episode of Blake’s 7.

The director for this one, Herbert Wise, made an odd choice: The soliloquies are mostly delivered in voiceover with the actors just standing there silently, changing expression in sync with the lines. They must’ve been playing back the pre-recorded lines on-set to cue the actors, because sometimes they switch to speaking aloud; there’s a particularly seamless transition from “thinking” to shouting on Antony’s “Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war.” Also, the scene where Brutus sees a vision of Caesar’s ghost (which I guess is what Perry White’s catchphrase is referencing) is done by superimposing Charles Gray’s face on the scene. Richard Pasco seems to have been unclear on which direction he was supposed to look when he saw the ghost, since Brutus first looks the wrong way and then gets it right later in the scene. Or maybe the director faded in Gray’s face earlier than he should have. Sometimes it’s surprising they didn’t retake more of these scenes, given the glitches that slip through. According to the Wiki article, they shot each one in six days, though the location shoots took longer. I’d think that would’ve been time enough to do a few retakes.

Measure for Measure

This is Shakespeare’s final comedy, and a very dark and cynical one dealing with pretty tawdry business. The Duke of Vienna decides he’s been too lenient in enforcing the laws against fornication and debauchery (the main comedy character is a brothel’s bartender), but doesn’t want the people to resent him for cracking down, so he appoints his deputy Angelo to crack down in his place while he goes undercover as a friar to watch it unfold. Claudio, who got his girlfriend pregnant before marriage due to some technical mixup in the wedding arrangements, is sentenced to death for it, and when his nun-in-training sister Isabella pleads with Angelo for his life, he makes an indecent proposal and says he’ll spare Claudio if she sleeps with him. She’s so pious that she’d rather let her brother die, which he’s not too happy about, but the duke/friar connives a trick to substitute Angelo’s ex Mariana, who’s technically his wife except for another mixup with a dowry lost at sea, in Isabella’s place in the dark of night. (Shakespeare has to bend over backward and tie himself in knots to contrive excuses for why the protagonists’ extramarital sex is technically moral and godly. And we think Victorian morality was strict.) The duke also contrives to save Claudio from beheading while making it look like he’s dead, even cruelly telling Isabella he’s dead for no good reason. It’s all a very capricious and arbitrary game on the duke’s part before it ends up with a nominally happy ending. It’s very hard to understand the duke’s motives, unless he’s simply playing with lives because he can. (I did an essay in my college Shakespeare class about the duke’s imposture vs. Helena’s in All’s Well that Ends Well, but I didn’t come to any firm conclusions.)

Wikipedia says the role of the Duke was offered to Sir Alec Guinness, but he declined, so it went to Kenneth Colley. Which means that when they couldn’t get Obi-Wan Kenobi, they turned to Admiral Piett. Way to fall to the Dark Side, Cedric Messina! Colley (who also played Jesus in Monty Python’s Life of Brian, showing his range) didn’t impress me much initially, but he ended up being reasonably good in the role, for all that it was hard to tell whether we should like the Duke or hate him. (I guess when he was playing the false friar, he was a man of Pietty.)

This production has two cast members in common with Ray Harryhausen’s Clash of the Titans. Angelo is Tim Pigott-Smith, who was Perseus’s ally Thallo, and the executioner Abhorson is Neil McCarthy, who played the villain Calibos. Both actors were also in Doctor Who, Pigott-Smith in “The Claws of Axos” and “The Masque of Mandragora” and McCarthy in “The Mind of Evil” and “The Power of Kroll.” Even more Who veterans: Kevin Stoney (Mavic Chen in “The Daleks’ Masterplan” and Tobias Vaughn in “The Invasion”) gives a solid, likeable performance as Angelo’s advisor Escalus, and Mariana is played by Jacqueline Pearce, who was Chessene in “The Two Doctors,” though of course she’s best known as Blake’s 7‘s archvillain Servalan. Isabella is Kate Nelligan, whose genre credits are sparse, including Lucy in the 1979 film Dracula and Mrs. Which in the 2003 TV movie of A Wrinkle in Time.

This installment has more of the flubs and production glitches I mentioned before, notably a couple of moments where some characters in a scene are badly miked and hard to hear. I’m surprised they didn’t do retakes for more of these; they must’ve been on a tight schedule. (Fortunately I have the subtitles on throughout so I can follow the text more clearly.)

King Henry VIII

A number of Doctor Who vets in this one, too many to list, but the big one is Julian Glover, who was King Richard I in DW’s very Shakespearean-feeling “The Crusade” and Scaroth in the classic “City of Death,” here playing the Duke of Buckingham. David Troughton, son of Second Doctor Patrick Troughton and portrayer of King Peladon in “The Curse of Peladon,” has a small but crucial role as Buckingham’s surveyor who testifies against him. Troughton, who was also Professor Hobbes in “Midnight,” is one of at least three cast members here who would appear in the modern Who series, the others being Claire Bloom (“The Woman” from “The End of Time”) as Katherine of Aragon and Roger Lloyd-Pack (Lumic from “Rise of the Cybermen”/”The Age of Steel”) as the second of the two nameless Gentlemen who serve as a Greek chorus observing and expositing a couple of key events. (Bloom would also appear in this series as Queen Gertrude in Hamlet, which I’ve already covered.)

Outside of Who, we’ve got Jeremy Kemp, notable for playing Captain Picard’s brother in Star Trek: The Next Generation: “Family,” as the Duke of Norfolk, one of the main adversaries to the king, and the great John Rhys-Davies (who co-starred with Julian Glover in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade among so many other notable credits) in the tiny role of Ambassador Capuchius — the play’s name for Eustace Chapuys, who plays a more sizeable role in other accounts of Henry VIII’s life, but who here appears only to attend Katherine on her deathbed and gets only about ten lines.

This is the only other installment shot on location, impressively shot in many of the actual rooms and buildings where the events it depicts took place. It’s got a somewhat more cinematic style as well, with more distinct takes and close angles; it looks as if most of the interior scenes were shot on video with one or more cameras while the exteriors were filmed, typical of BBC productions of the era.

Unfortunately, the somewhat impressive production is paired with a rather mediocre play, the final one Shakespeare wrote aside from the lost Cardenio and the coauthored The Two Noble Kinsmen. (Also the last play performed at the Globe Theatre, since the cannons used in one of its scenes ignited the fire that burned the Globe to the ground.) It’s a somewhat unfocused treatment of various events in the life of Henry VIII (played by John Stride), which it compresses and rearranges extensively despite the opening chorus claiming it’s all true. I mentioned how R&J gave so much focus to rich moments of character-building, but here, the characters are largely just interchangeable exposition engines describing plot points and offstage events, like a dramatized history lesson. Some key events, like the Duke of Buckingham’s trial and Henry’s divorce from Katherine and wedding to Anne Bullen (Boleyn), are only described after the fact by side characters, when it seems it would’ve been more dramatic to show them directly.

The first three acts focus on the machinations of Cardinal Wolsey (Timothy West), who schemed for power and is unquestionably the villain of the piece, though he’s portrayed sympathetically and gets a big valedictory speech that West delivers well. Act IV shows Anne’s coronation (the play describes the procession in great detail, more than I’m used to seeing in Shakespeare’s stage directions), then focuses on Katherine’s final hours, giving Claire Bloom a chance to shine. Act V swerves to a new storyline about the charges laid against the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cranmer (Ronald Pickup, whose TV debut was in Doctor Who: “The Reign of Terror”), which Henry disposes of rather abruptly. The play concludes (after a penultimate comedy scene that the adaptation omits) with the christening of Henry & Anne’s daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth. This consists largely of Cranmer delivering a long, implausibly prophetic speech about the great future lying in store not only for the newborn baby Elizabeth but her successor James I, the reigning monarch at the time the play was written — thereby breaking not only the fourth wall but the fourth dimension. (Appropriate, given all the Who actors. Maybe he was a time traveler.) It’s all over the place story-wise, and there’s not much outstanding dialogue by Shakespeare’s standards; a lot of the philosophical and metaphorical lines sound like rehashes of ideas from earlier plays.

Perhaps the play suffers from being about the parents of Shakespeare’s former patron Queen Elizabeth, since he had to portray Henry and Anne as rather flawless, noble figures. Katherine is allowed to be angry about Henry tossing her aside for a younger woman, but the play tiptoes around whether Henry is in the wrong (and avoids dealing with Anne’s execution for treason or Henry’s subsequent four marriages). John Stride is adequate but unremarkable as Henry, perhaps because the role doesn’t give him a great deal to work with.

There was an amusing dialogue glitch with the subtitles in Act 2, Scene iii. When Anne Bullen is insisting to her Old Lady attendant that she wouldn’t want to be queen for all the world (an irony, since we know she’s about to be), the Old Lady says disbelievingly that Anne would do it for England, while “I myself would for Canarvonshire,” which my Riverside explains is a “notoriously poor Welsh county.” However, the subtitles render it as “I myself would fuck an arvonshire,” which gives a different meaning to Anne’s laugh in response. It also makes the Lady’s reference in the previous line to “an emballing” — investiture with the ball or orb of sovereignty — sound like a double entendre. Knowing Shakespeare, maybe it was. I doubt the mishearing of “for C…” was intended, though, since the London accent of Shakespeare’s day was heavily rhotic, like a stereotypical pirate accent, so it would’ve sounded like “fork” or “ferk” instead.

The subtitle glitch is odd, though, since in other instances, the subtitles use the original text when the actors diverge from it, so the subtitlers clearly had it to refer to. It’s hard to believe the inserted profanity was accidental, then, but also hard to believe they could’ve gotten away with it.

–

So that’s it for Season 1. Next season looks like it’ll be light on SF/fantasy actors (except in Hamlet), but heavy on kings named Henry.

Solar, so good

So far, my new solar trickle charger for my car battery seems to be working. I won’t really know for sure that it works unless my battery doesn’t run down again, but at least I know it isn’t not working, I guess. Anyway, after the suction cup on the cord side came loose twice on consecutive days, I realized what I should’ve caught onto right away — the weight of the cord hanging down off the dash was pulling the panel loose on that side. So I rearranged the cord to have most of it bundled up and resting on the dash right under the panel, to take the weight off that side. The suction cup has held for several days since then, so I guess it worked.

Today I went driving with it for the first time, to pick up groceries, and I did remember to unplug it from the lighter before starting the engine. I didn’t drive very far or over any particularly bumpy terrain, but it stayed in place the whole way, so I guess it’s okay to leave it attached to the window, at least for short trips.

I’m a little disappointed that the panel only came with two kinds of connector you could attach to the end of its cord, one for the lighter socket and one with alligator clips to attach directly to the battery. I’m wondering if the solar panel could be used to charge a phone or something. But maybe there’s a reason it doesn’t have a connector for that. It is called a trickle charger, after all; I guess the rate at which it delivers charge is probably too low to be useful for a phone or other device.

Going solar

I decided to go ahead and buy a solar trickle charger for my car battery, and here it is:

The installation was quite easy — just put on the suction cups, stick it to the windshield (which I cleaned and allowed to dry first), and plug it into the lighter socket. The little LED on the right there blinked to assure me it was delivering charge properly, and it was still blinking when I checked this morning, even though, as you can see from my reflection, the sun was coming from behind the car. I usually park facing west, and I think I get more hours of direct sunlight facing that way, since there are trees behind the car in that position. But clearly the panel doesn’t need direct sun to work, and I gather it even works on cloudy days. (I’m fairly sure this is the first solar-powered device I’ve ever owned, so this is all new to me.)

Incidentally, discovered yesterday that I need to lift my sunglasses to confirm that the LED is blinking, since it’s pure blue and the sunglasses filter out blue and UV light.

One concern is that it only has two suction cups (though the kit came with four, so I guess they’re spares); maybe I should’ve shopped for another model that had four. When I checked on the car this morning, I found that the driver’s side suction cup had come loose overnight, although that only changed the panel’s position slightly. The instructions say you should take it down before driving, maybe keep it in the glove compartment (though I’m not sure I have room in mine), but it seems it would be easier if I could leave it in place. Not sure the cups will hold well enough for that, since I haven’t tried driving with it yet. I will have to remember to unplug it before driving, at least, since the instructions say turning on the ignition could send harmful spikes through the plug if it’s left in.

Another concern, as you can see from the photo, is that the car tends to get very dusty. I think the dust comes from the blacktop they use to coat the parking lot, since it’s the only explanation for why my car keeps getting covered in sooty black dust when I drive it so infrequently. That could reduce the light the panel receives, so I’ll have to remember to wash the window more often.

But anyway, it apparently works, so hopefully I won’t have problems with my car battery draining or dying on me anymore. If so, it means I’ll have much less use for my portable jumpstarter pack — though I’ll still try to remember to top up its charge every three months per the instructions, just in case. It could also save me gas if I don’t need to drive around to top up a drained battery, though I estimate it would have to save me well over a hundred miles of driving before it paid for itself, which would take a long time.

False (car) alarm

The other day, I found my car battery completely drained once again, something that apparently happens when you drive as infrequently as I do. I recharged it with my portable jumpstarter pack, but there was a weird moment where the engine started up, ran for a second or two, then cut off instantly. That was worrisome, but the next time I tried it, it started up smoothly.

When I was driving it around to recharge the battery, hoping it hadn’t died completely, I noticed a strong gasoline smell. I’d just filled the tank a few days before, and the smell made me wonder if the fuel leak I had before had returned. So yesterday I took my car into the shop.

Turns out they found nothing wrong with the battery or the electrical system, and couldn’t offer an explanation for that anomalous shutdown, except maybe something to do with the underused battery cells “collapsing” or something — I didn’t quite follow that. As for the gas smell, that was a mix of two factors: one, I hadn’t driven it enough for the catalytic converter to burn off the uncombusted fumes, and two, my gas cap’s seal was dried and cracked. They replaced that, as well as my old, deteriorated wiper blades, and that was it, a much less expensive repair than I’d feared.

The last time, the mechanic suggested that I look into a battery tender or trickle charger, something you plug into the wall to keep your battery charged. But I park in an outdoor lot, so that isn’t an option. But since then, I’ve discovered there’s such a thing as a solar trickle charger. I wasn’t sure if there was a way to mount one inside the car, but I looked into it this morning, and apparently that’s exactly where they’re supposed to go, and you can plug one right into the lighter/socket as long as it functions when the ignition is off — which it turns out mine does (it was the first thing I checked when I picked up the car). I used to think the front lighter didn’t work as an electrical socket, only the one in the back seats, but now it works fine, and I realize that must’ve been the result of the missing fuse that caused me some other electrical problems for a couple of years.

So I guess a solar trickle charger may be the way to go. It looks like you can get one for as little as $20-30, and they have such a thing as blocking diodes to prevent the charge from going the other way. Honestly, I’m surprised you can plug a solar panel into the lighter and have it charge the battery; I’d assumed the current only went one way. But apparently you can.

It looks like they come in different wattages, though, and I’m not sure what difference it would make. Looking at the user reviews, it seems to depend on how much electronic frippery your car has, and with my 2001 Saturn, that’s probably just the alarm system and not much else, suggesting a low wattage would be enough. Also, the instructions on one that I looked at said you shouldn’t leave the charger connected and unattended for long periods… except that’s exactly what I need it for. Some of the reviews say they successfully left it unattended for months. The big thing is to unplug it before starting the car, to avoid harmful power spikes, so I’d have to remember to do that.

So it seems like a good thing to try. But if anyone reading this has more automotive knowledge than I do (which is highly likely) or has experience with trickle chargers, feel free to offer an opinion.

Eclipse Walk II: Eclipse Harder

When I learned about today’s solar eclipse a few years back, I was disappointed that the path of totality would just barely miss Cincinnati, and I was tempted to drive north far enough to see it. When the day came, I didn’t feel up to undertaking such an expedition; in fact, I was pretty much planning to give it a miss, since I saw the last partial eclipse back in 2017. But as it turned out, it was a really nice day out and I felt like going for a walk anyway, and I still had my eclipse glasses from the last time, which seemed to be intact — kind of dusty, but that’s probably beneficial for eclipse glasses as long as they don’t have any scratches or pinholes. (The instructions printed on the glasses actually advise against cleaning them and say it’s unnecessary.) So I took a walk over to the park just down the street from my apartment in time to catch the maximum ten minutes or so of the eclipse.

As it turned out, even without driving north, I got to see something much closer to a total eclipse than last time. That was only 91%, but according to the online eclipse map I found, the obscuration from the park’s vantage point was a whopping 99.74%! Missed it by that much!

It’s interesting how it went, though. By the time I was getting ready for my walk, I noticed how much visibly softer the light from outside was — unlike evening light, because I was still getting direct sunlight reflected off the buildings opposite, but it was much milder. Yet when I went outside, it still looked like a clear, sunny day, just muted enough that I didn’t need sunglasses, like the last eclipse. That pretty much persisted once I reached the park and for minutes thereafter — even with just a C-shaped sliver of the sun visible through my eclipse glasses, the light still looked brighter than a cloudy day, and the sky was still a fairly light blue.

Once we reached the maximum, though, with less than a parenthesis of sunlight, the light dimmed quickly, almost to twilight levels, and the sky opposite the sun became a darker grayish-blue. I noticed the lights of the downtown skyscrapers peeking through the trees at the overlook end of the park. Yet then it started to brighten again just as quickly, getting visibly less dim as I watched my surroundings — even though the arc of sunlight was only a tiny bit wider, just changing angle as the Moon advanced.

I didn’t stick around long thereafter, since there’s this group of motorcyclists who like to ride up and down the street and into that little park making a great deal of noise with their engines, and they were commemorating the eclipse by doing the same more than usual, so I decided to retreat, since I don’t deal well with loud noises. Unfortunately, it turned out they were leaving the park anyway and they drove right past me on the single street in or out of it. I should’ve just stuck around a few more minutes. Even with my fingers in my ears, the noise shook my innards when they revved their engines right next to me. I’m sure this violates Cincinnati noise ordinances (I checked, and we do have them), but apparently enforcement thereof is lax in my neighborhood.

Now I’m a little disappointed I didn’t find somewhere to see totality, since it came so close. I only would’ve had to drive half an hour or so either way. But seeing 99.74% of an eclipse was still pretty interesting.