Some reviews from the first four months of the year … part eleven!

I thought I’d switch it up today and check out the non-comics portion of what I read or watched in the first four months of the year. Plus, some CDs? What madness is this?!?!?

BOOKS

Gorky Park by Martin Cruz Smith. 433 pgs, 1981, Ballantine Books.

I had never read this nor seen the movie, so I didn’t quite know what to expect, and it was … odd. It’s a very good murder mystery, to be sure, and Smith does a very good job (it feels like) of giving us an idea of what it’s like to live under a totalitarian government at kind of the height of its power but also at a time when the creakiness was definitely setting in (the book is set in 1978). Arkady Renko is tasked with finding out who killed three people in the park, but once he begins to figure out what’s going on, those in power don’t want him to figure it out, because it would expose too much corruption. In that way, it’s not all that different from a lot of thrillers – the lone cop fighting against the system that employs him is a hoary old trope, even in 1981 – but because it’s set in a country where going against your superiors will not only get you fired, it will get you killed (and officially, not like in the U.S., where they’d have to arrange an “accident” for Renko), it’s a nice difference from the way these stories usually work. The case is fascinating, too – it’s very Russia-specific, which is nice (and yes, the book is over 40 years old, but I’m still not going to spoil the details of the case), and Renko has to do a lot of work to make it all fit together. A lot of the book feels superfluous, but Smith does a good job tying everything together. The love story is just kind of there, and the sex scenes – as usual in literature – are a bit ridiculous, but Renko’s quasi-love for Irina does spur him on in some places, so that’s not bad. The book is structured very weirdly – Renko goes as far as he can in Moscow, and it seems like the book is going to end on a very bleak note, but then, suddenly, Renko is back and headed to New York to wrap up the case, which he does, although not exactly in the manner that we might expect. It’s just a weird way to do it – Renko is shot up pretty good and it’s unclear how he’s going to live, much less get back on the case, and we divert for a long time away from the case to his recovery, and then, just like that, he’s back on the case (with caveats, of course – it’s still the Soviet Union!). It’s a bit inelegant, but Smith does manage to power through it, and because the tone of the book remains the same – the paranoia, the fear, the mistrust of everyone – it doesn’t make the book grind to a halt as much as it might. I’m not sure if I’m going to read other books by Smith, but this is a pretty darned good one.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

Drood by Dan Simmons. 771 pgs, 2009, Little, Brown and Company.

Back in November, I wrote about The Terror, Simmons’s 700+-page book from 2007, and then I took a break from Simmons for a few books because I knew his next one was this 700+-page book! How he manages to research and write these suckers this quickly is beyond me, but good for him! This book, however, isn’t quite as good as The Terror. It feels more unfocused, which means it feels like it meanders a bit too much at times. It’s written well and the plot can be gripping, but it also feels like you could cut 200 pages and it wouldn’t be a problem (The Terror, by contrast, earned its 700+ pages!). The book covers the last five years of Charles Dickens’s life, from 1865 to 1870, and it’s narrated by Wilkie Collins, who’s writing an account of the events to a reader – you and I – in the distant future. In June 1865, Dickens was in a train crash that almost killed him and apparently messed him up for the rest of his life, and in Collins’s account, he meets a very creepy man who calls himself “Drood” at the site of the wreck, and Drood begins to wreck his – and then, Collins’s – life. Drood is a murderer, according to a ex-detective who comes into Collins’s life (and whom Dickens based a character on), and this detective wants Collins to help catch him without letting Dickens know, as the detective is convinced Dickens is working with Drood. There’s a lot of supernatural elements in the book, and Collins takes opium to help him with his gout, which makes him fairly unreliable as a narrator (plus, as we learn, he’s writing this at a distance of almost two decades, so his memory might not be great, either), and … it’s just weird. I’m not entirely sure what the point is, unfortunately. Drood isn’t as much of a presence as you might expect, Simmons turns Collins into a monster as the book goes along (and he wasn’t a great dude to begin with), and it seems like the entire point is to make Collins realize that Dickens is a great writer and that he, Collins, will be forgotten? I mean, Collins isn’t forgotten, so I’m not sure what that’s about, but Simmons sets up a lot of dominos and then seems to enjoy simply putting them away instead of knocking them over. It’s a bit frustrating because we know what happened to Dickens and Collins, so any tension about their fates isn’t all that tense, but that can be (and is here, to a certain extent) overcome in fiction. But the supernatural elements, the mystery of Drood, what the heck is going on in Collins’s house with … well, some things that I won’t give away – maybe I’m just too dumb to get it all. I mean, Guillermo del Toro (who wanted to make this into a movie) and Stephen King are both pull-quoted in the front, so maybe they know something I don’t. It just feels like Simmons threw a shit-ton of stuff into the blender, and while the ride is fun while it’s happening, at the end, you don’t really have a good smoothie. Oh well. I have one more (somewhat shorter) Simmons book to read, so maybe that will restore my interest in his work!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Anarchist by John Smolens. 333 pgs, 2009, Three Rivers Press.

I wished I liked this book more – it tells the story of the McKinley assassination, and this period of American history is fascinating, but it’s not that good, unfortunately. Part of the problem is that there’s just not a lot of drama around Leon Czolgosz and his murder of the president. Despite his proclamations about anarchy, he acted alone, without being really involved in any anarchist organization (the anarchists who knew him thought he was weird and didn’t want to have much to do with him), he simply walked up to McKinley and shot him (the security was tight, yo!), he was quickly tried and convicted with no histrionics, and he was electrocuted less than two months after he killed the president. Smolens creates a big narrative around him, but the lack of tension about the important parts of the narrative – will someone stop the assassination (no) and will the anarchists be able to use Czolgosz to further their cause (no) – make it less than successful. He gives us a douchebag Pinkerton, Jake Norris, who finds a laborer in Buffalo named Moses Hyde whom he recruits as a snitch because Hyde is kind of sympathetic to the anarchists. Hyde, as it turns out, actually knows Czolgosz, so he lets Norris know that Czolgosz is actually planning to kill McKinley. Hyde is also in love with a Russian prostitute, Motka, whose brother is also involved with the anarchists, so Hyde begins to try to figure out a way to get away with Motka without getting killed by the cops or the anarchists. That’s fine, but neither Norris nor Hyde is that compelling a character, so their confrontations and schemes aren’t all that interesting. Smolens spends some time with Dr. Presley Rixey (future Surgeon General of the U.S.), who was the McKinleys’ personal physician, and how he tries to ease the president’s suffering after he was shot and how he tries to help Mrs. McKinley after the president’s death, but again, that’s not that interesting. After McKinley’s death, there was a wave of repression of anarchists, and the back half of the book is about how some of them tried to use Czolgosz to make their cause more visible, but Roosevelt’s reign of terror against the anarchists isn’t part of this book and the scheme that takes up the back half of the book isn’t that interesting, because we know Czolgosz will be executed. I’m not sure what Smolens is trying to do with this book, because it feels like it could be more interesting, but he kind of wants to do a thriller. Unfortunately, there’s nothing all that thrilling about the actual assassination of William McKinley. It feels like the easiest assassination in history, and that doesn’t make for good fiction.

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons. 617 pgs, 2015, Back Bay Books.

This is the third (really long) book by Simmons I’ve read recently, and I fear he probably needs an editor, much like a certain Mr. King. None of the books have been bad, and this one is better than Drood (see above) but not quite as good as The Terror (although it’s closer to the latter than the former). It does go on far too long, however, and it’s frustrating. Simmons can’t resist the siren call of Sherlock Holmes, so he gives us his own Holmes pastiche, with our detective teaming up with Henry James, of all people, to solve a mystery in the U.S. during the time when Holmes was supposed to be dead. He stops James from committing suicide in Paris (James was, our unknown narrator tells us, going through a fallow period of writing, believing his time had passed, which is interesting because some of his best work was ahead of him) and tells him he needs James’s help, as he’s trying to solve the supposed murder of Henry Adams’s wife, who died by suicide in 1885, and Holmes needs James to get him an introduction to Adams and his social circle. While they’re in the States, it turns out that Holmes is also there because someone is plotting to assassinate President Cleveland at the opening of the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. That can’t be good.

Both the mystery and the thwarting of the assassination are interesting, so that’s not the problem. Someone has been sending notes to the people who knew Clover Adams claiming she was murdered, and Holmes figures out who the woman is calling on Clover the day she died (who actually existed) and she had to do with Clover’s death. James, meanwhile, is a fun character, because he really does not like Holmes all that much, and he doesn’t think Holmes is a gentleman, so he’s constantly embarrassed by Holmes even though his friends are fascinated by him. He also thinks Holmes is a lousy detective, although he comes around on that over the course of the book. So that’s kind of interesting. Simmons then introduces an interesting conundrum: Holmes thinks he might be a fictional character. He says that he often isn’t sure how he got to places and he also brings up the strangeness of Watson’s war wounds, and in this world, at least, Watson is writing about Holmes and Conan Doyle is a literary agent, so Holmes thinks it could be possible that he doesn’t exist, which would explain the incongruities in his life. James reads the actual Holmes stories (only through “The Final Problem,” naturally) and scoffs at how ridiculous they are in terms of mysteries (I mean, he’s not wrong, and this is one of the more entertaining sections of the book), and Holmes points out that Watson is embellishing the actual cases, and the “real” ones are much different and often bleaker. This plot point comes up a few times (and James certainly wonders what it means about him), but ultimately, it doesn’t really go anywhere, and I wonder why Simmons even brought it up if he wasn’t going to explore it a bit more. A lot of the book is about identity, what makes us who we are, whether we can escape what made us who we are, and how we handle the forces that shaped us, and Holmes, with his mastery of disguises, becomes a walking metaphor for this quite often, but why Simmons goes all metaphysical on us and never really pays it off is mystifying. It gums up the works and makes the book longer than it needs to be. And it does feel long – The Terror is longer but doesn’t feel it, while Drood is also longer and does feel it – but both of those books felt like they needed to be long (although, as I noted, Drood could be edited down a bit). This does not, and I just wonder if it would have been a nice, tighter book with 150-200 pages lopped off. There’s a lot going on and Simmons is obviously ambitious, but it doesn’t quite work, and I wonder if he bit off more than he could chew.

Now I’m done with Simmons for a while – we shall see if get more of his work, but for now, we’re on to other writers!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Red Prince: The Secret Lives of a Habsburg Archduke by Timothy Snyder. 344 pgs, 2008, Basic Books.

Here’s a topic that’s right in my wheelhouse: it’s about a Habsburg, one of my favorite topics; it takes place in the first half of the 20th century, which is a fascinating time period; and it’s about a dude who was a bit odd by the standards of the time, which is always fun to read about. Snyder gives us the life of Wilhelm von Habsburg, who was, essentially, a nephew of the emperor Franz Josef (they were both descended from the Emperor Leopold II, who died in 1792, but Franz Josef was a few generations older – he was born in 1830 while Wilhelm was born in 1895), although he was well out of the line of succession. Wilhelm’s father, Stefan, foresaw a time when the Habsburg domains might be radically changed, so even before World War I (which radically changed the Habsburg domains), he was trying to anticipate a kind of federated Europe, with different nationalities having their own countries but acknowledging a Habsburg as their sovereign. With this in mind, he deliberately “Pole-ized” his family, moving them to Galicia in the north of the Habsburg empire, a region which was largely ethnically Polish, and teaching his children Polish and trying to make them more, well, Polish. One son, Albrecht, took to this very well, but Wilhelm decided to rebel a bit against his father and found a home with the Ukrainians, who were a numerically significant minority in Galicia. After World War I destroyed the Habsburg empire, Wilhelm fought for the Ukrainians who were trying to establish an independent nation. He was always trying to be crowned king in Ukraine, it seems, but it’s also clear he had a great deal of sympathy for the Ukrainians and it just wasn’t an attempt to be a ruler. World War II began with Wilhelm helping the Germans because he thought they would help establish an independent Ukraine (as it was clear the Soviet weren’t interested in doing that), but he turned against the Nazis pretty quickly, both because he realized they weren’t interested in an independent Ukraine and also because he figured out they were, you know, pretty evil (Wilhelm was an aristocrat, of course, but he was also not a monster), and he worked as a spy against the Nazis for a while during the war. His pro-Ukraine and early pro-Nazi stance did not endear him to the Russians, who ended up arresting him and, basically, killing him in prison by neglecting his health concerns, and he died in August 1948 after about a year in a Soviet prison.

Snyder goes into the subsequent history of the area, as it’s clear that Stefan, Albrecht, and Wilhelm were a bit ahead of their time, as Europe is now in a sort of state that they envisioned, and Ukraine is independent (although, of course, it’s clear Putin and Trump do not really like that and are doing what they can to end it). The Habsburgs fought for their land for decades after Wilhelm’s and Albrecht’s death (he died in 1951), and the titular crown prince, Otto, was still alive when Snyder published this book (he died in 2011 at the age of 98). That’s an interesting coda in the book, because Snyder wants to show that some people and ideas are out of their time, a bit, and it’s clear the idea of a federated Europe wasn’t ready for fruition in the 1940s and earlier. Snyder’s bugbear, to a degree, is nationalism, which helped unify the Poles, say, but at the expense of the Ukrainians, who found themselves oppressed by the Poles in Galicia not unlike the Poles had been oppressed by the Germans in the same region. People suck, as we well know.

The book, however, is a bit of a disappointment, because Wilhelm sounds a lot more interesting than Snyder makes him out to be. Snyder goes through his life well, but it also feels a bit shallow. Perhaps it’s because Wilhelm didn’t write about his own life, and therefore some of the more unusual aspects of his life can’t be delved into too much, but he was clearly bisexual, at least, and his romantic relationships are hardly touched on, nor is his apparent cross-dressing, which is alluded to more than once but not really explored. It’s clear that Wilhelm enjoyed the trappings of aristocracy, including dressing up, so dressing in women’s clothing wouldn’t have been too shocking (especially as people back then seemed a bit more understanding of weirdo upper-class people doing weirdo upper-class stuff), but it’s not really in the book all that much. Similarly, his political and military experience in Ukraine in the early 1920s, when the Red Army was wrecking Ukraine’s attempts to be independent, feels a bit glossed over, as is the scandal in Paris in the 1930s that drove him from the city. Wilhelm was obviously naïve (the scandal involved a con artist who ought to have a book written about her, if she hasn’t already), and Snyder notes this, and he does give us the ins and outs of the scandal and other events in Wilhelm’s life, but it just feels a bit too much like boilerplate. It’s frustrating, because there’s a lot of information here, but it feels like Snyder leaves some meat on the bone. I’m not unhappy with the book, certainly, and it sheds some light on yet another fascinating character from history during a time when history was in a great deal of upheaval, but I do feel like I could have had more. Still, who doesn’t love books about bisexual archdukes who fight for a country that’s not theirs, spy on the Nazis, and fall for grifters?

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

MUSIC

Fish, Weltschmerz, Chocolate Frog Records, 2020.

Fish’s final album (he turned 62 the year it came out, so we can probably believe him) was several years in the making (his penultimate album came out in 2013) and, if the liner notes are to be believed (and why wouldn’t they?), it took a lot out of him. His father died during its production, Fish himself had some health problems, and the political situation weighed heavily on his mind (given that he was almost done with it when COVID hit, I suppose fans should be glad that that didn’t hold up its release any longer). It’s a majestic double album of 10 songs, just under 85 minutes long, with three epics that run over ten minutes and only two that come in at less than five. Fish decided it would be more personal and political than most of his songs – he’s always worn his heart on his sleeve and he’s also dabbled in political songs in the past, but usually in a far more abstract manner than this. “Man With a Stick,” for instance, begins as a song about his father and, it seems, his complicated relationship with him as he shifts from a young man who did not spare the rod to an old man who needs a stick to walk, but in between, he links it to police using sticks to pummel protesters. Fish sings about his own near-death experience in the album’s haunting opening song, “The Grace of God,” mental health (either his father’s or his own?) in “Walking on Eggshells,” a person getting diagnosed with cancer but refusing to let it wreck his life in “C Song (The Trondheim Waltz),” which begins with a lilting accordion, and about dementia in “Garden of Remembrance.” Oddly enough, in terms of lyrics, the bleakest song on the album is probably “This Party’s Over,” which is both about Fish rejecting his old, partying lifestyle (which he sung about as early as 1987, in his final Marillion album) and also about the mess the world is in but which comes at us with playful whistles and bold saxophones in the music. He intersperses these more personal songs with songs about the world, from the plight of Syrian refugees in “The Rose of Damascus” (the album’s longest song at almost 16 minutes, but it fully earns its epic length) to the bury-your-head-in-the-sand tragedy of “Little Man What Now?” to the emptiness of homelessness in “Waverly Steps (End of the Line).” As always with Fish, the lyrics are brilliant – he creates these amazing images with his words that paint a full picture of what he’s singing about, but he learned long ago to not slide too far into the abstract, so the lines stay grounded even when he uses metaphors. The best song on the album is probably the title track, which comes at the end and sums up the album, if not his entire career: “Please let me introduce myself, I’m simply a man of our time / Confused and bewildered, I seem to live without reason or rhyme / Betrayed by a system I’d given up trying to change / Let me tell you now for nothing, I’m back in the game.” It’s a marvelous summation of a life, backed by triumphant yet still dark guitars by Steve Vantsis, Robin Boult, and John Mitchell (all are credited, but I don’t know who does what) and thudding drums by Craig Blundell. Weltschmerz isn’t, I don’t think, Fish’s best album (I still think Interal Exile from 1992 takes that prize), but it’s a wonderful capper to a fantastic career and ends his nice late-life renaissance that encompasses his final three albums – 13th Star, Feast of Consequences, and this – after some middling stuff in the late 1990s and early 2000s (I’m biased, so I don’t think Fish ever released a bad album, but those from that time period are a bit uneven at times). I’m not entirely sure if non-Fish fans will like this – it’s a big prog album, after all, so be warned! – but it is pretty darned good nevertheless. Who doesn’t love 85 minutes of introspection and anger at the state of the world?!?!?

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆

ABBA, Voyage, Capitol Records, 2021.

In 1981, ABBA released their eighth album, The Visitors. Then they took a short break to, you know, recharge their batteries, and 40 years later, they released their ninth album, Voyage. I suppose the batteries needed a bit more recharging than we thought! I, of course, am a huuuuuuuggggge ABBA fan, so I was very excited about new music from the group, and I was very happy to pick this sucker up. It’s not their best album, but it’s not their worst, so that’s nice. Benny and Björn show that, even in their 70s, they can still write good pop songs, and Frida and Agneta, even in their 70s, can still sing ’em up! The best song on the album is the first one, “I Still Have Faith in You,” a song that feels hard-earned because it is, a song that’s about the years behind them and an ode to their fans, with Frida providing lead with that wonderful, rich alto she has (plus, it’s a terrific video – see below). Other highlights include the seemingly cheery “When You Danced With Me,” with its lilting melody but achingly sad lyrics; “Don’t Shut Me Down,” with Agneta’s slightly higher pitch, feels like it could have easily been included on Voulez-Vous (ABBA’s best album), with its bouncy disco beat, jaunty piano, and the somewhat plaintive lyrics; “I Can Be That Woman,” which is wildly regressive (the chorus is “You’re not the man you should have been / I let you down somehow (not the one I could have been) / I’m not the woman I could have been (I can be that woman) / But I can be that woman now”), but Agneta sells the sadness of the singer really well (even though the fact that it’s a dog in the first verse is a bit weird) and the piano is superb; “No Doubt About It,” with its pulsing beat and Frida’s lush vocals; and “Keep an Eye on Dan,” another Agneta song, which is about the trauma that divorce inflicts on kids, and her vocals are matched by the dark, brooding synthesizers (with a nice tag from “SOS” at the end). It’s impressive that a song like “Just a Notion,” which was recorded in 1978 and still uses the vocals (both women sing on it), feels like it fits perfectly with the others. The other songs are decent, but just decent. It’s a pretty darned good album in general, but when you consider the age of the participants and how long they’ve been apart, it becomes even more amazing. You know you love ABBA, whether it’s a secret or not, so give this a listen!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ½ ☆ ☆

TELEVISION

Wolf Hall (PBS). We didn’t watch this when it first came out in 2015 for some reason, but PBS recently reran it, so we checked it out. I haven’t read the series of novels on which it’s based (we own the first one), but it’s your fairly typical historical drama, with the added bonus of a strong cast, so that’s nice. Mark Rylance is very good as Thomas Cromwell, who begins the show on the outs with Henry VIII but gradually moves back into the inner circle of power, and Damian Lewis does nice work as the fickle king. Claire Foy is excellent as Anne Boleyn, veering between conniving and petulance easily, which seems difficult to do. As I noted, the cast is very good – Bernard Hill, Mark Gatiss (always get Mark Gatiss if you want a good toady – he thrives at that!), Joanne Whalley, Jonathan Pryce, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Harry Lloyd, and Tom Holland just before he signed on to be Spider-Man. It’s beautiful to look at (a bit dark occasionally, but such is life when you’re watching pre-electric historical dramas!), it’s interesting (Henry, as well as being kind of a monster, was an interesting king), and it frustratingly ends with Anne’s death and doesn’t go any further. There is a sequel, but I haven’t seen it yet and it took almost a decade to show up. Oh well. It’s a decent show, if you dig historical dramas – and come on, who doesn’t?

No Good Deed (Netflix). There’s a lot to like about No Good Deed, which stars Ray Romano and Lisa Kudrow as a couple putting their very cool Los Angeles house on the market and what happens because of it. The cast is excellent – Romano and Kudrow play a long-married couple very well; Denis Leary is Romano’s ex-convict brother; Linda Cardellini, Luke Wilson, O-T Fagbenle, Teyonah Parris, Abbi Jacobson, and Poppy Liu play the prospective owners; Matt Rogers as the realtor and Linda Lavin as the nosey neighbor are great in their smaller roles. They all have secrets, and their lives start to unravel as the prospective buyers scheme to get the house (it really is amazing) while Romano and Kudrow try to hide what has happened in the house so that its value doesn’t go down (I certainly won’t spoil it!). It’s both funny and tense and also not cruel, which it feels like it could turn at any moment. A bleaker show would have really gone dark, but while what happened in the house is a tragedy, creator Liz Feldman and the other writers manage to find the good stuff in the tragedy, and Romano and Kudrow make it work. The biggest problems I had with the show is the fact that so much drama concentrated on a small group of people feels a bit unbelievable. First of all, what happened to Romano and Kudrow, as sad as it is, probably didn’t have to turn into the thing it did if they had just not panicked. I get that people panic, but man, it seems like someone should have said, “Ok, here’s what we do,” and it could have all worked out. Second, the prospective buyers have so much going on, too, and while I know it’s fiction and therefore reality is skewed just a bit, it does feel like a lot. Oh, there’s the woman having an affair with another woman that her husband doesn’t know about? There’s the husband with money problems that he won’t tell his wife about? There’s the woman whose estranged father is super-rich and she doesn’t want anyone to know about it? There’s the woman who wants to get pregnant and is taking medications to help but she doesn’t want to tell anyone? It’s just a lot. It’s entertaining, certainly, but at some point, it veers close to the ridiculous. Still, it’s a fun show, and the actors do make a lot of the sheer amount of drama work. And it’s only 8 episodes, so you can buzz through it quickly if you want!

Yellowstone season 5 (part 2) (Paramount). Yellowstone ends with a bit of a whimper, even though it tries to go out with a bang, because Costner’s absence robs the show of its pole star, and the other actors flounder a bit trying to hold it together. Costner’s John Dutton is killed at the beginning of this “part 2” of the season, and much of the season is taken up with his daughter, her husband, and his “good son” (Kate Reilly, Cole Hauser, and Luke Grimes) trying to figure out how to take revenge on the people that killed him (which, of course, includes Wes Bentley, the “bad son”). There’s also what to do with the ranch, which is actually far more interesting than the murder stuff. As has been since the early days, Reilly and Hauser get to be flashy, and while they both do good work with the roles, they should never have been the focus, especially considering that Hauser is pretty much a mass murderer and Reilly is a truly horrible human being. But the fans love them, so Taylor Sheridan ignores reality and gives them a happy ending. Grimes and Bentley, who should have been the focus of the show, go in opposite directions in this season, as Grimes gets some good stuff and becomes a paragon of Sheridan-esque virtues (I never quite understood why the MAGA crowd seemed to love this show, as whatever Sheridan’s personal politics are – and yes, they seem to lean MAGA – the show has never really been all that right-leaning, and the way Grimes solves his problems in this season are, on the surface, very much aligned with the “man alone with his woman against the world, just like we MAGA types who get no government assistance except that we do,” but is actually much more touchy-feely, earthy-crunchy, look at all the hippies! than you might expect), while Bentley gets to do nothing except be, basically, a simp and goes out kind of like a bitch. Reilly and Hauser took over the show so much that so much more interesting stuff got pushed aside. There’s also a completely unnecessary death that does nothing except make perhaps the coolest character on the show sad, so that’s annoying, too. Yellowstone is a pretty good show, and it’s fun to watch, but I do wish that they had been able to keep Costner (it seems like it’s all on Sheridan, who kept delaying the second half of the season even though Costner kept wanting to work on his big failed Western from last year and kept working around the delays), because he and his relationship with his sons was always the most interesting part of the show. Once that was gone, it stumbled a bit to the finish line.

Outlander season 7 (part 2) (Starz). Another show that took a long time off between the first and second parts of a season (why not just call it “season 8”?), Outlander keeps on keeping on, and I kind of hope they wrap it up soon. Caitríona Balfe and Sam Heughan are still terrific together, but it feels like their story is kind of … over? but the showrunners (and author Diana Gabaldon) keep just chucking shit at them to mess with them. In this half-season, both Balfe and Heughan are believed dead at certain points, and it just lacks drama because we know they’re fucking not going to die. I mean, Balfe gets shot during a skirmish in the Revolution, so that is a not bad moment because we’re able to see how her modern knowledge has influenced doctors of the time, but Heughan’s presumed death leads to a fairly ridiculous sub-plot about Balfe marrying David Berry, the (gay, mind you) Englishman who is close friends with Heughan and whose son he’s raising. Believe me, it makes very little sense when you see if unfold, as well. There’s also the shenanigans of the time traveling, as Richard Rankin and Sophie Skelton (Balfe and Heughan’s daughter and son-in-law) returned to the present day, but then their son is kidnapped and Rankin goes back in time with an ancestor of his to find the kid, but they end up in 1739 instead of the 1770s, and it’s kind of fun to watch but still a bit ridiculous. It just feels like they’re kind of spinning their wheels with the plot, and while I assume Gabaldon wants to get to the end of the Revolution (apparently she’s working on the final book of the series), I hope the show does get there and ends before too long, because it feels like it’s getting a bit creaky. It’s gorgeous to look at and the acting is mostly quite good, but it’s still feeling a bit worn out. We shall see.

The Agency season 1 (Showtime). Michael F. Assbender stars in this spy thriller, which deals with the London bureau of the CIA and all the crap they go through. It’s pretty good – the showrunners (which includes some handsome dude named Clooney) claim they want to make it as realistic as possible, and they manage to do that pretty well, despite some things that strain credulity just so we can get some good drama and violence (you always have to have the violence!). The cast is stacked: Richard Gere is the station chief, Jeffrey Wright is Fassbender’s immediate supervisor, Katherine Waterston is his handler (at the beginning of the show, as for most of it, he’s not in the field and therefore doesn’t need a handler), Harriet Sansom Harris (Bebe!) is the psychologist who comes in to check on everyone’s mental state, and Jodie Turner-Smith plays a Sudanese woman whom Fassbender fell in love with while he was out on his mission and whom he can’t let go, which leads to a lot of trouble. There’s a lot going on, but the writers do a good job with all the threads, even if one of them (the new agent being trained to go to Iran) is a “season two” thing, as they spend the entire season getting her to Iran, and then the season ends. Oh well! Fassbender can’t let Turner-Smith go, so he keeps seeing her when she turns up in London, but, as we know, Pop Culture Rule #1 applies, and she’s in London for something other than what she says. That becomes a clusterfuck right quick, believe you me. Meanwhile, one of the agency’s recruits in Belarus has disappeared, and they figure out he was taken and might spill all their secrets, so they have to get him back. The creators and actors do a very good job showing the strain of spycraft, as everyone looks exhausted and tense all the time – as my wife pointed out, why would anyone want to do this? It’s nice that they use real-life countries, too – I get a bit annoyed when television shows make up countries because they don’t want to offend anyone. I’m not sure how crazily paranoid everyone in the CIA really is (I’m not saying they’re not, I just don’t know how real the show really is and how much they’re exaggerating for dramatic effect), but it makes the show pretty gripping. We’ll see what happens with Agent in Iran and F. Assbender’s new, tenuous reality in season 2!

Miss Scarlet season 5 (PBS). Stuart Martin left the show after the fourth season, so Kate Phillips (who was also in Wolf Hall, above, because of course she was!) continues without his name in the title, and the showrunners just throw another attractive, bearded detective inspector in her path in the form of Tom Durant Pritchard, who doesn’t want Eliza’s help because of course he doesn’t, but by the end of this season, there’s definitely a spark between them (I do wish showrunners would knock this off – make the attractive guy gay or – hey, here’s a thought! – make them not interested in each other romantically at all!). Eliza continues to butt up against the sexism of 1880s England, and she continues to prove all the dudes wrong, and while it’s certainly entertaining, I do get tired of stars of shows being simply … never wrong. I mean, Eliza’s life isn’t perfect by any means, and she always has money problems, but every instinct she has about a case is correct, and this is a long tradition in detective shows, and it’s just annoying. I think it’s more obnoxious in this show because literally everyone thinks she doesn’t know what she’s talking about because she’s a woman (DI Blake comes around quickly, but he is adamant about not hiring private detectives, no matter their gender, which is how they get around any latent sexism he might feel), and it’s exhausting, to be honest. Every time Eliza sticks her foot in it, it turns out it’s not really that bad and she can wrangle her way out of it fairly easily. I just don’t buy it as much from a story set in Victorian England where the protagonist is a woman who would be very much discriminated against than I do with a more modern story. Eliza’s life, which isn’t easy, seems like it should be harder. I know it’s not that kind of show, and I should just shut up, but it bugs me. Anyway, the cases are interesting, as usual – not all are murders, which is nice. There’s a story about sensationalistic journalism, there’s a Gilbert and Sullivan story (with Gilbert and Sullivan knockoffs, although the originals are mentioned by a character), there’s a story about a scammer, there’s a plot that hinges on the fact that a powerful man is gay – it’s not a dull show by any means, and the cast is solid as usual, but it just feels lacking a bit. The showrunners wanted to show a woman making her way in a male-dominated society that would look down on her, but they skirt past that far too much. Again, I know what this is supposed to be and I enjoy it, I just always feel it’s a bit of a missed opportunity. We shall see what season 6 brings!

Vienna Blood season 4 (PBS). Jürgen Maurer and Matthew Beard continue to have a good old time solving crimes in 1908 Vienna, which is always keen to see. The show always looks great, because they film in Vienna, which is nifty. In this season, however, Beard gets shot and spends a good amount of time in a coma, although he does show up in Maurer’s thoughts to help with the case, so it’s not like Beard is off-camera for very long. It is odd that they chose to do it, though, but I guess the writers know best! The case is that of a sinister villain who is manipulating political events thanks to his many spies, and Maurer’s pursuit of him. It’s nifty that the show, embedded as it is in the “real world” of Austria-Hungary, deals with real-life events – the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in a previous season, and here, just the tension in the government as Europe rushes toward war. They have the emperor’s real-life mistress, Katharina Schratt, in a small role, and while it doesn’t appear anyone else prominent is real, the fact that they’re dealing with the problems that confronted the Austrians in the few years before World War I is keen (whether they’ll ever get anywhere near the war is unknown). There’s an interesting subplot with Beard’s love interest, Luise von Finckh, who wants to be a real reporter and does not appreciate the sexism she has to deal with, but they don’t do too much with that. There’s also Maurer acting stupidly when it comes to the husband of a woman he digs, who’s a brute of a person. She tells him that her husband is planning some crime, but when the husband beats her, Maurer heads over there, full of piss and vinegar, and threatens him … and of course he ends up dead. I mean, she told you he was going to commit a crime, and he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, so just let him do something stupid and get arrested! But no, Maurer has to be the white knight, and it backfires on him. Men are idiots.

Anyway, this remains a pretty interesting detective show. I look forward to more seasons!

Funny Woman season 2 (PBS). Gemma Arterton is back (with a guest-starring role from another Gemma, because this is such a British production!) in this second season, which doesn’t quite work as well as the first one, simply because it’s not as long. It’s only four episodes rather than six, and it feels far too rushed, which is a shame, because it’s still a good show. Arterton, still playing an ingenue far younger than herself (as I mentioned when I wrote about the first season, Arterton does nice work as Sophie Straw, but she’s supposed to be more naïve than we’ve seen so far, as Arterton is almost 40 and has been working since 2007, but that’s not her fault, really, as someone much younger might not be able to pull the role off), has a new show in which she is the sole star, but she’s lost her writers and producer, with whom she fell in love in the first season. She gets them back, and they come up with a revolutionary(-ish) show in which “Barbara” (Arterton’s character) deals with real-life stuff instead of just pining for a man. Meanwhile, the producer (Arsher Ali) wants a divorce from his cheating wife, but she won’t agree to it because, she rightly points out, if it’s publicly known that she committed adultery, she’ll be shamed, so their lawyer is encouraging Ali to bang Arterton, because then he can be the adulterer, which won’t hurt his reputation at all. He rightly points out that then it will hurt Arterton’s reputation, and he won’t do it. Aren’t 1960s morals fun? There’s a reporter (the always-excellent Gemma Whelan) who’s digging around in Sophie Straw’s past, and when that comes out, Arterton has to deal with that and the fact that she found her mother, played by Olivia Williams. Meanwhile, Arterton’s excellent roommates, Alexa Davies and Claire-Hope Ashitey, are dealing with their unfair workplace and, you know, racism (on Ashitey’s part), and they’re grumpy that Arterton isn’t more in their corner. And Matthew Beard is still gay, which of course gets him in big trouble in 1960s Britain, where it was illegal at the time (although it was about to be decriminalized, which comes up in the show). It’s a lot, and it feels like we don’t get enough which each story before the season comes to an end. Beard’s arrest (which affects Davies as well, in an unexpected way) and trial takes up a lot of time, which pushes, it feels, Davies and Ashitey’s grievances to the back burner a bit. Arterton and Ali are having a romance, which eclipses the unusual romance between Leo Bill and his wife, played by Lydia Wilson (who is really good in a small role). Davies’s agitation on behalf of the working class gives us less time for her romance with Marcus Rutherford, which is more important than it initially appears. And through it all, Arterton’s attempts to shatter the status quo of television in 1960s Britain is, weirdly, not given much of a spotlight, even though the season ends with what could be an apocalyptic story arc if they go through with it (which, I mean, of course they will). It’s still well acted, often very funny, and the plots are interesting, it’s just … I wonder why it was only four episodes. It ends on a bit of a cliffhanger, so I assume it’s coming back, so why couldn’t they at least do … five episodes? Anyway, I will check out season 3. It should be keen.

Mayfair Witches season 2 (AMC). Back when I checked out season 1, I wrote that I wasn’t sure if I would watch season 2, but I did. And … I mean, it’s not terrible, just kind of there. Alexandra Daddario remains one of the most unusual hot women around, but she’s also a pretty good actor, and she does a decent enough job here. Jack Huston, so good in Boardwalk Empire, is also just kind of there, kind of whining his way through the season, as he’s the Mayfair family demon who got a body at the very end of the first season and is now just kind of moping around New Orleans and then Scotland (where the bulk of the season takes place) as others determine his fate for him (and he kills some people, so he’s got that going for him). Harry Hamlin is back from his exile as a stone statue, and the show needs his chaotic, menacing-yet-goofy energy, and he doesn’t disappoint. Ben Feldman shows up as Daddario’s ex-lover, and he sort-of represents the audience, as he has no knowledge of all this witch shit, but manages to get involved without freaking out. When Huston gets kidnapped to Scotland, the show takes a weird turn, as characters start acting far, far too stupid to be believed, which is of course a bad trend in television, when people act completely foolishly just so the plot can move along, and it just bugs me. Feldman, especially, as the person who doesn’t quite know what’s going on, should just trust his instincts and peace the hell out, but I guess he’s too mesmerized by Daddario’s piercing eyes and ample bosom. It’s not a terrible show, just kind of dull, and as with season 2, I don’t know if I’ll be back. We started watching it because my wife digs these kinds of shows, and I know she liked this a bit more than I do, but I’ll have to ask her when season 3 comes around if she really wants to check it out. We’ll see.

The White Lotus season 3. Fraser’s favorite show returns for another season of rich and horrible people acting horribly and sort-of getting their comeuppance? This time we’re in Thailand, and the resort is some kind of wellness spa, which is different from the first two seasons, where they just seemed like places to vacation. Mike White’s creation gets eight episodes this time out, as each season increases by one, it seems (although eight feels about the limit for this show, which always takes place over a week). Our participants this time around are: the Ratliff family, with dad Tim (Jason Isaacs), mom Victoria (Parker Posey), and kids Saxon (Patrick Schwarzeneggar), Piper (Sarah Catherine Hook, who honestly could be Daphne Zuniga’s love child), and Lochlan (Sam Nivola); three long-time friends reunited, played by Michelle Monaghan (Jaclyn), Leslie Bibb (Kate), and Carrie Coon (Laurie); and Walton Goggins (Rick) and Amie Lou Wood (Chelsea), who are there because Rick has something to do while Chelsea just wants to enjoy herself. From season 1, Natasha Rothwell shows up because the Hawaiian White Lotus is not doing well and she’s part of an exchange program to learn some new stuff. Meanwhile, Gaitok (Tayme Thapthimthong) is a security guard at the resort who has a serious crush on Mook (Lalisa Manobal of the K-pop group Blackpink), and Valentin (Arnas Fedaravicius) is a Russian working at the resort who’s assigned to the three ladies, which suits him just fine because it’s clear he’s a dude who likes the ladies. Got all that?

As usual, these are rich people who deserve everything they get, but also as usual, the location porn and the amazing acting on display almost makes you forget how horrible they all are. Tim Ratliff gets bad news about some illegal activity he participated in as part of his wildly successful financial business and spends the week hiding it from his ridiculously spoiled family and spiraling into a Lorazepam-fueled haze (he stole the drugs from his wife, who of course blames the swarthy people). Saxon is on the hunt for pussy and wants his brother to come along, but Lochy isn’t all that interested but he doesn’t want to let Saxon down. Piper is there to research a Buddhist monk for school, but she has an ulterior motive. Jaclyn is a successful actor, and she and her friends quickly get into a bitch-fest about how each of them is horrible for different reasons, but they do it in the most passive-aggressive ways, because of course they do. Rick is there to see the owner of the resort, who’s eventually played by Scott Glen (he’s in Bangkok for most of the season), and it’s not for a nice social call. Chelsea wants Rick to leave violence behind, but he abandons her to go to Bangkok, so she hangs out with Chloe (Charlotte le Bon), who’s in Thailand with her lover, played by Jon Gries … who has been in all three seasons of the show, as he’s the dude who hooked up with Jennifer Coolidge in season 1 and then tried to have her killed in season 2 (he succeeded, but not in the way he thought he would) and is now living in Thailand because he’s wanted for questioning in regard to his wife’s death but he also inherited her vast wealth. Rothwell knows he’s a bad dude, so she’s trying to figure out what to do about it (even though she has no proof he killed his wife, and he didn’t, really, anyway). Phew!

As I noted, it’s a lot of somewhat hollow fun. The acting is superb: Coon gets a speech in the final episode that will be on her Emmy reel; Sam Rockwell as Goggins’s old friend gets a speech about what his life in Bangkok is like that is breathtaking in its weirdness and depravity, but Rockwell sells it hard; Wood is wonderful as the far-too-forgiving Chelsea, and she’s also someone who doesn’t have a lot of money, so the rich folk around her amuse her to no end; Schwarzeneggar slowly makes Saxon someone that you might not like but whom you can’t help feeling bad for; and Posey, as she always does, has the best time diving into a very weird role. The problem with this season as opposed to others is that White goes super-cynical, which the show has always been, but occasionally, not cynical enough? It’s a weird vibe, because one criticism people had of the show was that it felt a bit plotless, which is perfectly fine with me, but then, in the final few episodes, we got too much plot, and it didn’t feel thought through. As always, there’s a dead body at the beginning of the show and then we flashback to the beginning of the week, but in this case, the circumstances surrounding the dead body don’t make sense. I don’t want to spoil anything, but it seems like everyone is very nonchalant about the death at the end of the show. Similarly, everyone’s story just kind of … ends, with no resolution … which is the point, I get that, but they don’t really end satisfactorily with no resolution, which I know doesn’t make sense but I really don’t want to spoil it. It just felt more empty than the first two seasons, which is hard to do because the show is generally very cynically empty. I’ve gone on too long about this, sorry. As with the other two seasons, you watch this show more for the scenery and the brilliant acting and less for the enjoyment of what actually happens. It’s frustrating, but I’ll probably watch the next season as well!

Dark Winds season 3 (AMC). I like Dark Winds, but it still frustrates me. I get annoyed when shows try to introduce supernatural elements into things that are clearly not supernatural, as they do in this season. Two young Indians disappear from the rez, and Sheriff Zahn McClarnon (terrific as usual) and his deputy, Kiowa Gordon, have to track them down with the help of A Martinez, who’s also a sheriff (McClarnon is the tribal police, while Martinez is the town sheriff). They find one of the boys dead, but the other is still missing, and things get weird because there appears to be a strange monster wandering around. Of course, there isn’t, but the show spends a lot of time with McClarnon freaking out because of the monster. He’s feeling guilty because he left the dude who ran the mine where his son died out in the desert, where the dude froze to death, and now an FBI agent (Jenna Elfman) is sniffing around that death, and McClarnon thinks the monster might be there because of his evil actions. What’s frustrating is that when a show does this stuff, it distracts from the actual case, which, if McClarnon wasn’t freaking out so much, he probably could have solved much sooner and at least one person who gets killed would have lived. It’s not the most difficult case in the world, but it seems more difficult because McClarnon is spending so much time freaking out. Meanwhile, Jessica Matten, playing the deputy who left northern Arizona to join the Border Patrol, gets caught up in a case that might involve human trafficking and definitely involves crooked Border Patrol agents, and that’s not a bad plot either, although she does do a few stupid things along the way. As usual with the show, it looks amazing – it’s filmed, it seems, in Arizona and New Mexico, so lots of wide, desert vistas! – and the cast is terrific – Matten does a really nice job with Bernadette this season, for instance – but it’s still frustrating. Why are cops in cop shows so dumb so often?!?!?!

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Usually, when I get through the non-comics stuff, I throw up the asterisks and rant about things. I’m not going to rant too much about the United States’s fun descent into the dumbest dictatorship in human history (whenever our Dumb Orange Baboon opens his frickin’ mouth, what he says instantly becomes the dumbest thing he’s ever said), but, I mean, Jeebus. Will enough people come to their senses before the Demented Cult Leader wrecks it all? The race is on!

Anyway, we got a new pope, and he’s ‘Murican (I think that was an Alan Moore quote from Watchmen?), and I dig the name. Leo I saved Europe from Attila, to a degree, and Leo III crowned Charlemagne in 800, so that’s fun. I know he’s still a Catholic dude, but the fact that the MAGA mouth-breathers hate his guts is not a bad thing. Go, Pope Bob!

As I always do, I have to link to the post I write every year recapping what’s going on with my daughter on the anniversary of the accident that caused her brain injury. Mia is aging out of high school in a few weeks, and we’re not happy about it, but what are you going to do? We’re trying to figure out what to do with her after she gets out of school – there are day programs she can go to, but we have to figure out which one and when she can go and if they’ll even take her, but it’ll work out! We weren’t going to get a yearbook for her, because yearbooks are for people to check out after some years and reminisce about your life in school, and Mia will not be doing that. However, her teacher let us know that they devoted an entire page to Mia and her choir career, so we had to get it! Here’s the page:

So, that was very nice of them. Mia is, of course, awesome.

Other than that, things are fine. My other daughter finally got a job after some months of looking, and she’s still trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life. I’m still looking for work, and I hope that works out. We’ll see.

I still have some more comics to review for January through April – I think I might push through and do them all in one post, which might be a bit longer than the ones I’ve been doing but not too long – and I hope to be back on track for this month. I know Bill Reed likes the shorter posts, and I might take that into consideration. Any opinions on the shorter posts, or are the once-a-month super-long posts ok with y’all? We’re a democracy around here, people!

Have a great day, everyone!