+++ PHOTOS PENDING (when the anti-SOPA blackout is over) +++
This weekend I went to a brand new, black-and-white silent movie called The Artist, and I saw international opera star Christine Brewer sing Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs in person.
I chose to see The Artist on Friday evening because it was starting immediately. Otherwise my choice might have been The Iron Lady, a Margaret Thatcher biopic starring Meryl Streep. While I still may see the Streep flick another weekend, I'm glad I saw The Artist. It was really a beautiful movie, and fun to watch too. Using a minimum of dialogue cards to explain what people are saying, and accompanied by a steady stream of really good film music, the movie tells the story of a silent film actor whose career goes into crisis with the advent of "talkies." Meanwhile, his young female protege takes off like a Roman candle. Their life trajectories pass in many different ways, until a romance grows up between them.
Featuring an international cast, including French leads and several supporting American actors (notably John Goodman), plus an adorable dog, it's a delightful fantasy that plays around with the idea of silent films giving way to the sound era in a variety of ways. For example, there is a dream sequence in which the protagonist starts hearing sound effects intruding into his silent world; and later, a nightmarish scene in which he can't seem to hear anything anybody says. The movie is loaded with gimmicks and in-jokes—I was the only one in the theater who laughed when the starlet told her chauffeur, "Take me home. I want to be alone"—and did I mention that the music is awesome? I would like to see David Robertson conduct a performance-to-projection version someday.
But this evening, I saw him conduct three other pieces of music. In the first half of the program, he played the socks off of Dvorak's 7th (Sorry, I meant to paste in the spelling of his name with all the strokes and squiggles, but as I write this Wiki is down in protest against SOPA). Robertson's pre-concert lecture really sold this symphony short. Dark and brooding at the start, with a complex and mysterious slow movement, a wildly rhythmic scherzo, and a finale that moves from horror to triumph, I thought it absolutely was the type of piece that would have brought down the house at the end of the concert. But in his lecture, Robertson opined that, although he considers it the greatest of Dvorak's nine symphonies, it lacks the blockbuster appeal of the 8th or 9th that make for a really good closer. So, instead of the usual program order, he put the symphony first, then after the intermission he programmed a 20-minute piece by modern composer George Crumb and the Four Last Songs.
Robertson may or may not be surprised to hear that some, like myself, felt that the concert order of which he was so proud ran counter to order in which the pieces interested us. But even I was surprised to discover that I liked the Crumb piece ("Haunted Landscape") better than the Strauss. The first reason is that the Crumb piece was actually cool to listen to. I disagree with the patron I overheard bitching about "New Age music" at the end of the concert. I heard an intelligible structure with distinct musical ideas. I heard a composer playing around with sound, really quite like Robertson's pre-concert comparison between Crumb and a child messing around with fingerpaints. And I picked up on a real, scary-movie type of spookiness which I believe the music was intended to convey.
As for the other reason I preferred the Crumb to the Strauss... at the risk of exposing myself as a complete boob in the world of high culture... I have to admit that Richard Strauss' music generally leaves me cold. I can't explain exactly why. But the Four Last Songs was no exception. I've given many of Strauss' works several chances each, and I just can't seem to get excited about them. In the case of Four Last Songs, I'll admit the harmony is very expressive and the orchestral colorings are deep and lush, but I was constantly irritated by the balance between the orchestra and the voice part. Christine Brewer has a wonderful voice, so I don't doubt the fault lies with Strauss, but only rarely does the vocal line soar above the accompaniment; seldom is it even very interesting. More often, it seemed to me that Strauss only gave the voice part a minimum of notes to cover the syllables of the text, then stretched them out to fill enough of each movement's length to make it seem worthwhile. And then he scored the orchestra so that it would all but drown out even as renowned a Wagnerian as Christine!
I'm a Christine Brewer booster, so I have to assume there's something to this piece. After all, according to Robertson, she fell in love with it at an early age and has performed it dozens of times worldwide. But the way I look at things, it seems odd that an opera star would choose to be upstaged by the orchestra. What they played was worth hearing; but I still don't understand what Christine sang that was worth singing. I've felt the same way about certain other pieces, including (here I go) Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, so my quibble may really be with an aesthetic of setting words to music shared among composers of the Strauss-Mahler generation; it may simply be a sign that I am a dyed-in-the-wool Rossinian, or Mozartian, or maybe Bach-and-Handelian, where the relationship between lyrics and music is concerned; but even if there were valid principles that drove Strauss to treat his leading lady so, I think these four brief songs took those principles to an extreme.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Sunday, January 8, 2012
War Horse
My weekend debauch was a plate of goat meat at a Mexican restaurant and a matinee showing of the new Spielberg picture, the beautiful War Horse.
I like to drop names of cast members, but the average Yank isn't likely to recognize a lot of the faces in this movie. This is chiefly because most of them are British faces. Harry Potter fans might recognize David Thewlis (lately "Prof. Remus Lupin") as the sharp-tongued landlord and Peter Mullan (lately pony-tailed Death-Eater "Yaxley") as the hero boy's broken-down father. Emily Watson, late of Breaking the Waves and more recently The Water Horse, plays the boy's mother.
Eddie Marsan (lately "Inspector Lestrade" in the Sherlock Holmes movies) plays a sergeant in the trenches of World War I.
The boy himself, who is most likely on his way to becoming a big star, has a face that you'll feel you've seen before, but in fact this is his first movie. The actor, whose screen name is Jeremy Irvine, is already featured in three upcoming films, including the role of Pip in Great Expectations. Maybe that gives you an idea of his type & the direction his career is going. Topping the bill of an epic, tear-jerking, Spielberg-directed war movie must be a great way to start a career in the movies. Being a really good actor with male-model looks and the ability to shed tears on cue make him a threat to a whole generation of up-and-coming leading men.
The movie is a love story between a young man and a horse, a handsome thoroughbred stallion he raised and trained, in defiance of what everyone in his Devon village considered possible, to be a serviceable plowhorse. Albie (the boy) and Joey (the horse) are meant to be inseparable, but thanks to a crop-destroying rainstorm and the outbreak of World War I, they are indeed separated. Sold to a young cavalry captain, Joey sets out on a series of heartbreaking adventures, passes from owner to ill-fated owner, and finally—in a scene that made me cringe and groan, "Oh no"—gets tangled in barbed wire in the no-man's-land between the British and German trenches at the Somme.
Albie, meanwhile, undergoes his own hardships among the machine-guns, the mustard gas, and the insanely high cost in human life of a few yards of muddy wasteland. Even when boy and horse are miraculously reunited, the chance remains that regulations and rival claims will separate them again. The movie ends with a scene shot in amazing light, with a silhouette-like composition and hardly any dialogue, proving that the filmmaker can be a more powerful storyteller than even the writers and the actors. It is but one of many Spielbergian stylistic touches, another notable example being the use of a moving windmill blade to render a firing-squad execution both less gruesome and more dreadful.
To be sure, however, credit for the emotional power of this movie must also be given to composer John Williams (whose score is steeped in British folk melody), cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (who won Oscars for two previous Spielberg movies, Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List), and of course, all those magnificent horses. Assuming that some of them were actual, live animals and not just CGI effects, a lot of effort must have gone into training them to act, and remain calm, among crowds of extras, battalions of war-machines, and heaps of oozing mud. I can't believe that they would subject a live animal to some of the strains depicted in the film; there must be laws against that sort of cruelty. So the effectiveness of these gut-tearing images must be due, at least in part, to special effects.
I like to drop names of cast members, but the average Yank isn't likely to recognize a lot of the faces in this movie. This is chiefly because most of them are British faces. Harry Potter fans might recognize David Thewlis (lately "Prof. Remus Lupin") as the sharp-tongued landlord and Peter Mullan (lately pony-tailed Death-Eater "Yaxley") as the hero boy's broken-down father. Emily Watson, late of Breaking the Waves and more recently The Water Horse, plays the boy's mother.
Eddie Marsan (lately "Inspector Lestrade" in the Sherlock Holmes movies) plays a sergeant in the trenches of World War I.The boy himself, who is most likely on his way to becoming a big star, has a face that you'll feel you've seen before, but in fact this is his first movie. The actor, whose screen name is Jeremy Irvine, is already featured in three upcoming films, including the role of Pip in Great Expectations. Maybe that gives you an idea of his type & the direction his career is going. Topping the bill of an epic, tear-jerking, Spielberg-directed war movie must be a great way to start a career in the movies. Being a really good actor with male-model looks and the ability to shed tears on cue make him a threat to a whole generation of up-and-coming leading men.
The movie is a love story between a young man and a horse, a handsome thoroughbred stallion he raised and trained, in defiance of what everyone in his Devon village considered possible, to be a serviceable plowhorse. Albie (the boy) and Joey (the horse) are meant to be inseparable, but thanks to a crop-destroying rainstorm and the outbreak of World War I, they are indeed separated. Sold to a young cavalry captain, Joey sets out on a series of heartbreaking adventures, passes from owner to ill-fated owner, and finally—in a scene that made me cringe and groan, "Oh no"—gets tangled in barbed wire in the no-man's-land between the British and German trenches at the Somme.
Albie, meanwhile, undergoes his own hardships among the machine-guns, the mustard gas, and the insanely high cost in human life of a few yards of muddy wasteland. Even when boy and horse are miraculously reunited, the chance remains that regulations and rival claims will separate them again. The movie ends with a scene shot in amazing light, with a silhouette-like composition and hardly any dialogue, proving that the filmmaker can be a more powerful storyteller than even the writers and the actors. It is but one of many Spielbergian stylistic touches, another notable example being the use of a moving windmill blade to render a firing-squad execution both less gruesome and more dreadful.To be sure, however, credit for the emotional power of this movie must also be given to composer John Williams (whose score is steeped in British folk melody), cinematographer Janusz Kaminski (who won Oscars for two previous Spielberg movies, Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List), and of course, all those magnificent horses. Assuming that some of them were actual, live animals and not just CGI effects, a lot of effort must have gone into training them to act, and remain calm, among crowds of extras, battalions of war-machines, and heaps of oozing mud. I can't believe that they would subject a live animal to some of the strains depicted in the film; there must be laws against that sort of cruelty. So the effectiveness of these gut-tearing images must be due, at least in part, to special effects.
Where No Tackiness Has Gone Before
This week's lighted-sign fiasco at the neighborhood ELCA parish:
EPIPHANY--AN ENTERPRISING STAR TREK!
Aaargghhhh... That turns my stomach on so many levels that I feel myself becoming a ruminant. Most disturbing of all, once the vomit backs down my esophagus, is the question: "In what way do they mean 'enterprising'?" Did I miss the verse in Matthew 2 where the wise men received double their investment in gold, frankincense, and myrrh?
EPIPHANY--AN ENTERPRISING STAR TREK!Aaargghhhh... That turns my stomach on so many levels that I feel myself becoming a ruminant. Most disturbing of all, once the vomit backs down my esophagus, is the question: "In what way do they mean 'enterprising'?" Did I miss the verse in Matthew 2 where the wise men received double their investment in gold, frankincense, and myrrh?
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Voyager Season 4
Season Four of Star Trek: Voyager originally aired between 1997 and 1998, roughly my second year of post-B.A. studies. As was the case with Season 3, I only remember seeing a handful of its episodes when they first aired; the rest I am now seeing, for the first time, as Netflix sends me one four-episode DVD at a time. Still, I was aware of the overall arc of this season, which introduced Jeri Ryan's role as the sexy Borgette in recovery, Seven of Nine. As Seven was eased into the show, the first two episodes eased out Jennifer Lien's character of Kes (still a sore point for me).
I can only fondly imagine how different this year's storylines would have been with both characters in the cast.
Meanwhile, it was a season that didn't quite justify Season 3's ominous buildup toward a year of conflict with the Borg and Species 8472. Indeed, after the season-opening conclusion to the previous year's cliffhanger, the Voyagers don't encounter the Borg, except in the form of Seven's memories and hallucinations, and indirectly through other aliens who have issues with them. Maybe this was because the development of Seven's character was enough Borg for the writers' taste. As for Species 8472, their one appearance after the first episode of the season is upstaged by the development of a new alien threat, the predatory Hirogen, who figure in no less than five episodes this year.
Other developments, however, remain on pace. Tom and B'Elanna increasingly become the couple Season 3 suggested they would be. A two-part episode fulfills the previous year's foreshadowing of the "Year of Hell" which, after all the cards were laid down, turned out not to have happened anyway. (Maybe if Kes had still been on board, she would have remembered...) Leonardo's studio, introduced at the end of last season, becomes a regular holographic retreat for our characters, and Leonardo himself (played for the second and last time by John Rhys Davies) even gets an away mission of sorts, with help from the Doctor's mobile holo-emitter. The Voyagers finally succeed in communicating with Starfleet, ensuring that somebody back home will be trying to find a way to bring them home. The same episode also provides a point of reference to where Deep Space Nine was at during the same period, dropping a hint about the Federation's war with the Dominion. (Who?) And the show's list of big-name guest stars grows to include Virginia Madsen of Sideways, Kurtwood Smith of That '70s Show, and Andy Dick of TV's News Radio.
Scorpion, Part II kicks off the season with Captain Janeway making an alliance with the Borg. In exchange for the technology to defend themselves against Species 8472, the Borg are to escort Voyager safely through their space. While this is all right in theory, reality tests the alliance to the limit. First Janeway gets hurt and, while temporarily in command, Chakotay pulls back from what he considers a reckless plan. Then the spokesBorg, a ruthless and arrogant number with a trim waist-line, tries to get the ship assimilated. Just when Janeway has no choice but to save the Borg from their even worse enemy, she learns that the Borg provoked the war she is helping to end. All that and a visit to a fantastic realm known as "Fluid Space"... Wow!
The Gift is the transitional episode in which Seven of Nine makes the difficult adjustment to being cut off from the Collective and forced to begin exploring her humanity; and in which Kes makes the transition to being some kind of non-corporeal life-form. The latter seems to be the more traumatic of the two adjustments, if you measure trauma in terms of how close it comes to annihilating the entire ship, but in the end the Voyagers end up ten years closer to home (Kes's parting gift). It's a grueling episode for Janeway in particular, as she has to hand-hold both women through this difficult time in their lives. Especially effective is her tearful "I'm going to miss you" before hugging Kes goodbye. The ethics of her decision to force Seven to live without the Borg Collective are more likely to stimulate discussion.
Day of Honor is partly a story about a rough day for B'Elanna Torres and partly an illustration of the risks of giving to charity. The aliens in this episode come to Voyager with open hands, begging for humanitarian aid. Having gotten as much as the Voyagers can afford to give, they come back with reinforcements and try to take what they want—including Seven, who will be punished because of what the Borg did to their society. Meanwhile, B'Elanna is torn as to whether or not to observe the Klingon Day of Honor. On the one hand, she always resented being forced by her mother to partake of Klingon traditions. On the other hand, a part of her is ashamed of not living up to Klingon standards of honor and courage. It epitomizes the inner conflict that has kept her aloof from others all her life, but during a disastrous shuttle mission that finds her and Tom stranded as pictured here, the vacuum of space boils her dilemma down to the essence: that only under threat of imminent death will she confess that she loves Tom Paris.
Nemesis is the one where Chakotay's shuttle is shot down over a war zone. Welcomed by a unit of young Vori defenders who are holding out against their Kradin "nemesis," Chakotay expects to be escorted to a command center where he can signal his ship. Instead, he finds himself drawn into the conflict between the seemingly good-natured Vori and the Kradin, whose atrocities have earned them the name of "the Beast." Only when Chakotay has so completely identified with the Vori that he is willing to kill or die for their cause, does he realize that the Kradin Beast at the end of his rifle barrel is actually Tuvok, trying to reason him into lowering his weapon. Yes, kids, Chakotay has been brainwashed by a Vori combat-training simulation, like thousands of their own people, to say nothing of waylaid aliens, who have been conscripted in this way. It is, after all, the snaggle-toothed Kradin who help the Voyagers recover Chakotay—though this doesn't help the Commander overcome his revulsion toward them. As he says in the final line of the episode, "I wish it were as easy to stop hating as it was to start." A grim, action-filled, perhaps heavy-handed episode, it sticks in the memory partly because of the Vori culture's strange lingo and partly because of the sympathy elicited, then betrayed, by its illusory people.
Revulsion is the Trek franchise's answer to the movie Dead Calm, featuring four-time Trek guest Leland Orser as Dejaren, a psychotic maintenance hologram who murders the crew of his ship. B'Elanna and the Doctor don't realize this until they're trapped on the ship with him, alternately humoring his flights of fancy (which include one especially nasty tirade against "organics") and trying to shut him down. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Tom Paris has been recruited as a medical assistant and, more interestingly, Harry and Seven have been assigned to work together to design a new astrometrics lab. For Harry, who is both intimidated by and attracted to the former Borg, their partnership is excruciatingly awkward. For the rest of us, particularly when Harry tries to explain to Chakotay why he doesn't want to be paired with Seven, the result is comic gold.
The Raven is part of a series of terrifying dreams and hallucinations that begin to plague Seven of Nine as Voyager approaches the territory of the paranoid and highly territorial B'omar (a representative pictured here). While the B'omar offer to let Voyager cross their space only under ridiculously restrictive conditions, Seven goes off the reservation in search of a Borg signal that both fascinates and terrifies her. Whether this is a sign that she is returning to the Collective, or discovering a new facet of her humanity, only becomes clear when she and Tuvok (whom she captures when he tries to bring her back) reach the source of the signal and find that it's a Raven of another kind—the ship of that name on which she and her human parents lived until the Borg assimilated them some 20 years ago. Seven's vulnerability as she gets closer to this discovery is very touching, but the episode is equally fulfilling for fans (like me) who also enjoy the sight of spaceships shooting at each other.
Scientific Method is a little talking piece about the ethics of medical research, as well as a creepy story about unseen invaders who can mess you up on so many levels, including a molecular one, that even if you knew they were there you couldn't do anything to stop them. When members of the crew start developing weird symptoms caused by overstimulation of certain parts of their genetic code, the Doctor and B'Elanna discover that somebody has stuck eensy-weensy transmitters to the victims' genes. It seems the Voyagers are being studied by someone on Voyager. But before they can alert anyone else to their findings, or do anything about it, the baddies incapacitate B'Elanna and drive the Doctor into hiding. Later, with modifications to her bionic eye, Seven becomes able to see the aliens; she finds the ship crawling with them, sticking nasty probes into everybody and monitoring the results. Fighting back is tricky when you have to pretend you don't see the invaders and you can't talk to anyone about them. Eventually, Seven takes the only course left to her: she blows the cover of one of the aliens, shifting the dilemma onto the Captain's shoulders. What Janeway does to get rid of the unwanted visitors is just plain crazy. But the most unnerving part of the episode may be how the captured alien seems so reasonable and, well, clinical, while justifying her people's atrocities and threatening even worse. Besides being a creepy and intense story, the writing of this episode is marked by some hilarious dialogue, including Tuvok asking Janeway whether he should flog people (you'd have to be there), and Neelix and Chakotay trying to outdo each other with medical complaints.
Year of Hell guest-stars John Loprieno (late of One Life to Live), three-time Trek guest Kurtwood Smith, and four-time Trek guest Peter Slutsker in his only non-Ferengi role in the franchise, all as members of the Krenim Imperium, a civilization that has risen, or fallen (depending on what timeline you're in), through the use of weaponized time. The episode begins with a Krenim time-ship commanded by Annorax (pictured here), blasting an entire planet with a weapon that erases its inhabitants from history. Their plan is to do this to as many civilizations as necessary to restore the timeline in which the Krenim had a huge empire. Meanwhile, Voyager finds itself under attack by Krenim ships which either grow or shrink, along with the Imperium itself, according to the results of each "temporal incursion" attempted by Annorax and his crew. Over a period of several months, things go pretty badly for the Voyagers, and they don't even know that their enemies are changing history until Seven of Nine invents a shield that insulates the ship from both chroniton torpedoes and changes in the timeline. In doing that, however, they make a personal enemy of Annorax, who moves in for the kill. The first half of this two-part episode ends with Tuvok blinded by an accident, Tom and Chakotay captured by the enemy, and most of the crew abandoning Voyager in escape-pods... Could it be the last one they ever made?
Year of Hell, Part II concludes the two-parter with Janeway leading a crew of six to try to put out all the fires on Voyager, seek out allies against the Krenim, and risk everything on a reckless gamble that will either destroy the ship completely or reset everything to the status quo ante. Annorax, meanwhile, regales his guests (Tom and Chakotay, remember) with the cuisine of cultures that, outside his weapon-ship's envelope of technobabble, never existed. While Tom cultivates a mutiny against Annorax, Chakotay tries to understand the villain's obsession with tweaking history until he restores the one thing that matters: his wife and the colony she lived on. For Annorax, this goal has eluded him for 200 years, driving him to commit acts of temporal genocide against countless races. Chakotay is convinced that there must be a way that both Annorax and the Voyager can benefit from a temporal incursion that doesn't hurt anybody, but his open-mindedness is matched only by Annorax's impatience. In the end it is Tom's plan that saves the day—or rather, erases it—in one of those frustrating time-travel-story endings in which all the events of the two-episode arc turn out never to have happened, and nobody even remembers them. So it was all, ultimately, pointless!
Random Thoughts guest stars Gwynyth Walsh, who appeared five times between TNG, DS9 and the movies as Klingon villain B'Etor. Here she plays a magistrate on a planet of telepaths where, over the previous three generations, they have virtually eliminated crime by purging violent thoughts from their minds. A marketplace mishap momentarily triggers B'Elanna's combative instincts. Minutes later, a man is beaten senseless, the victim of a telepath who had B'Elanna's violent thought in his mind. Naturally, in Star Trek logic, B'Elanna gets arrested and faces something called an "engrammatic purge" in the machine pictured here. But Tuvok insists on running his own investigation, made even more urgent when the same thought of B'Elanna's causes a murder days later. Obviously one passing thought could not have led directly to the second crime. Tuvok's suspicions lead him to uncover a black market in illicit thoughts, and an especially creepy telepath who hoards images of brutality. Tuvok's mind-meld with this character is one of the most ruthless things we have seen him do—very scary!
Concerning Flight features larger-than-life actor John Rhys Davies, who at that time was probably best known for his work in the Indiana Jones movies, in an encore of his third-season appearance as a hologram of Leonardo da Vinci. While wincing every time a crew member calls him "Mr. Da Vinci" (which is sort of like calling Seven of Nine "Miss Of Nine"), you can thrill to caper in which the 16th-century master, aided by the Doctor's mobile emitter, finds himself running around an alien planet, and even going airborne in a flying machine of his own design. Leonardo has a gang of space pirates to thank for this opportunity. Using their high-powered transporters to loot Voyager of crucial pieces of technology, including the main computer core, the robbers retire to their network of high-security warehouses on a mercantile planet. Janeway joins her holographic mentor to sniff out the computer core's hiding place, snatch it back, and make a low-tech getaway. Apart from the opportunity to enjoy John Rhys Davies in a long white beard, and the fun of seeing a 16th-century holo-character rationalizing his experiences on a 24th-century alien planet into his worldview, it actually isn't all that hot an episode. There are, in fact, moments when one wants to ask, "What is the point of this?" And, most damagingly, what was meant to be a climactic moment (Leonardo's flying machine taking off) comes over as rather anticlimactic and even, forgive me, ludicrous. Oh well...
Mortal Coil is the one in which Neelix takes one on the chin, waking up in sickbay some 18 hours later to learn that he has been dead. This leads the crew's morale officer into a serious existential crisis. Surprisingly, it isn't due to the fact that he has been brought back to life by Seven's Borg nanoprobes. It is simply that, after experiencing nothingness during his spell as a cadaver, Neelix can no longer believe in the Talaxian traditions about the afterlife. Since all his loved ones perished in a war (see Season 1's "Jetrel"), the belief that his family, and especially his sister Alixia, await him in the Great Forest has been all that kept him going. Now, without that belief, he has nothing to live for. Neelix tries to seek answers through a vision quest guided by Chakotay, but this only drives him deeper into depression. Finally, on the point of suicide, Neelix is brought back by his sense of duty, especially to a little girl who needs him to tuck her in at night. (Don't ask.)
Waking Moments finds the Voyagers being attacked by a race of aliens (representative pictured here) who are always asleep in the waking world, but who have serious kung-fu in the dream state in which they live their whole lives. Plus, they have a gadget that broadcasts technobabble over a wide region of space, causing anyone who passes through to fall asleep and become trapped in a shared dream in which the sleep aliens use said kung-fu to capture them. The only people on Voyager with a chance against them are the holographic Doctor (who doesn't sleep) and Chakotay, whose "ah-koo-chee-moya" shtick includes a lucid-dreaming subroutine. He manages to kick his way to the surface of all the dreams-within-dreams, breaching the waking world just long enough to point the ship's photon torpedoes at the sleep aliens' planet and set a three-minute countdown, before falling back into the dream to explain to the crew's not-really-there captors that they're about to become really not-there. I think it's Chakotay's level of commitment, being willing to die himself to make his point, that finally scares the aliens off in an episode whose concept is so ridiculous that it could only be Star Trek, if not more so.
Message in a Bottle is the episode in which the Voyagers finally get a message back to the folks back home in the Alpha Quadrant. Situated appropriately at about the midpoint of the series, it's sort of the "hump" beyond which the rest of their journey is, more or less, downhill—at least in the sense that, from now on, people at both ends are working on a way to bring them home. But first, the Doctor must survive being transmitted through an ancient network of alien communications relays, then take back an experimental Starfleet vessel whose entire crew has been slaughtered by Romulan agents, assisted only by the Emergency Medical Hologram "Mark 2," played to comic perfection by Andy Dick. Mark 1: "Stop breathing down my neck." Mark 2: "My breathing is only a simulation." Mark 1: "So is my neck. Stop it anyway." Playing one of the Romulans is Judson Scott, who besides a first-season TNG role also had a notable (but uncredited) role in the second Trek feature film. This also happens to be the episode that introduced a new alien threat, the savagely single-minded hunters known as the Hirogen.
Hunters further develops the wolf-like Hirogen culture, whose hunters—alone or in pairs, and occasionally in packs—stalk aliens across fantastic distances. They take satisfaction from a long and difficult chase, but even when their prey is as easy to capture as Tuvok and Seven (whose shuttlecraft only puts up a few moments of resistance), they are also into possessing the "relics of the hunt" (i.e., the clean white bones), being the first to bag a new species, and bagging it on their own. Their quick study of these characteristics proves to be Tuvok and Seven's only defense, but it gives them just enough time to avoid being skinned before Voyager comes to their rescue. Meanwhile, messages from home have started to come through the alien relay network to which the Hirogen lay claim, adding a layer of urgency and expectation to the drama on the Voyager's decks. The "Alpha" Hirogen in this episode is played by the same ironically-named Tiny Ron who played Maihar'du (Grand Nagus Zek's footman) in seven episodes of DS9.
Prey features Tony Todd, who played Worf's brother Kurn on both TNG and DS9 as well as a grown-up version of Jake Sisko in DS9's "The Visitor," as another Alpha-Hirogen who is brought on board Voyager, barely alive, after attempting to bag a Species 8472. Unfortunately his quarry also finds his way onto the ship. This leads to spooky scenes in which the alien is seen crawling on the outside of the ship's hull, and spacesuited crewpersons stalk darkened corridors lit only by the lights on the barrels of their phaser rifles. It also leads to an intense showdown between the Captain, who intends to help the wounded and demoralized Species 8472 back to the dimension it calls home, and Seven, who thinks they should give into the Hirogen hunter's demand for his prey before his buddies arrive and blow the Voyager up. This conflict between the ethics of Borg pragmatism and human compassion forms the heart of an episode which, nevertheless, will be best remembered for making you think, "Could the Hirogen be even badder than Species 8472? Cool!"
Retrospect guest-stars Michael Horton, late of Murder, She Wrote and a role in two TNG feature films, as an ill-fated weapons dealer named Kovin in a story that dramatizes the limitations of recovered memories as evidence of a crime. The Doctor, trying out some new "Ship's Counselor" subroutines he has added to his program, observes Seven of Nine having an anxiety attack while he gives her a routine exam. Using memory regression techniques of his own devising, the Doctor teases out a repressed memory in which Kovin stunned Seven, extracted Borg nanoprobes from her body, then covered up the assault with false memory engrams about an accidental technobabble overload. Seven warps directly from having no memory of the crime to being determined to see Kovin pay for it. Between technobabble and psychobabble, the investigation eventually proves Kovin innocent, but not before the trader, convinced that he is being set up, gets himself killed trying to escape. The whole affair opens new emotional vistas for Seven and leads the remorseful Doctor to ask Janeway to reset his program to its default settings. Which, of course, would be boring; so, request denied!
The Killing Game finds the Voyager in the hands of the Hirogen. Several weeks after being captured, the ship has become a prison for most of the crew, while the senior officers are forced to take part in holodeck simulations of the most violent periods in history. They don't know that it's only a shadow play, thanks to neural implants that keep them in character. So we find Janeway leading the French resistance in a small town overrun by Nazis, while the Americans led by General Chakotay close in. When the flesh-and-blood characters are injured, the Hirogen force the Doctor to patch them up and send them back into the fray. The Doc uses an opportunity to treat an injured Seven of Nine to break the implant's hold on her, so that she becomes the seed of a resistance within the resistance, fighting not only against a holographic German occupation force but against the very real Hirogen one. Either of these enemies may be equally deadly since, with the holodeck safeties turned off, the holographic weapons are as deadly as the real ones. And so this first half of a two-parter ends with an explosion blasting an opening between the holodeck and the corridors of the Voyager, which the Hirogen have just rigged with emitters, enabling World War II to spill out onto the decks of a 24th century starship...
The Killing Game, Part II continues the Voyagers' struggle to retake their ship from the Hirogen, while the chief of the hunters battles his own subordinates in a campaign to use holodeck tech to build a new future for his people. Janeway and Seven have to do some nimble footwork to free their crewmates from Hirogen thought-control while keeping up the charade that the World War II holonovel in which they are all trapped is real. Alpha-Hirogen Karr, meanwhile, fears that the hunt has spread his species too thin, that in a few generations their culture will no longer exist unless they can find a way to come back together. He believes holography is the key, but he is killed by one of his own men just when he and Janeway are about to make a deal. This ensures a final, climatic battle in which holographic Nazis, Americans, French resistance fighters, and Klingons get mixed up with flesh-and-blood Voyagers and Hirogen. This two-parter features guest actors Danny Goldring (who played 5 guest roles in various Star Trek spinoffs), Mark Metcalf (of Animal House fame), Mark Deakins (a Star Trek: Insurrection alum who provided a love interest for Seven of Nine in a later two-parter), J. Paul Boehmer (in his first of five Trek roles, including another Nazi), and Paul Eckstein (whose six Trek roles all involved heavy prosthetics).
Vis à Vis features Dan Butler (late of Frasier) as an alien named Steth who... Nope. Wow, this is going to be hard to describe without getting the facts mixed up! Let's try again. The male alien pictured here, played by Dan Butler, is actually Tom Paris; the woman next to him is really the male alien named Steth who owns the body Tom Paris is... No, that isn't right either. The character played by Dan Butler at the beginning of this episode calls himself Steth, but really isn't Steth, and after he swaps genomes with Tom P. (a little trick the unnamed alien is good at), he sends a stunned Tom flying off in his experimental spaceship, looking like Steth, while he (the alien) tries to pass himself off as Tom back on Voyager. This proves to be harder than the alien expected, which leads one to suspect that the alien isn't very bright except when it comes to genome-swapping, which he also does with Janeway. And so, at one point, Janeway finds herself looking like Tom Paris. All of which is pretty confusing for everybody, but remarkably fun to watch. For a moment (e.g., when the fake Paris is trying to find sickbay), you might actually sympathize with the dastardly alien as he struggles to cover his ignorance of all the things one would have to know to pass as a Voyager crewman; for reasons that soon become obvious, psychotic tricks like his only mix well with a solitary lifestyle. Which is why he/she/it (in the image of Janeway) eventually makes a break for it in a shuttlecraft. They have to catch the alien, at the very least so that Janeway needn't look like Paris for the rest of the series. It's wicked fun and, again, as loopy as Trek can be.
The Omega Directive
Unforgettable
Living Witness
Demon
One
Hope and Fear
For more on spaceship-based TV series, see my reviews of Star Trek: TOS seasons one, two, and three; of TNG seasons one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven; of DS9 seasons one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven; of Voyager seasons one, two, and three; and of Enterprise season one. See also my review of Farscape seasons one, two, three, and four; of Firefly; and of Babylon 5 seasons one, two, three, and four.
I can only fondly imagine how different this year's storylines would have been with both characters in the cast.Meanwhile, it was a season that didn't quite justify Season 3's ominous buildup toward a year of conflict with the Borg and Species 8472. Indeed, after the season-opening conclusion to the previous year's cliffhanger, the Voyagers don't encounter the Borg, except in the form of Seven's memories and hallucinations, and indirectly through other aliens who have issues with them. Maybe this was because the development of Seven's character was enough Borg for the writers' taste. As for Species 8472, their one appearance after the first episode of the season is upstaged by the development of a new alien threat, the predatory Hirogen, who figure in no less than five episodes this year.
Other developments, however, remain on pace. Tom and B'Elanna increasingly become the couple Season 3 suggested they would be. A two-part episode fulfills the previous year's foreshadowing of the "Year of Hell" which, after all the cards were laid down, turned out not to have happened anyway. (Maybe if Kes had still been on board, she would have remembered...) Leonardo's studio, introduced at the end of last season, becomes a regular holographic retreat for our characters, and Leonardo himself (played for the second and last time by John Rhys Davies) even gets an away mission of sorts, with help from the Doctor's mobile holo-emitter. The Voyagers finally succeed in communicating with Starfleet, ensuring that somebody back home will be trying to find a way to bring them home. The same episode also provides a point of reference to where Deep Space Nine was at during the same period, dropping a hint about the Federation's war with the Dominion. (Who?) And the show's list of big-name guest stars grows to include Virginia Madsen of Sideways, Kurtwood Smith of That '70s Show, and Andy Dick of TV's News Radio.
Scorpion, Part II kicks off the season with Captain Janeway making an alliance with the Borg. In exchange for the technology to defend themselves against Species 8472, the Borg are to escort Voyager safely through their space. While this is all right in theory, reality tests the alliance to the limit. First Janeway gets hurt and, while temporarily in command, Chakotay pulls back from what he considers a reckless plan. Then the spokesBorg, a ruthless and arrogant number with a trim waist-line, tries to get the ship assimilated. Just when Janeway has no choice but to save the Borg from their even worse enemy, she learns that the Borg provoked the war she is helping to end. All that and a visit to a fantastic realm known as "Fluid Space"... Wow!
The Gift is the transitional episode in which Seven of Nine makes the difficult adjustment to being cut off from the Collective and forced to begin exploring her humanity; and in which Kes makes the transition to being some kind of non-corporeal life-form. The latter seems to be the more traumatic of the two adjustments, if you measure trauma in terms of how close it comes to annihilating the entire ship, but in the end the Voyagers end up ten years closer to home (Kes's parting gift). It's a grueling episode for Janeway in particular, as she has to hand-hold both women through this difficult time in their lives. Especially effective is her tearful "I'm going to miss you" before hugging Kes goodbye. The ethics of her decision to force Seven to live without the Borg Collective are more likely to stimulate discussion.
Day of Honor is partly a story about a rough day for B'Elanna Torres and partly an illustration of the risks of giving to charity. The aliens in this episode come to Voyager with open hands, begging for humanitarian aid. Having gotten as much as the Voyagers can afford to give, they come back with reinforcements and try to take what they want—including Seven, who will be punished because of what the Borg did to their society. Meanwhile, B'Elanna is torn as to whether or not to observe the Klingon Day of Honor. On the one hand, she always resented being forced by her mother to partake of Klingon traditions. On the other hand, a part of her is ashamed of not living up to Klingon standards of honor and courage. It epitomizes the inner conflict that has kept her aloof from others all her life, but during a disastrous shuttle mission that finds her and Tom stranded as pictured here, the vacuum of space boils her dilemma down to the essence: that only under threat of imminent death will she confess that she loves Tom Paris.
Nemesis is the one where Chakotay's shuttle is shot down over a war zone. Welcomed by a unit of young Vori defenders who are holding out against their Kradin "nemesis," Chakotay expects to be escorted to a command center where he can signal his ship. Instead, he finds himself drawn into the conflict between the seemingly good-natured Vori and the Kradin, whose atrocities have earned them the name of "the Beast." Only when Chakotay has so completely identified with the Vori that he is willing to kill or die for their cause, does he realize that the Kradin Beast at the end of his rifle barrel is actually Tuvok, trying to reason him into lowering his weapon. Yes, kids, Chakotay has been brainwashed by a Vori combat-training simulation, like thousands of their own people, to say nothing of waylaid aliens, who have been conscripted in this way. It is, after all, the snaggle-toothed Kradin who help the Voyagers recover Chakotay—though this doesn't help the Commander overcome his revulsion toward them. As he says in the final line of the episode, "I wish it were as easy to stop hating as it was to start." A grim, action-filled, perhaps heavy-handed episode, it sticks in the memory partly because of the Vori culture's strange lingo and partly because of the sympathy elicited, then betrayed, by its illusory people.
Revulsion is the Trek franchise's answer to the movie Dead Calm, featuring four-time Trek guest Leland Orser as Dejaren, a psychotic maintenance hologram who murders the crew of his ship. B'Elanna and the Doctor don't realize this until they're trapped on the ship with him, alternately humoring his flights of fancy (which include one especially nasty tirade against "organics") and trying to shut him down. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Tom Paris has been recruited as a medical assistant and, more interestingly, Harry and Seven have been assigned to work together to design a new astrometrics lab. For Harry, who is both intimidated by and attracted to the former Borg, their partnership is excruciatingly awkward. For the rest of us, particularly when Harry tries to explain to Chakotay why he doesn't want to be paired with Seven, the result is comic gold.
The Raven is part of a series of terrifying dreams and hallucinations that begin to plague Seven of Nine as Voyager approaches the territory of the paranoid and highly territorial B'omar (a representative pictured here). While the B'omar offer to let Voyager cross their space only under ridiculously restrictive conditions, Seven goes off the reservation in search of a Borg signal that both fascinates and terrifies her. Whether this is a sign that she is returning to the Collective, or discovering a new facet of her humanity, only becomes clear when she and Tuvok (whom she captures when he tries to bring her back) reach the source of the signal and find that it's a Raven of another kind—the ship of that name on which she and her human parents lived until the Borg assimilated them some 20 years ago. Seven's vulnerability as she gets closer to this discovery is very touching, but the episode is equally fulfilling for fans (like me) who also enjoy the sight of spaceships shooting at each other.
Scientific Method is a little talking piece about the ethics of medical research, as well as a creepy story about unseen invaders who can mess you up on so many levels, including a molecular one, that even if you knew they were there you couldn't do anything to stop them. When members of the crew start developing weird symptoms caused by overstimulation of certain parts of their genetic code, the Doctor and B'Elanna discover that somebody has stuck eensy-weensy transmitters to the victims' genes. It seems the Voyagers are being studied by someone on Voyager. But before they can alert anyone else to their findings, or do anything about it, the baddies incapacitate B'Elanna and drive the Doctor into hiding. Later, with modifications to her bionic eye, Seven becomes able to see the aliens; she finds the ship crawling with them, sticking nasty probes into everybody and monitoring the results. Fighting back is tricky when you have to pretend you don't see the invaders and you can't talk to anyone about them. Eventually, Seven takes the only course left to her: she blows the cover of one of the aliens, shifting the dilemma onto the Captain's shoulders. What Janeway does to get rid of the unwanted visitors is just plain crazy. But the most unnerving part of the episode may be how the captured alien seems so reasonable and, well, clinical, while justifying her people's atrocities and threatening even worse. Besides being a creepy and intense story, the writing of this episode is marked by some hilarious dialogue, including Tuvok asking Janeway whether he should flog people (you'd have to be there), and Neelix and Chakotay trying to outdo each other with medical complaints.
Year of Hell guest-stars John Loprieno (late of One Life to Live), three-time Trek guest Kurtwood Smith, and four-time Trek guest Peter Slutsker in his only non-Ferengi role in the franchise, all as members of the Krenim Imperium, a civilization that has risen, or fallen (depending on what timeline you're in), through the use of weaponized time. The episode begins with a Krenim time-ship commanded by Annorax (pictured here), blasting an entire planet with a weapon that erases its inhabitants from history. Their plan is to do this to as many civilizations as necessary to restore the timeline in which the Krenim had a huge empire. Meanwhile, Voyager finds itself under attack by Krenim ships which either grow or shrink, along with the Imperium itself, according to the results of each "temporal incursion" attempted by Annorax and his crew. Over a period of several months, things go pretty badly for the Voyagers, and they don't even know that their enemies are changing history until Seven of Nine invents a shield that insulates the ship from both chroniton torpedoes and changes in the timeline. In doing that, however, they make a personal enemy of Annorax, who moves in for the kill. The first half of this two-part episode ends with Tuvok blinded by an accident, Tom and Chakotay captured by the enemy, and most of the crew abandoning Voyager in escape-pods... Could it be the last one they ever made?
Year of Hell, Part II concludes the two-parter with Janeway leading a crew of six to try to put out all the fires on Voyager, seek out allies against the Krenim, and risk everything on a reckless gamble that will either destroy the ship completely or reset everything to the status quo ante. Annorax, meanwhile, regales his guests (Tom and Chakotay, remember) with the cuisine of cultures that, outside his weapon-ship's envelope of technobabble, never existed. While Tom cultivates a mutiny against Annorax, Chakotay tries to understand the villain's obsession with tweaking history until he restores the one thing that matters: his wife and the colony she lived on. For Annorax, this goal has eluded him for 200 years, driving him to commit acts of temporal genocide against countless races. Chakotay is convinced that there must be a way that both Annorax and the Voyager can benefit from a temporal incursion that doesn't hurt anybody, but his open-mindedness is matched only by Annorax's impatience. In the end it is Tom's plan that saves the day—or rather, erases it—in one of those frustrating time-travel-story endings in which all the events of the two-episode arc turn out never to have happened, and nobody even remembers them. So it was all, ultimately, pointless!
Random Thoughts guest stars Gwynyth Walsh, who appeared five times between TNG, DS9 and the movies as Klingon villain B'Etor. Here she plays a magistrate on a planet of telepaths where, over the previous three generations, they have virtually eliminated crime by purging violent thoughts from their minds. A marketplace mishap momentarily triggers B'Elanna's combative instincts. Minutes later, a man is beaten senseless, the victim of a telepath who had B'Elanna's violent thought in his mind. Naturally, in Star Trek logic, B'Elanna gets arrested and faces something called an "engrammatic purge" in the machine pictured here. But Tuvok insists on running his own investigation, made even more urgent when the same thought of B'Elanna's causes a murder days later. Obviously one passing thought could not have led directly to the second crime. Tuvok's suspicions lead him to uncover a black market in illicit thoughts, and an especially creepy telepath who hoards images of brutality. Tuvok's mind-meld with this character is one of the most ruthless things we have seen him do—very scary!
Concerning Flight features larger-than-life actor John Rhys Davies, who at that time was probably best known for his work in the Indiana Jones movies, in an encore of his third-season appearance as a hologram of Leonardo da Vinci. While wincing every time a crew member calls him "Mr. Da Vinci" (which is sort of like calling Seven of Nine "Miss Of Nine"), you can thrill to caper in which the 16th-century master, aided by the Doctor's mobile emitter, finds himself running around an alien planet, and even going airborne in a flying machine of his own design. Leonardo has a gang of space pirates to thank for this opportunity. Using their high-powered transporters to loot Voyager of crucial pieces of technology, including the main computer core, the robbers retire to their network of high-security warehouses on a mercantile planet. Janeway joins her holographic mentor to sniff out the computer core's hiding place, snatch it back, and make a low-tech getaway. Apart from the opportunity to enjoy John Rhys Davies in a long white beard, and the fun of seeing a 16th-century holo-character rationalizing his experiences on a 24th-century alien planet into his worldview, it actually isn't all that hot an episode. There are, in fact, moments when one wants to ask, "What is the point of this?" And, most damagingly, what was meant to be a climactic moment (Leonardo's flying machine taking off) comes over as rather anticlimactic and even, forgive me, ludicrous. Oh well...
Mortal Coil is the one in which Neelix takes one on the chin, waking up in sickbay some 18 hours later to learn that he has been dead. This leads the crew's morale officer into a serious existential crisis. Surprisingly, it isn't due to the fact that he has been brought back to life by Seven's Borg nanoprobes. It is simply that, after experiencing nothingness during his spell as a cadaver, Neelix can no longer believe in the Talaxian traditions about the afterlife. Since all his loved ones perished in a war (see Season 1's "Jetrel"), the belief that his family, and especially his sister Alixia, await him in the Great Forest has been all that kept him going. Now, without that belief, he has nothing to live for. Neelix tries to seek answers through a vision quest guided by Chakotay, but this only drives him deeper into depression. Finally, on the point of suicide, Neelix is brought back by his sense of duty, especially to a little girl who needs him to tuck her in at night. (Don't ask.)
Waking Moments finds the Voyagers being attacked by a race of aliens (representative pictured here) who are always asleep in the waking world, but who have serious kung-fu in the dream state in which they live their whole lives. Plus, they have a gadget that broadcasts technobabble over a wide region of space, causing anyone who passes through to fall asleep and become trapped in a shared dream in which the sleep aliens use said kung-fu to capture them. The only people on Voyager with a chance against them are the holographic Doctor (who doesn't sleep) and Chakotay, whose "ah-koo-chee-moya" shtick includes a lucid-dreaming subroutine. He manages to kick his way to the surface of all the dreams-within-dreams, breaching the waking world just long enough to point the ship's photon torpedoes at the sleep aliens' planet and set a three-minute countdown, before falling back into the dream to explain to the crew's not-really-there captors that they're about to become really not-there. I think it's Chakotay's level of commitment, being willing to die himself to make his point, that finally scares the aliens off in an episode whose concept is so ridiculous that it could only be Star Trek, if not more so.
Message in a Bottle is the episode in which the Voyagers finally get a message back to the folks back home in the Alpha Quadrant. Situated appropriately at about the midpoint of the series, it's sort of the "hump" beyond which the rest of their journey is, more or less, downhill—at least in the sense that, from now on, people at both ends are working on a way to bring them home. But first, the Doctor must survive being transmitted through an ancient network of alien communications relays, then take back an experimental Starfleet vessel whose entire crew has been slaughtered by Romulan agents, assisted only by the Emergency Medical Hologram "Mark 2," played to comic perfection by Andy Dick. Mark 1: "Stop breathing down my neck." Mark 2: "My breathing is only a simulation." Mark 1: "So is my neck. Stop it anyway." Playing one of the Romulans is Judson Scott, who besides a first-season TNG role also had a notable (but uncredited) role in the second Trek feature film. This also happens to be the episode that introduced a new alien threat, the savagely single-minded hunters known as the Hirogen.
Hunters further develops the wolf-like Hirogen culture, whose hunters—alone or in pairs, and occasionally in packs—stalk aliens across fantastic distances. They take satisfaction from a long and difficult chase, but even when their prey is as easy to capture as Tuvok and Seven (whose shuttlecraft only puts up a few moments of resistance), they are also into possessing the "relics of the hunt" (i.e., the clean white bones), being the first to bag a new species, and bagging it on their own. Their quick study of these characteristics proves to be Tuvok and Seven's only defense, but it gives them just enough time to avoid being skinned before Voyager comes to their rescue. Meanwhile, messages from home have started to come through the alien relay network to which the Hirogen lay claim, adding a layer of urgency and expectation to the drama on the Voyager's decks. The "Alpha" Hirogen in this episode is played by the same ironically-named Tiny Ron who played Maihar'du (Grand Nagus Zek's footman) in seven episodes of DS9.
Prey features Tony Todd, who played Worf's brother Kurn on both TNG and DS9 as well as a grown-up version of Jake Sisko in DS9's "The Visitor," as another Alpha-Hirogen who is brought on board Voyager, barely alive, after attempting to bag a Species 8472. Unfortunately his quarry also finds his way onto the ship. This leads to spooky scenes in which the alien is seen crawling on the outside of the ship's hull, and spacesuited crewpersons stalk darkened corridors lit only by the lights on the barrels of their phaser rifles. It also leads to an intense showdown between the Captain, who intends to help the wounded and demoralized Species 8472 back to the dimension it calls home, and Seven, who thinks they should give into the Hirogen hunter's demand for his prey before his buddies arrive and blow the Voyager up. This conflict between the ethics of Borg pragmatism and human compassion forms the heart of an episode which, nevertheless, will be best remembered for making you think, "Could the Hirogen be even badder than Species 8472? Cool!"
Retrospect guest-stars Michael Horton, late of Murder, She Wrote and a role in two TNG feature films, as an ill-fated weapons dealer named Kovin in a story that dramatizes the limitations of recovered memories as evidence of a crime. The Doctor, trying out some new "Ship's Counselor" subroutines he has added to his program, observes Seven of Nine having an anxiety attack while he gives her a routine exam. Using memory regression techniques of his own devising, the Doctor teases out a repressed memory in which Kovin stunned Seven, extracted Borg nanoprobes from her body, then covered up the assault with false memory engrams about an accidental technobabble overload. Seven warps directly from having no memory of the crime to being determined to see Kovin pay for it. Between technobabble and psychobabble, the investigation eventually proves Kovin innocent, but not before the trader, convinced that he is being set up, gets himself killed trying to escape. The whole affair opens new emotional vistas for Seven and leads the remorseful Doctor to ask Janeway to reset his program to its default settings. Which, of course, would be boring; so, request denied!
The Killing Game finds the Voyager in the hands of the Hirogen. Several weeks after being captured, the ship has become a prison for most of the crew, while the senior officers are forced to take part in holodeck simulations of the most violent periods in history. They don't know that it's only a shadow play, thanks to neural implants that keep them in character. So we find Janeway leading the French resistance in a small town overrun by Nazis, while the Americans led by General Chakotay close in. When the flesh-and-blood characters are injured, the Hirogen force the Doctor to patch them up and send them back into the fray. The Doc uses an opportunity to treat an injured Seven of Nine to break the implant's hold on her, so that she becomes the seed of a resistance within the resistance, fighting not only against a holographic German occupation force but against the very real Hirogen one. Either of these enemies may be equally deadly since, with the holodeck safeties turned off, the holographic weapons are as deadly as the real ones. And so this first half of a two-parter ends with an explosion blasting an opening between the holodeck and the corridors of the Voyager, which the Hirogen have just rigged with emitters, enabling World War II to spill out onto the decks of a 24th century starship...
The Killing Game, Part II continues the Voyagers' struggle to retake their ship from the Hirogen, while the chief of the hunters battles his own subordinates in a campaign to use holodeck tech to build a new future for his people. Janeway and Seven have to do some nimble footwork to free their crewmates from Hirogen thought-control while keeping up the charade that the World War II holonovel in which they are all trapped is real. Alpha-Hirogen Karr, meanwhile, fears that the hunt has spread his species too thin, that in a few generations their culture will no longer exist unless they can find a way to come back together. He believes holography is the key, but he is killed by one of his own men just when he and Janeway are about to make a deal. This ensures a final, climatic battle in which holographic Nazis, Americans, French resistance fighters, and Klingons get mixed up with flesh-and-blood Voyagers and Hirogen. This two-parter features guest actors Danny Goldring (who played 5 guest roles in various Star Trek spinoffs), Mark Metcalf (of Animal House fame), Mark Deakins (a Star Trek: Insurrection alum who provided a love interest for Seven of Nine in a later two-parter), J. Paul Boehmer (in his first of five Trek roles, including another Nazi), and Paul Eckstein (whose six Trek roles all involved heavy prosthetics).
Vis à Vis features Dan Butler (late of Frasier) as an alien named Steth who... Nope. Wow, this is going to be hard to describe without getting the facts mixed up! Let's try again. The male alien pictured here, played by Dan Butler, is actually Tom Paris; the woman next to him is really the male alien named Steth who owns the body Tom Paris is... No, that isn't right either. The character played by Dan Butler at the beginning of this episode calls himself Steth, but really isn't Steth, and after he swaps genomes with Tom P. (a little trick the unnamed alien is good at), he sends a stunned Tom flying off in his experimental spaceship, looking like Steth, while he (the alien) tries to pass himself off as Tom back on Voyager. This proves to be harder than the alien expected, which leads one to suspect that the alien isn't very bright except when it comes to genome-swapping, which he also does with Janeway. And so, at one point, Janeway finds herself looking like Tom Paris. All of which is pretty confusing for everybody, but remarkably fun to watch. For a moment (e.g., when the fake Paris is trying to find sickbay), you might actually sympathize with the dastardly alien as he struggles to cover his ignorance of all the things one would have to know to pass as a Voyager crewman; for reasons that soon become obvious, psychotic tricks like his only mix well with a solitary lifestyle. Which is why he/she/it (in the image of Janeway) eventually makes a break for it in a shuttlecraft. They have to catch the alien, at the very least so that Janeway needn't look like Paris for the rest of the series. It's wicked fun and, again, as loopy as Trek can be.
The Omega Directive
Unforgettable
Living Witness
Demon
One
Hope and FearFor more on spaceship-based TV series, see my reviews of Star Trek: TOS seasons one, two, and three; of TNG seasons one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven; of DS9 seasons one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven; of Voyager seasons one, two, and three; and of Enterprise season one. See also my review of Farscape seasons one, two, three, and four; of Firefly; and of Babylon 5 seasons one, two, three, and four.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Christmas Season Hymn
Here's a little something for the Twelve Days of Christmas, and not a partridge or a pear tree in sight!
With thankfulness give thanks! Rejoice with joy!
For at the favored hour is born a Boy
Whose ageless might, now clothed in humble birth,
Shall shower gifts o'er all who dwell on earth.
What poverty and rudeness marked His birth!
A den of beasts first welcomed Him to earth;
While men of means despised His kingly claim,
Mean men from flock and fold first praised His name.
With penitence repent! As beggars pray
That now, and on the awful youngest day,
We be rewarded not for what we've done,
But for the sake of Mary's holy Son.
At eight days pierced according to the law,
The Christ first bled to mend our flesh's flaw;
The sonship-covenant He lay beneath
Now gathers in those baptized in His death.
At eight days named the angel-whispered name,
Our Savior fully into office came.
For this alone our God with us did dwell:
To save Immanuel's race from sin and hell.
At forty days presented to the priest,
His mother from impurity released,
They made th' appointed off'ring, though in fact
His soul was pure, her maidenhead intact.
Still, in that hour, He caused the prophetess
Her faith in Israel's Savior to confess,
And brought the light of joy into the eyes
Of him who hoped the Lord to recognize.
Said Simeon: Now, Lord, I go to my rest,
Glad of this Child in whom the world is blessed;
Though sword may cut and tongue may idly play,
The thoughts of many hearts lie toward this day.
Then, while the city murmured of a star
And tidings brought by sages from afar,
They found Him, worshiped Him, and presents gave
Fit for the coffer, altar, and the grave.
Pursued by kings, bereft of home and land,
The holy Child fulfilled what God had planned:
From Egypt, whence His chosen line had run,
God called again His bondage-breaking Son.
With faith, believe the tidings you have heard!
Break forth in song! Repeat and praise the Word
Through whose becoming flesh we have been given
The right to be God's children, heirs of heaven!
All glory be to God among His host,
Eternal Father, Son, and Holy Ghost:
Sending and sent, He shone on us His face
That we might taste peace, pardon, joy, and grace.
With thankfulness give thanks! Rejoice with joy!
For at the favored hour is born a Boy
Whose ageless might, now clothed in humble birth,
Shall shower gifts o'er all who dwell on earth.
What poverty and rudeness marked His birth!
A den of beasts first welcomed Him to earth;
While men of means despised His kingly claim,
Mean men from flock and fold first praised His name.
With penitence repent! As beggars prayThat now, and on the awful youngest day,
We be rewarded not for what we've done,
But for the sake of Mary's holy Son.
At eight days pierced according to the law,
The Christ first bled to mend our flesh's flaw;
The sonship-covenant He lay beneath
Now gathers in those baptized in His death.
At eight days named the angel-whispered name,
Our Savior fully into office came.
For this alone our God with us did dwell:
To save Immanuel's race from sin and hell.
At forty days presented to the priest,
His mother from impurity released,
They made th' appointed off'ring, though in fact
His soul was pure, her maidenhead intact.
Still, in that hour, He caused the prophetess
Her faith in Israel's Savior to confess,
And brought the light of joy into the eyes
Of him who hoped the Lord to recognize.
Said Simeon: Now, Lord, I go to my rest,
Glad of this Child in whom the world is blessed;
Though sword may cut and tongue may idly play,
The thoughts of many hearts lie toward this day.
Then, while the city murmured of a star
And tidings brought by sages from afar,
They found Him, worshiped Him, and presents gave
Fit for the coffer, altar, and the grave.
Pursued by kings, bereft of home and land,
The holy Child fulfilled what God had planned:
From Egypt, whence His chosen line had run,
God called again His bondage-breaking Son.
With faith, believe the tidings you have heard!
Break forth in song! Repeat and praise the Word
Through whose becoming flesh we have been given
The right to be God's children, heirs of heaven!
All glory be to God among His host,
Eternal Father, Son, and Holy Ghost:
Sending and sent, He shone on us His face
That we might taste peace, pardon, joy, and grace.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Gaiman, Larsson, Gaiman, Pratchett, Gaiman
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
by Stieg Larsson
Recommended Ages: 16+
This is the first book in the "Millennium Trilogy," named after the magazine published by its main character, Swedish financial writer Mikael Blomkvist. The six-part Swedish TV miniseries based on these books is packaged in the U.S. as the "Dragon Tattoo Trilogy." American audiences can now see a big-screen version of this book, starring Daniel Craig in the role of Mikael "Kalle" Blomkvist, a crusading journalist who (like the author who created him) specializes in exposing right-wing corruption—though, unlike Larsson, he does so mainly in the context of business. He is nicknamed "Kalle Blomkvist" after an Astrid Lindgren character known to all Swedes today, but whose stories have not come over to the U.S. in a big way. Adding still more confusion to this background is the fact that the book's original, Swedish title translates as "Men Who Hate Women," so if you try to start a conversation about this book with an acquaintance from Sweden, you are apt to get a blank look.
While you probably know already that this trilogy came out quite recently and is all the rage on both sides of the Atlantic, you might be surprised to learn that Stieg Larsson is no longer around to clear up any confusion or ambiguities in his books. Larsson, age 50, died of a sudden heart attack in 2004 after climbing seven flights of stairs to his office when the elevator was broken (source: Wikipedia). Keep your elevators in running order, people! We can't afford to lose good writers like that! At the time of his death, the Millennium Trilogy was only an unpublished manuscript, and a half-written fourth book was saved on the author's computer. Now see how far it has gone! Unfortunately, conflicting inheritance claims make it unlikely that any of us will live to see Book 4, finished or otherwise. So if you are as crazy about this book as millions of other readers, you will have to settle for the two sequels already published: The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (whose Swedish title means "The Air Castle that Was Blown Up").
It is obvious from these titles that the American market is more interested in the character of Lisbeth Salander, a 24-year-old, starved-looking, tattooed, pierced, socially awkward genius hacker who provides highly detailed background research for the clients of a major security firm, while at the same time living under a guardian because she is considered legally incompetent. I don't know if this is a result of something like Asperger's Syndrome (which Mikael Blomkvist suspects) or because of some kind of childhood trauma. (The Swedish telefilm, which I watched just after I read this book, drops some hints in that direction, but the book stays mum.) Diffident, self-contained, and elusive, Lisbeth is a hard person to get to know.
Salander gets to know Blomkvist long before he even knows she exists. She digs up his background for a prospective employer, who then hires Blomkvist in the aftermath of a disastrous libel conviction. In exchange for some real dirt on the white-collar gangster who set him up, Blomkvist agrees to write the family history of one of the oldest family-owned industrial firms in Sweden. Henrik Vanger, the retired CEO of the Vanger Corporation, sets the left-wing Blomkvist this unpleasant task mainly as a cover, while his real job is to try to solve the 40-year-old mystery of who killed a beautiful teenager named Harriet. One day, while the only bridge onto the family-owned island of Hedeby was blocked by an accident, Harriet disappeared and was never seen again. Since then, every year on Henrik Vanger's birthday, the old man has received a pressed flower like the ones Harriet used to give him. Vanger thinks the murderer is taunting him. He is convinced the killer is a member of his big, dysfunctional family,
that Harriet was killed to hurt him, and that the flowers represent a 40-year campaign to drive the family patriarch insane.
At first unenthusiastic about his chances of finding anything that 40 years of police work might have missed, Blomkvist quickly realizes that he is onto something. A cryptic note in the back of Harriet's diary leads him to suspect that the girl was killed while trying to expose a serial killer in the family. Once Blomkvist brings Salander on board as his research assistant (the beginning of a relationship too complex to be missed, almost too explosive to be believed), the case starts to crack open like lake ice at the spring breakup. Suddenly both the girl with the tattoo and the journalist with a crusader's heart find themselves in terrible danger. And the truth turns out to be far weirder than either of them imagined.
Lisbeth Salander is, make no mistake, a fascinating character. Her fascination affects the men around her in fascinating ways. While they worry that she may be the perfect victim for a male predator who likes to hurt women, Lisbeth proves surprisingly resourceful, not to say relentless, in deflecting danger back onto the "men who hate women." And when you get down to brass tacks, violence against women is what this book is really all about. A lingering stench of Swedish Nazism, a brusque polemic against financial journalists who toady up to big-business interests, a subplot about corporate espionage in the journalistic field, and some "adult content advisory" worthy bedroom scenes add dimension to the tale; but what will really shock you, what will echo in your mind, what will haunt your dreams for days after you open this book, are the statistics of violence against women, including physical assault as well as rape and murder, quoted at strategic points throughout this book... and the steps the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo would take to punish the men who perpetrate it.
Good Omens
by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Recommended Ages: 14+
Two of my favorite authors teamed up in 1990 to write this irreverently funny take on prophecy, the Antichrist, and Armageddon. Then audiobook reader Martin Jarvis joined the party and kept me in stitches for a week's worth of my daily drive to and from work.
The full title of the book is Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. We find out, within the book, that Agnes had the misfortune of being the only 100% accurate prophet in English history. As a trade-off for all her predictions coming true, Agnes couched them in bizarre riddles which are impossible to decipher until after their fulfillment; and she made sure that her book of prophecies, its only surviving copy handed down through generations of her descendants, focused specifically on the fortunes and misfortunes of her own family. So, where it comes to predicting the winners of the next World Series, Mrs. Nutter will be no help. But she has plenty to say about the End of the World.
Meanwhile, in the hilariously twisted cosmos imagined by Messrs. Pratchett and Gaiman, the powers of Good and Evil have their own plans. An eleven-year countdown to Doomsday begins with the birth of the Spawn of Hell in a tiny, rural hospital run by a very talkative order of nuns who are secretly satanic. The nuns are supposed to swap the Antichrist-child with the son of an American diplomat and his wife, but due to a farcical mix-up, he gets raised by a salt-of-the-earth family in a small English village and turns out, by sheer chance, to be a rather nice boy. Adam Young unwittingly uses his reality-bending powers to keep his hometown safely isolated from the rapidly changing outside world. Even the hellhound sent to Adam on his eleventh birthday becomes, at his master's whim, an adorable little mongrel with one twisted ear. Adam's small gang follows him in an endless series of games driven by the power of sheer imagination... hardly guessing how much power that is. And the angels of light and darkness haven't a clue.
Two of those angels have formed an unlikely friendship over the millennia, in spite of being on opposite sides. Aziraphale (the flaming-sword guy from the Garden of Eden) and Crowley (formerly Crawly, the serpent from ditto), disapprove of each other's methods but get along like an old married couple. They rather like the world, particularly the comforts of twentieth-century life, and aren't in a hurry to see it end. But what can they do, when those higher up (and lower down) will brook no interference in the Ineffable Plan?
Whatever they do, it's going to be a mess. For not just the two angels, but a lot of other confused people with conflicting points of view show up for the party, including an apprenctice witch-finder whose heart isn't quite in it, a nice young witch with an encyclopedic knowledge of coming events, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who are now more accurately described as the Four Motorcyclists and who enjoy their work a little too much. The tension of worldwide catastrophe builds and builds, not (as one might expect) in the Middle East, but in a sleepy village in the English countryside where all depends, finally, on whether young Adam's nature (being the Seed of Satan) or nurture (his nice upbringing) win out.
Here is a book that impishly pokes at millennialistic notions about the End Times, the interpretation and re-interpretation of obscure medieval prophecies that fill pages of each week's supermarket tabloids. It might, perhaps, poke a little harder than one quite likes at Judaeo-Christian cosmology in general, and it certainly deserves both "occult" and "adult" content advisories. But if you lighten up a little, you might enjoy it anyway; enjoy it for its quirky characters, the comic-opera pacing of its various plot-lines, the goofily bizarre imagery, the cutting wit, and the disarming silliness of the sayings and doings it describes, from the revenge of a medieval witch about to be burned at the stake to the good-natured bickering of four children in an idyllic small town. All that and a funny dog too! How can it go wrong?
The Graveyard Book
by Neil Gaiman
Recommended Ages: 12+
This novel for young readers by the author of Coraline won the 2009 Hugo Award, Carnegie Medal, and Newbery Medal—a hat-trick unique in the the history of these three awards—respectively the highest honors for English-language fantasy novels, children's novels published in the U.K., and ditto in the U.S. When I got around to reading it some three years later, it achieved another honor that only applies to the very best books: It made me cry. But that happened at the end of the book; let's not get ahead of ourselves!
It's the story about a boy who grew up in a graveyard. His name: Nobody. Nobody Owens, adopted by a couple of kindly ghosts on the night his parents and older sister were murdered, has been given the freedom of the graveyard until he grows up. This means that, for the time being, he can "fade" so that ordinary mortals cannot see him; he can "haunt" by putting the frighteners on the living; and he can slide through solid stone and earth to visit the crypts and coffins of the neighborhood, whose owners form a sort of extended family to him. Because, don't you know, it takes a graveyard to raise a child.
Nobody's adventures bring him into contact with some strange beings, including ghouls, a werewolf, a witch, and a vampire. But he is only really in danger from a secret organization whose motives for killing his first family, and for planning to kill the boy himself, are revealed at the very end of the book. Though Nobody is pretty safe while he remains inside the cemetery gates, his danger remains very real because—well, because boys will be boys. Sometimes they rebel. Sometimes they sulk. Sometimes they get lonely for the company of kids their own age. For a while, Nobody even tries to go to school. In spite of all his mistakes and near-disasters, he remains a spirited and active youngster whose wits make him a match for men far stronger than himself.
Whimsical and weird, moving and macabre, this story is like a cross between Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride and Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books. You can laugh at the little ways of all the denizens of Nobody's graveyard, but because he loves them, you can't help but love them too. And while the character of Silas, Nobody's undead (but also unliving) guardian, is not the first vampire in fiction to be depicted as a sympathetic character, the reason why he is one in this case comes across (at least to me) as the final twist of the corkscrew, unstopping the tear ducts all the way to the book's messy, nasally congested finish.
Neverwhere
by Neil Gaiman
Recommended Ages: 13+
One of the most enjoyable weeks I have spent commuting to and from my workplace was the week I borrowed the CD book of Neil Gaiman himself reading his "Author's Preferred Text" of this novel. This is the novel that, in 1996, really put him on the map for those of us who missed the Sandman graphic novels and the BBC teleseries (co-written by Lenny Henry) on which this book was based. In fact, it is now regarded as something of a classic, the starting point of a flourishing genre of "London Below" fiction, so that the dust-jacket blurbs of such books as Mike Shevdon's Sixty-One Nails and China Miéville's Un Lun Dun tout them as "Neverwhere for the next generation," or the like. Having read those books before this one, I can't help sensing that I've fallen behind the class!
Well, thanks to the miracle of audiobooks, I'm not so far behind now. And I can't complain that the book reader didn't know the author's intentions. With Gaiman himself reading his preferred text, I learned that he has a good voice for storytelling, that he knows how to sell a variety of character voices and British dialects, and that he may even be as good an actor as writer. An all around entertainer, our Neil is. And judging from the fact that London seems to occupy more alternate realities than any other city on Earth, his influence appears to be spreading.
Neverwhere is the story of Richard Mayhew, a young London office worker with a gentle spirit, a bossy fiancée, and a blissfully ordinary life. One night as Richard is walking to a dinner date, an encounter with a gravely injured street person knocks his life out of its comfortable groove. Because he stops to help a filthy and bleeding girl named Door, Richard loses his fiancée, his job, his flat, and finally, his connection to reality as he knows it. Suddenly people can no longer see or hear him, or remember that he existed. So Richard goes underground.
Literally. Down into the London Below, from which Door came and to which she has returned.
All Richard really wants is a way back to the life he knew. But before he can get it, he must learn to believe six thousand impossible things, and without the benefit of breakfast. He meets people who can communicate with birds and rats. He encounters an angel, a vampire-like creature called a velvet, a legendary beast, and a dead man come back to life. He makes friends with a girl who has the power to open any door, even where there wasn't a door before; and he makes enemies with two characters who have been torturing and killing for fun and profit since the world began. He visits a "floating market" where more or less fabulous beings swap more or less fabulous items; he undergoes an ordeal that many have tried before, but none have survived; and he demonstrates a curious blend of abject cowardice and heroic courage that ensure, whether or not he gets home to London Above, that London Below will never be the same.
Richard and Door are a likable couple. So are some of their dodgier neighbors in the underworld of magic, menace, and outright madness; though you may not immediately guess which ones are and aren't to be trusted. Through Gaiman's written and spoken word, they live vividly in my imagination. I am actually afraid to watch the BBC series, lest the world of Neverwhere become an obsession. I already have plenty of obsessions. But my inner world has plenty of room for another first-rate fantasy like this!
by Stieg Larsson
Recommended Ages: 16+
This is the first book in the "Millennium Trilogy," named after the magazine published by its main character, Swedish financial writer Mikael Blomkvist. The six-part Swedish TV miniseries based on these books is packaged in the U.S. as the "Dragon Tattoo Trilogy." American audiences can now see a big-screen version of this book, starring Daniel Craig in the role of Mikael "Kalle" Blomkvist, a crusading journalist who (like the author who created him) specializes in exposing right-wing corruption—though, unlike Larsson, he does so mainly in the context of business. He is nicknamed "Kalle Blomkvist" after an Astrid Lindgren character known to all Swedes today, but whose stories have not come over to the U.S. in a big way. Adding still more confusion to this background is the fact that the book's original, Swedish title translates as "Men Who Hate Women," so if you try to start a conversation about this book with an acquaintance from Sweden, you are apt to get a blank look.
While you probably know already that this trilogy came out quite recently and is all the rage on both sides of the Atlantic, you might be surprised to learn that Stieg Larsson is no longer around to clear up any confusion or ambiguities in his books. Larsson, age 50, died of a sudden heart attack in 2004 after climbing seven flights of stairs to his office when the elevator was broken (source: Wikipedia). Keep your elevators in running order, people! We can't afford to lose good writers like that! At the time of his death, the Millennium Trilogy was only an unpublished manuscript, and a half-written fourth book was saved on the author's computer. Now see how far it has gone! Unfortunately, conflicting inheritance claims make it unlikely that any of us will live to see Book 4, finished or otherwise. So if you are as crazy about this book as millions of other readers, you will have to settle for the two sequels already published: The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (whose Swedish title means "The Air Castle that Was Blown Up").It is obvious from these titles that the American market is more interested in the character of Lisbeth Salander, a 24-year-old, starved-looking, tattooed, pierced, socially awkward genius hacker who provides highly detailed background research for the clients of a major security firm, while at the same time living under a guardian because she is considered legally incompetent. I don't know if this is a result of something like Asperger's Syndrome (which Mikael Blomkvist suspects) or because of some kind of childhood trauma. (The Swedish telefilm, which I watched just after I read this book, drops some hints in that direction, but the book stays mum.) Diffident, self-contained, and elusive, Lisbeth is a hard person to get to know.
Salander gets to know Blomkvist long before he even knows she exists. She digs up his background for a prospective employer, who then hires Blomkvist in the aftermath of a disastrous libel conviction. In exchange for some real dirt on the white-collar gangster who set him up, Blomkvist agrees to write the family history of one of the oldest family-owned industrial firms in Sweden. Henrik Vanger, the retired CEO of the Vanger Corporation, sets the left-wing Blomkvist this unpleasant task mainly as a cover, while his real job is to try to solve the 40-year-old mystery of who killed a beautiful teenager named Harriet. One day, while the only bridge onto the family-owned island of Hedeby was blocked by an accident, Harriet disappeared and was never seen again. Since then, every year on Henrik Vanger's birthday, the old man has received a pressed flower like the ones Harriet used to give him. Vanger thinks the murderer is taunting him. He is convinced the killer is a member of his big, dysfunctional family,
that Harriet was killed to hurt him, and that the flowers represent a 40-year campaign to drive the family patriarch insane.At first unenthusiastic about his chances of finding anything that 40 years of police work might have missed, Blomkvist quickly realizes that he is onto something. A cryptic note in the back of Harriet's diary leads him to suspect that the girl was killed while trying to expose a serial killer in the family. Once Blomkvist brings Salander on board as his research assistant (the beginning of a relationship too complex to be missed, almost too explosive to be believed), the case starts to crack open like lake ice at the spring breakup. Suddenly both the girl with the tattoo and the journalist with a crusader's heart find themselves in terrible danger. And the truth turns out to be far weirder than either of them imagined.
Lisbeth Salander is, make no mistake, a fascinating character. Her fascination affects the men around her in fascinating ways. While they worry that she may be the perfect victim for a male predator who likes to hurt women, Lisbeth proves surprisingly resourceful, not to say relentless, in deflecting danger back onto the "men who hate women." And when you get down to brass tacks, violence against women is what this book is really all about. A lingering stench of Swedish Nazism, a brusque polemic against financial journalists who toady up to big-business interests, a subplot about corporate espionage in the journalistic field, and some "adult content advisory" worthy bedroom scenes add dimension to the tale; but what will really shock you, what will echo in your mind, what will haunt your dreams for days after you open this book, are the statistics of violence against women, including physical assault as well as rape and murder, quoted at strategic points throughout this book... and the steps the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo would take to punish the men who perpetrate it.
Good Omens
by Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Recommended Ages: 14+
Two of my favorite authors teamed up in 1990 to write this irreverently funny take on prophecy, the Antichrist, and Armageddon. Then audiobook reader Martin Jarvis joined the party and kept me in stitches for a week's worth of my daily drive to and from work.
The full title of the book is Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch. We find out, within the book, that Agnes had the misfortune of being the only 100% accurate prophet in English history. As a trade-off for all her predictions coming true, Agnes couched them in bizarre riddles which are impossible to decipher until after their fulfillment; and she made sure that her book of prophecies, its only surviving copy handed down through generations of her descendants, focused specifically on the fortunes and misfortunes of her own family. So, where it comes to predicting the winners of the next World Series, Mrs. Nutter will be no help. But she has plenty to say about the End of the World.Meanwhile, in the hilariously twisted cosmos imagined by Messrs. Pratchett and Gaiman, the powers of Good and Evil have their own plans. An eleven-year countdown to Doomsday begins with the birth of the Spawn of Hell in a tiny, rural hospital run by a very talkative order of nuns who are secretly satanic. The nuns are supposed to swap the Antichrist-child with the son of an American diplomat and his wife, but due to a farcical mix-up, he gets raised by a salt-of-the-earth family in a small English village and turns out, by sheer chance, to be a rather nice boy. Adam Young unwittingly uses his reality-bending powers to keep his hometown safely isolated from the rapidly changing outside world. Even the hellhound sent to Adam on his eleventh birthday becomes, at his master's whim, an adorable little mongrel with one twisted ear. Adam's small gang follows him in an endless series of games driven by the power of sheer imagination... hardly guessing how much power that is. And the angels of light and darkness haven't a clue.
Two of those angels have formed an unlikely friendship over the millennia, in spite of being on opposite sides. Aziraphale (the flaming-sword guy from the Garden of Eden) and Crowley (formerly Crawly, the serpent from ditto), disapprove of each other's methods but get along like an old married couple. They rather like the world, particularly the comforts of twentieth-century life, and aren't in a hurry to see it end. But what can they do, when those higher up (and lower down) will brook no interference in the Ineffable Plan?
Whatever they do, it's going to be a mess. For not just the two angels, but a lot of other confused people with conflicting points of view show up for the party, including an apprenctice witch-finder whose heart isn't quite in it, a nice young witch with an encyclopedic knowledge of coming events, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who are now more accurately described as the Four Motorcyclists and who enjoy their work a little too much. The tension of worldwide catastrophe builds and builds, not (as one might expect) in the Middle East, but in a sleepy village in the English countryside where all depends, finally, on whether young Adam's nature (being the Seed of Satan) or nurture (his nice upbringing) win out.Here is a book that impishly pokes at millennialistic notions about the End Times, the interpretation and re-interpretation of obscure medieval prophecies that fill pages of each week's supermarket tabloids. It might, perhaps, poke a little harder than one quite likes at Judaeo-Christian cosmology in general, and it certainly deserves both "occult" and "adult" content advisories. But if you lighten up a little, you might enjoy it anyway; enjoy it for its quirky characters, the comic-opera pacing of its various plot-lines, the goofily bizarre imagery, the cutting wit, and the disarming silliness of the sayings and doings it describes, from the revenge of a medieval witch about to be burned at the stake to the good-natured bickering of four children in an idyllic small town. All that and a funny dog too! How can it go wrong?
The Graveyard Book
by Neil Gaiman
Recommended Ages: 12+
This novel for young readers by the author of Coraline won the 2009 Hugo Award, Carnegie Medal, and Newbery Medal—a hat-trick unique in the the history of these three awards—respectively the highest honors for English-language fantasy novels, children's novels published in the U.K., and ditto in the U.S. When I got around to reading it some three years later, it achieved another honor that only applies to the very best books: It made me cry. But that happened at the end of the book; let's not get ahead of ourselves!
It's the story about a boy who grew up in a graveyard. His name: Nobody. Nobody Owens, adopted by a couple of kindly ghosts on the night his parents and older sister were murdered, has been given the freedom of the graveyard until he grows up. This means that, for the time being, he can "fade" so that ordinary mortals cannot see him; he can "haunt" by putting the frighteners on the living; and he can slide through solid stone and earth to visit the crypts and coffins of the neighborhood, whose owners form a sort of extended family to him. Because, don't you know, it takes a graveyard to raise a child.Nobody's adventures bring him into contact with some strange beings, including ghouls, a werewolf, a witch, and a vampire. But he is only really in danger from a secret organization whose motives for killing his first family, and for planning to kill the boy himself, are revealed at the very end of the book. Though Nobody is pretty safe while he remains inside the cemetery gates, his danger remains very real because—well, because boys will be boys. Sometimes they rebel. Sometimes they sulk. Sometimes they get lonely for the company of kids their own age. For a while, Nobody even tries to go to school. In spite of all his mistakes and near-disasters, he remains a spirited and active youngster whose wits make him a match for men far stronger than himself.
Whimsical and weird, moving and macabre, this story is like a cross between Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride and Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Books. You can laugh at the little ways of all the denizens of Nobody's graveyard, but because he loves them, you can't help but love them too. And while the character of Silas, Nobody's undead (but also unliving) guardian, is not the first vampire in fiction to be depicted as a sympathetic character, the reason why he is one in this case comes across (at least to me) as the final twist of the corkscrew, unstopping the tear ducts all the way to the book's messy, nasally congested finish.
Neverwhere
by Neil Gaiman
Recommended Ages: 13+
One of the most enjoyable weeks I have spent commuting to and from my workplace was the week I borrowed the CD book of Neil Gaiman himself reading his "Author's Preferred Text" of this novel. This is the novel that, in 1996, really put him on the map for those of us who missed the Sandman graphic novels and the BBC teleseries (co-written by Lenny Henry) on which this book was based. In fact, it is now regarded as something of a classic, the starting point of a flourishing genre of "London Below" fiction, so that the dust-jacket blurbs of such books as Mike Shevdon's Sixty-One Nails and China Miéville's Un Lun Dun tout them as "Neverwhere for the next generation," or the like. Having read those books before this one, I can't help sensing that I've fallen behind the class!Well, thanks to the miracle of audiobooks, I'm not so far behind now. And I can't complain that the book reader didn't know the author's intentions. With Gaiman himself reading his preferred text, I learned that he has a good voice for storytelling, that he knows how to sell a variety of character voices and British dialects, and that he may even be as good an actor as writer. An all around entertainer, our Neil is. And judging from the fact that London seems to occupy more alternate realities than any other city on Earth, his influence appears to be spreading.
Neverwhere is the story of Richard Mayhew, a young London office worker with a gentle spirit, a bossy fiancée, and a blissfully ordinary life. One night as Richard is walking to a dinner date, an encounter with a gravely injured street person knocks his life out of its comfortable groove. Because he stops to help a filthy and bleeding girl named Door, Richard loses his fiancée, his job, his flat, and finally, his connection to reality as he knows it. Suddenly people can no longer see or hear him, or remember that he existed. So Richard goes underground.
Literally. Down into the London Below, from which Door came and to which she has returned.All Richard really wants is a way back to the life he knew. But before he can get it, he must learn to believe six thousand impossible things, and without the benefit of breakfast. He meets people who can communicate with birds and rats. He encounters an angel, a vampire-like creature called a velvet, a legendary beast, and a dead man come back to life. He makes friends with a girl who has the power to open any door, even where there wasn't a door before; and he makes enemies with two characters who have been torturing and killing for fun and profit since the world began. He visits a "floating market" where more or less fabulous beings swap more or less fabulous items; he undergoes an ordeal that many have tried before, but none have survived; and he demonstrates a curious blend of abject cowardice and heroic courage that ensure, whether or not he gets home to London Above, that London Below will never be the same.
Richard and Door are a likable couple. So are some of their dodgier neighbors in the underworld of magic, menace, and outright madness; though you may not immediately guess which ones are and aren't to be trusted. Through Gaiman's written and spoken word, they live vividly in my imagination. I am actually afraid to watch the BBC series, lest the world of Neverwhere become an obsession. I already have plenty of obsessions. But my inner world has plenty of room for another first-rate fantasy like this!
Wednesday, December 28, 2011
A Very Absinthe Christmas
How did I spend my Christmas vacation? Well, teacher (and fellow classmates), I applied myself energetically to accompanying three Divine Services, complete with vocal solos, choir numbers, and more than the usual quantity of hymns. Then I set the cats up for a few days on their own (putting out extra food and water), gathered up a few things, and hit the road.
Sunday the 25th was a beautiful day to drive from Saint Louis to the Lake of the Ozarks. Ideal, in fact: the temperatures were cool but not cold, the sky was a bright clear blue, the traffic was within mental-health tolerances, and I managed not to get ticketed for speeding this time.
I arrived at my parents' lovely home around three in the afternoon. I enjoyed playing Santa Claus, contributing to their nicely-stocked minibar a bottle of Glendronach 12-year-old single malt Scotch and a selection of beer bottle bracelets to help keep track of whose beer is whose at any reasonably-sized convivial gathering. I also brought along a bottle of 110-proof absinthe, a box of sugar cubes, and a slotted spoon designed to rest on top of a glass, so that we could experiment with that oft-romanticized, and sometimes demonized, herbal spirit.
Well, I'm no wiser as to what wormwood tastes like, but the herbal blend of which it is a part tasted to me a lot like licorice. Licorice with a kick. After sipping it straight, mixing it in the wrong proportions, and then mixing it right (with two parts absinthe to three of water and a sugar cube), my father and I both concluded that one was too many, and two was not enough. We were pretty well buzzed after having two absinthes each for lunch on Tuesday.
We enjoyed food as much as drink. For Christmas Day's supper, Stepmum cooked up a wonderful shank-cut, hickory-smoked ham and served it with crusty bread, scalloped potatoes, and an off-the-beaten-path green bean casserole made in the style of cauliflower casserole (with cheese and biscuit crumbs and... heck, I'm going to need to get that recipe!). Monday night's feast focused on homemade pizza whose crust was made with beer, and topped with a generous mixture of shredded mozzarella and fontina, plus a sprinkling of Grana Padano. One pie was dressed in black olive which we all found very yummy, the other in a combination of pepperoni, onion, and mushrooms which might be frankly dangerous. And finally, Tuesday night we dined out at a Mexican joint that served $1.50 margaritas and cuisine that sets one's mouth on fire so that it isn't hard to down three margaritas in an hour.
Besides watching whatever was on TV, we spent our time in a variety of amusements. Dad and I went out to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie and to consume mass quantities of popcorn. One day we also watched a DVD of District 9 while Stepmom was at work, and we agreed that she wouldn't have liked it. I particularly enjoyed the cheese flight we shared over lunch on Monday, and the return flight on Tuesday, when the main attractions were taleggio (a soft, strong-flavored Italian cheese), manchego (a hard, flavorful Spanish sheep's-milk variety), and a nice safe English favorite, Double Gloucester. Cut into hunks, they all went nicely when eaten alone or on a cracker.
The days I spent relaxing with my folks were very restorative. I didn't mind being indoors while it rained, froze, and frosted up over the successive days and nights, so long as it always seemed to be sunny or at least clear when we went out, and I had good weather for driving home again. I got a bit of reading done too, both in audio-book form (with a couple of Neil Gaiman novels on my CD player) and on paper (as I've been working my way through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And I'll soon be spending more time reading books in electronic format, now that my boss & his wife have given me a sleek Kindle for Christmas. I've already "bought" a couple dozen free books in Kindle format.
But, after all, it's nice to be home. I started to miss my cats, painfully, last night when something on my parents' TV reminded me of them. And I've been missing my very own, familiar bed on which I seem to get more sleep, and better sleep, than anywhere else on average. I had fun with my parents, and their hospitality is wonderful, but there's no pillow like your own pillow!
Sunday the 25th was a beautiful day to drive from Saint Louis to the Lake of the Ozarks. Ideal, in fact: the temperatures were cool but not cold, the sky was a bright clear blue, the traffic was within mental-health tolerances, and I managed not to get ticketed for speeding this time.
I arrived at my parents' lovely home around three in the afternoon. I enjoyed playing Santa Claus, contributing to their nicely-stocked minibar a bottle of Glendronach 12-year-old single malt Scotch and a selection of beer bottle bracelets to help keep track of whose beer is whose at any reasonably-sized convivial gathering. I also brought along a bottle of 110-proof absinthe, a box of sugar cubes, and a slotted spoon designed to rest on top of a glass, so that we could experiment with that oft-romanticized, and sometimes demonized, herbal spirit.Well, I'm no wiser as to what wormwood tastes like, but the herbal blend of which it is a part tasted to me a lot like licorice. Licorice with a kick. After sipping it straight, mixing it in the wrong proportions, and then mixing it right (with two parts absinthe to three of water and a sugar cube), my father and I both concluded that one was too many, and two was not enough. We were pretty well buzzed after having two absinthes each for lunch on Tuesday.
We enjoyed food as much as drink. For Christmas Day's supper, Stepmum cooked up a wonderful shank-cut, hickory-smoked ham and served it with crusty bread, scalloped potatoes, and an off-the-beaten-path green bean casserole made in the style of cauliflower casserole (with cheese and biscuit crumbs and... heck, I'm going to need to get that recipe!). Monday night's feast focused on homemade pizza whose crust was made with beer, and topped with a generous mixture of shredded mozzarella and fontina, plus a sprinkling of Grana Padano. One pie was dressed in black olive which we all found very yummy, the other in a combination of pepperoni, onion, and mushrooms which might be frankly dangerous. And finally, Tuesday night we dined out at a Mexican joint that served $1.50 margaritas and cuisine that sets one's mouth on fire so that it isn't hard to down three margaritas in an hour.Besides watching whatever was on TV, we spent our time in a variety of amusements. Dad and I went out to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie and to consume mass quantities of popcorn. One day we also watched a DVD of District 9 while Stepmom was at work, and we agreed that she wouldn't have liked it. I particularly enjoyed the cheese flight we shared over lunch on Monday, and the return flight on Tuesday, when the main attractions were taleggio (a soft, strong-flavored Italian cheese), manchego (a hard, flavorful Spanish sheep's-milk variety), and a nice safe English favorite, Double Gloucester. Cut into hunks, they all went nicely when eaten alone or on a cracker.
The days I spent relaxing with my folks were very restorative. I didn't mind being indoors while it rained, froze, and frosted up over the successive days and nights, so long as it always seemed to be sunny or at least clear when we went out, and I had good weather for driving home again. I got a bit of reading done too, both in audio-book form (with a couple of Neil Gaiman novels on my CD player) and on paper (as I've been working my way through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And I'll soon be spending more time reading books in electronic format, now that my boss & his wife have given me a sleek Kindle for Christmas. I've already "bought" a couple dozen free books in Kindle format.But, after all, it's nice to be home. I started to miss my cats, painfully, last night when something on my parents' TV reminded me of them. And I've been missing my very own, familiar bed on which I seem to get more sleep, and better sleep, than anywhere else on average. I had fun with my parents, and their hospitality is wonderful, but there's no pillow like your own pillow!
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