Reading and watching roundup: Some Desperate Glory, POI, Taskmasterthings
I read a thing! Two things, even!
2. Deadly Ever After by Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel (RoL GN #10) -- joins The Fey and the Furious as an emminently skippable outing, at least for my interests. I preorder these books so I don't forget about them, and when this one arrived, I read through the first chapter and then set it aside with nothing really drawing me back -- for over a month, until I knew I had to get it into a package I was sending to aome. If it wasn't for the package, I'm not sure when I would've bothered to go back to it. The focus is on Olympia and Chelsea, teenager river goddesses (by this point, they're 19 -- this is after the birth of Bev and Peter's twins), with a bunch of OCs and cameo appearances by Bev and Abigail (and the foxes), and Peter and Nightingale sort of glimpsed in the background doing wacky things a la the non-Xander, non-Faith cast of BtVS in "The Zeppo". Except I'm not sure it works nearly so well in GN format, or maybe the difference is that I just don't really care about the foreground stuff here. Of the people who actually do anything with the plot, the only one I care about is Abigail, really. I do enjoy cameo levels of Bev, so I enjoyed cameo levels of Bev here, especially her approach to punishing her baby sisters for changing the Netflix password -- that was cute! I don't feel about Chelsea and Olympia any more strongly than I did before I read this. As for the OCs, the only one I found at all interesting was the frog prince guy, and his lovingly rendered abs were like 80% of that. As for the plot/theme/whatever -- I can definitely enjoy updated, subverted, fractured, etc. fairy tales, but it's got to have something new and interesting to say, and I didn't think this had anything new and interesting to say, except, marginally, maybe with the frog prince.
3. Emily Tesh, Some Desperate Glory (read in ARC; publication date is April 6) -- I've had such a weird trajectory with Emily Tesh's work before this -- I loved Silver in the Wood, it was one of my favorite books the year I read it, loved the beautifully crafted prose, the interesting characterization for everyone including the antagonist, the lovely novella-sized plot -- and then I read the sequel, and wished I hadn't read it, because it spoiled some of the things about the first book (not in a spoiler way, just making it harder to enjoy way) while not adding much that I cared for. So when I heard that Tesh had written a novel, I was approaching it with trepidation, especially on the subject of sticking the landing. And a sci-fi novel, compared to the fantasy I've read from her before, was also a source of slight concern, because a lot of what I had especially liked in 'Silver' was the numinous fantasy feel. So, trepidation, but also excited to check it out, so getting my hands on an ARC broke through my general lack of reading at the moment.
I'm not really sure how to talk about this book. I have a lot to say, and a lot of it is positive, and some of it is "hmm, not sure", and some of it is in the context of other fannishing things, and a lot of it is stuff I want to talk about, and that's the frustrating thing about reading something in ARC -- I don't have enough people to talk about it with, now when I most want to talk about it! It is a book I enjoyed reading quite a lot. It is a book that I think attempts some impressive, difficult things and does at least some of them pretty well. It also makes some choices I was frustrated or puzzled about, but nothing that made me outright mad, which is becoming kind of a rarity, so I guess I'll take it. I liked the character work even in those cases where I didn't end up liking the characters (which is not a surprise, given how much I liked the character work in 'Silver'), and there's one character I ended up liking enough that they (obscuring choice of pronouns, not their actual pronoun) might show up on my Yuletide request this year (depending on what the fandom for this ends up being like, probably); I'm pretty sure anyone familiar with my taste in characters will know instantly who they are. Anyway, let's dig in.
I started reading the book a little ahead of cafemassolit, who was the one who alerted me to the existence of this book, and almost immediately wanted to talk about it. K had heard it described as "Azula in space", and when she asked me if it was that, I had to do a double-take, and then was slightly insulted on Azula's behalf, because Kyr is definitely NOTHING like her, except for being strong-willed and brainwashed as the result of an abusive upbringing, but that's, like, every dystopian protagonist. What the beginning of the book reminded me of was the start of the new She-Ra -- Kyr is like pre-series Adora in terms of drinking the Kool-Aid dished out by the abusive authority figures of Gaea and embracing the black-and-white mentality and militaristic/freedom fighter rhetoric, but, I said to K, with Catra's people skills -- and once K had met her too, she was like, actually, worse than Catra, which is impressive, and yes, both worse and impressive XD I also saw some reviews reference Ender's Game, and I did get that feeling from the early chapters, the child soldier setup and agoge (~simulation/live action video games) drills, though I don't think it's trying to be Ender's Game -- just in conversation with it. According to one of the Goodreads reviews, the marketing pitch was "the Vorkosigan saga meets Gideon the Ninth in a world reminiscent of Mass Effect" -- I've seen the Mass Effect comparison a lot, which I have nothing to say to since I haven't played it and know nothing about; I did think the book had more video-game-feel-y scenes than I really wanted, though. I have a separate comment on Gideon under the spoiler-cut, but it did not feel Gideon-like to me AT ALL -- and I do not understand where the Vorkosigan Saga comparison is coming from, like, at all. Like, who came up with that? (apparently editor Ruoxi Chen) what was their angle? I'm very puzzled... The beginning, which starts with a ~space Wikipedia article (ok, it's an actual book, followed by a scathing in-universe review, which I thought was a cute touch) is extremeley the "Humans are Space Orcs" meme, to the point that I wondered whether this book began as Humans are Space Orcs fic :P spoilers from here I also don't get where people on Goodreads are getting the comparisons to Locked Tomb/Gideon the Ninth from, unless it's very specifically the in-universe AUs, which did remind me of the pocket universes in Harrow, but the pocket universes in Harrow were brief asides, where here it is 50% of the book spent in a Groundhog Day fix-it kind of thing. But enough about things this book did or did not remind me of.
I guess the first thing to talk about is Kyr, since she is the consistent POV throughout the book (other than the epistolary bits quoting from books at the start of each part), and since so much of the first section, especially, is flavored by seeing everything through her eyes. Pretty much all reviews agree that Kyr starts out unlikable, and yep, she sure does -- she is very thoroughly bought into Gaea's militaristic mindset of being the last children of murdered Earth, keeping themselves honed as a blad to avenge her 14 billion dead -- before Kyr was born but in living memory of the adults on Gaea station, Earth was destroyed by an alien federation. As you might guess from the "aliens killed Earth" thing, Gaea (a sort of makeshift space station jury-rigged out of four surviving dreadnoughts and an asteroid and a population drawn and bred from their crews) is extremely anti-alien and Kyr has been raised to think of them as the enemy, and also as not-people. She's also unquestioningly accepted the ableist views of Gaea, which makes sense, what with the focus on physical training and humans being the scariest motherfuckers in the galaxy physically, since the majoda have the technological advantage. She doesn't question Gaea's general homophobia either, and I liked the way this part was handled viz Kyr's character -- she uses slurs and doesn't see why the gay characters can't just suck it up and contribute to the station's population efforts anyway, it's just duty, but she doesn't have a problem with her messmates who are a f/f couple or to learning that her brother is gay (which is not to say that she handles his coming out well, but that's Kyr being bad at people, not Kyr being actively homophobic). And I believer Kyr herself is meant to be on the aro/ace spectrum, although she does get a love interest, and I liked the way the asexuality stuff was set up, too -- the ugh, why is kissing such a big deal, can't you just focus on running drills stuff felt really nicely in character. Gaea station is also racist, but that part felt tacked on and not as well integrated to me (like, the point about the names chosen for the two Black children at the station was an interesting point but awkwardly made). And honestly the homphobia and racism felt a lot less organic to the setting than other aspects of Gaea; like, yes, it's a totalitarian regime/cult, and those do tend to be repressive, and with a straight guy in power I can see why he'd want the expectation that all women, regardless of orientation, had to be available to him/his cronies, so the Nursery set up worked for me pretty well (as in, it was horrible and I'm glad Kyr didn't spend any time there except the visit) but the rest of it is kind of generic/transplanted "bad person has bad views", which, eh. It didn't actively interfere with what I liked about the book, but I do think it contributed to the "that's too many battles, put some back" feelings I had about it.
Anyway, right, so Kyr starts out as an ulikable product of her shitty upbringing, bullying her mess-mates, who all dislike her (except for one, who pities her instead), when she thinks she is leading them and honing them into proper instruments of Earth's vengeance, pathologically competing with everyone and being dismissive of her twin brother in a way that she later realizes is petty jealousy, and just being all around unpleasant. I actually found it quite refreshing that her POV was allowed to be so immersive, without "xenophobia, homophobia, and ableism are bad actually" authorial asides that I've frankly resigned myself to expect from the current crop of SFF. And when Kyr is betrayed by the system she's so wholly bought into, the one that promised her, well, basically a glorious and meaningful death if her training scores are good enough and instead assigned her to Nursery duty -- combination of childcare, prostitution, and forced reproduction -- she does actually leave Gaea station, but I appreciated the way her departure is very much "they made a mistake with my specific assignment, I will show them I'm worthy" rather than anything more enlightened and informed, and it is only very, very slowly and very grudgingly that she comes to any sort of larger view. But I think my favorite thing about Kyr is actually that when she meets her Alternate Universe self, Valery Marston in the universe where Earth *wasn't* destroyed, how much the two of them loathe each other XD I'll talk more about the AU stuff later (I liked the AU stuff, as you might imagine) but in addition to it just being funny how much Kyr and Val despise each other when they come into contact in the space of her mind, how Kyr comes to realize some of her own flaws by seeing them repeat slightly differently in Val's timeline -- Val's fixation on test scores over knowledge when she's given all this access to education that Kyr never got; Val's fond but dismissive and belittling view of her brother. So, I never got to a point where I liked Kyr -- I don't think Kyr is the kind of character I'm likely to like anyway -- but I appreciated her arc (mostly; there are some things about the ending that didn't work for me as well, but I'll talk about the ending separately) and I respected the commitment to her difficult POV and general unreliable narrator stuff, like her being determined not to figure out what Ursa saying the child Kyr recognizes as Jole's (massive cognitive dissonance with Vorkosigan's Jole, btw XD) is hers, or Kyr fumbling her way through pronoun usage for Yiso and the (presumably nonbinary) reporter with the arms.
Right, so, Kyr definitely makes the first strong impression in the book, but then at the 14% mark I met Avicenna, who instantly became my favorite character and my favorite thing about the book. I expect this is a surprise for absolutely no-one, because "arrogant asshole who actually is Just That Good" is kind of my thing, and Avi is certainly that. I did not expect him to be quite this intractably committed to mass murder as a problem-solving technique, but I do actually appreciate that his lesson learned from "I killed 20 trillion aliens, which caused Mags to commit suicide and Kyr to snap my neck" (for which he isn't sure he's sorry / isn't sure he wouldn't do it again if he had the ability) is not "maybe cool it with the mass murder next time" but "it was the wrong mass murder, I'll make sure to kill the other guys next time" -- that is some impressive commitment XD (but also, like, he didn't actually get a growth arc, as such, the way Kyr did, so I'm not writing him off as hopeless; he's had less time). But, yeah, I loved Avi in all three universes, and enjoyed the book a step function level more whenever he was around, being kind-of-friends with Kyr and Mags in the first universe or getting the rebellion sprung on him in the last or the middle one where he actually has the recognition and respect he lacks in Gaea's world and is still kind of a jerk, who maybe does not commit mass murder, but also doesn't seem to be terribly horrified by it. I really enjoyed his sniping at Kyr, the "I'm smarter than everyone" attitude with Lin, where it's very much not justified, and was having a lot of fun when in the last timeline he got to actually interact with Cleo, who was my second favorite character in this (or possibly third, after Lin). He is definitely not a nice person -- mass murder aside, he tortures Yiso, who is at best a prisoner and also someone who considers him a friend -- but the complicatedness worked for me, and I thought a lot of what he did in the lead-up to his actions in the first timeline was in a sort of "so are you gonna stop me?" way where I do think he was kind of hoping to be stopped, and his sort of deranged "I'm already damned, might as well push through" demeanor in the first universe, but also kind of in general -- this sort of embracing and weaponizing of the worst parts of his personality that I generally find compelling.
So, yeah, Avi is the part of the book I want fic about! All the Avi AUs -- I want to see how prickly and fucked up he is in other scenarios, and where he can get to without the memories of his AU self, and he is also the character I'm really curious to see interacting with other universes and crossover characters. In that first timeline, I kept thinking that it would be really interesting to watch him interact with Elliot Schafer from In Other Lands, who is also prickly and arrogant (for I suspect similar reasons) but whose morality is diametrically opposed to Avi's, and watching them argue about it would be very entertaining I feel. The other person who Avi made me think of was Kujen in Machineries of Empire -- not out of similarity, but the failure mode of a very smart person who is capable of doing great things; Avi doesn't have to spoilers for Revenant Gun amputate his own morality the way Kujen did to go through with his great plans -- but that's probably in large part because Gaea has warped his morality from birth. And I could see him, like, making similar choices. /Hexarchate spoilers I'd eagerly read a Nirai Avicenna fusion, too. The thing is, if this book ends up having a fandom (and I think it well might) I expect Avi to actually be a prominent part of it, in the context of Mags/Avi. Which I will check out with curiosity, but I also suspect that what people will end up writing will be smoothing or reforming the aspects of Avi which are a big part of why I find him interesting, but I'm curious to see what will happen.
Other characters -- I liked Cleo, in particular in the "Earth survives" AU, and the relationship between her and Val there -- the rivals-to-friendly rivals-to-friends (I saw a Goodreads review complaining about that being a platonic relationship vs the less interesting/developed one with Lisabel/Lisa, but that didn't bother me at all; it's pretty clear that for Val/Kyr sex is just not that important, so I think it's actually cool that her strongest relationships are platonic -- although I can understand people being disappointed if they were going by the "queer space opera" and female lead perspective and expecting a lesbian love story. (I was not expecting that. Actually, for a good chunk of the early part of the book I was wondering if Kyr was going to turn out to be a trans guy or otherwise not-a-woman; I wonder if other people were, too, and if that's what's partly behind the several Goodreads reviews that were disappointed by the lack of trans characters.) Speaking of Kyr's relationships, I liked the complicatedness of her relationship with Mags/Max. I didn't find Mags himself all that interesting, even after Kyr started paying attention to him, but I liked the glimpse of him at the Nursery, being good with little kids. I wish we had gotten more of Ursa's character in either of the universes. I liked Lin a lot, her histore with Jole and telling Avi off about opsec and playing Tetris at a tense moment before drawing Jole's attention and fire. I saw some reviews complain about Jole as the antagonist, how petty and small he turns out to be; I think that actually works well thematically (and him being small doesn't mean he is not clever or dangerous), but he wasn't a particularly interesting villain. Who I actually did find compelling was Leru, the Prince of Wisdom who had made the decision to destroy Earth. This is obviously a monstrous decision (although, weirdly, it feels like the book justifies it as the correct one, but more on that below), but Leru themself is interesting -- there's the "ten thousand years of condescention" but I liked them in the conversation with Kyr and reaction to Avi, and their death feels sad rather than triumphant, and Yiso is allowed (in terms of narrative sympathies, I mean) to mourn them. Oh, and I would've liked to know a bit more about Admiral Russell, whom we see as an old man complicit in everything Gaea is doing, benefitting from the arrangements of the Nursery, but whom we also hear about as a war hero who put his own troops at risk to rescue enemy civilians (and got a medal from them); the dichotomy is cool, but I would've liked to see more about where his head is at -- did Doomsday make him feel that he'd been wrong to treat aliens like people? did he think Gaea was truly going to be the last stronghold of Earth only to be pushed aside by Jole and lulled into complacency with comfortable arrangements? It's not critical to know this about a tertiary-at-best character, but there's this interesting thing set up using him as an example of human honor, so it feels like a waste that the conflict with how we see him in the present day isn't addressed at all...
This is probably a good time to talk about the AUs. I was definitely NOT expecting Avi to blow up the alien homeworlds ~50% into the book, and when it did happen, was wondering what Kyr was going to do with all that and not having stopped him when she had the chance, but after Mags killed himself and Kyr killed Avi, it became pretty clear that we were heading for a reset with the oh-so-convenient Wisdom capability. I was kind of meh on the idea of making everything that had happened not-happen, but had not been expecting to roll things back to Doomsday. I enjoyed the Terran Federation AU, seeing what Val and Max and Cleo and not-Avi were like, and how the worldbuilding diverged. I mean, from a logical perspective, it doesn't make much sense for all the same people to exist in the absence of Gaea -- Max and Val, sure, because they were the offspring of an established pair -- but Cleo and Lisa and Avi, with their exact genetic makeup? not very likely. But, whatever, I like AUs, and I enjoyed seeing how things were different in this one, and what was still the same -- how Val and Cleo's rivalry is still a rivalry but a much more positive one outside of the toxic environment, that Jole still ended up in charge under false pretenses but on a much larger scale, etc. Second reset was less successful for me, and was kind of where I felt the book was starting to falter. I think just in general you start losing the stakes, emotionally, even though the Wisdom had destroyed itself so no more reboots would be possible -- the AUs being possible in the first place was pretty tenuously explained, but then it was just pretty arbitrary when, after explaining that the Wisdom does not choose, only the people in control of it do (Leru, Avi, Jole) the Wisdom does choose and sets up this "this is the last time scenario" pretty arbitrarily. I was expecting a full-on Groundhog Day rerun after the second reset, but the Wisdom being gone changes things, which meant that certain plot beats could be different, like Kyr getting assigned to Command instead of Nursery (and I did like the way that change was justified by which was going to grant Jole easier access to her under the different circumstances). I liked Kyr having awareness of the other universes, and Yiso having access to them made sense, given what he is, but I thought that giving those memories to Cleo was a cheat code -- I would've liked to see Kyr win her over without that. (I don't mind Avi getting the memories after he demanded them, because I did enjoy his reaction, the need to talk it over with Kyr but also the need to tell her that he wouldn't necessarily choose differently given the chance.)
Kyr being back on Gaea and around Jole with two other universes' worth of memories was less effective for me than either the unreliable narrator stuff at the start or the conflict between Val and Kyr in the second universe. I think the stuff that happens in this part of the book is less interesting and/or felt less... organic? coherent? something to me. Going from "we've got to get off Gaea and warn Ursa" to "we've got to hijack the Victrix and save the good/innocent ones" to "we've got to save everyone who is willing to be saved" is... nice. I even buy it of Kyr, who seems to be a Hufflepuff Primary who's been indoctrinated into having a very narrow definition of "person", excluding not only aliens but also any humans who do not fully subscribe to the views of Gaea (traitors and collaborators), and once her view of who is a person starts expanding with Yiso, then can't just leave people behind. The stuff with Jole worked for me less well. I did like the temptation of just trusting him again, when he's giving her everything the old Kyr would have wanted, the temptation to believe his explanation about Ursa. The part where he kisses her and she finds herself unable to fight back -- I think that's making an important point, that even someone who is strong, someone who is trained can freeze up or be overwhelmed, but I had trouble believing that of Kyr specifically in those specific circumstances. But regardless of whether it was plausible or not, I didn't feel like it was doing anything interesting? It seems fairly random for Kyr, and it doesn't reveal anything new about Jole, so was one of those "put some of the battles back" moments for me. Whereas Lisabel using agoge techniques that Kyr made her drill to get free was quite cheesy, but at least felt thematically relevant to things that had gone before.
My biggest disappointment, I think is how jarringly antiseptic the ending is, relative to where the book started. It's not that I wanted to stick with the interplanetary slaughter of the first or second timeline, but, really, no casualties at all? Except for a Disney villain ending for Jole? Lin apparently survives her heroic sacrifice gambit, and, like, I liked Lin! I'm glad Lin is alive -- but it's hard to believe that nobody likable dies in this coup. Yiso survives and, despite supposedly not having access to the Wisdom anymore can carve out a temporary pocket in space for themself and Kyr, and then, the most deus ex machina rescue of all, the pleasure yacht which is the remnants of the Wisdom just jumps them aboard -- so a) they are saved and b) apparently even the Wisdom didn't fully sacrifice itself, just sort of... pruned itself into a tame and manageable size. (Which, this actually was foreshadowed, at least, with the very puzzling way Kyr escaped from Cleo the first time -- I thought I had missed something in the description, but apparently the reason this wasn't explaine dbetter is that this was foreshadowing for the deus ex machina, and I guess neither Kyr nor Yiso (who were probably not following things very well) or Avi (which is much more surprising) bothered to wonder what had happened?) Anyway, I suppose there is something to be said for a quiet, non-tragic ending to a book called Some Desperate Glory, but I suspect there was a satisfying quiet, non-tragic ending that could be found for this, and that wasn't it. Also, what is the deal between Kyr and Yiso? Is Kyr into them? That was the sense I got (which, whatever, just also not really necessary/too many battles IMO) from an earlier line and from the crest/hair touching scene at the end (which scene at the end Rebecca Roanhorse had an interesting critical point about).
And, OK, this niggle is not about the ending specifically, but kind of related. The Wisdom's agency and a little weird throughout, but I think the explanation is that up until the last reset, the Wisdom-as-omnipotent-AI is not deciding anything, but just executing according to the moral weighting -- and biases -- of the people controlling it. So Leru can use the Wisdom to destroy the Earth because they believe that, tragic as it is, that is the best outcome for the universe. And then Avi and Jole can use the Wisdom, once they take over it, to destroy the alien homeworlds, and the Wisdom is just executing the choice. But then at the third reset, the Wisdom itself chooses -- and it chooses to put Kyr back in the universe where Earth was destroyed. Which -- the Wisdom has now chosen the destruction of Earth, and Kyr doesn't seem to have a problem with that -- and the narrative doesn't seem to either. This is kind of an odd take! Are we really supposed to accept that humanity is so warlike that, really, unless they exist in the universe as "homeless" refugees, you cannot build a good outcome on that foundation? The Wisdom choosing this and self-annihilating I could sort of accept, but here we are at the end, with the yacht-sized remnants of the Wisdom -- which chose the universe in which Earth is destroyed -- and I guess we are cool with it?
I thought I would miss the lush descriptions of forest fuckery from Silver in the Wood, and it certainly doesn't have the same crunchy, grounded prose, but I still liked the writing -- Kyr's tendency to do things and then realize she was doing them and be surprised by them is not subtle but it worked for me, and the propaganda speeches are really, really good, properly stirring and glorious, and there's the occasional very descriptive phrase like "the bright bleak awe of watching the dreadnought come alive" and "the jury-rigged defiance of Gaea"
Totally random bit: when I was reading the description of Kyr visiting Avi's simulation he made for Mags and was squinting at the description like, "Is this meant to be Minas Tirith? It sounds a lot like Minas Tirith..." -- and then the Acknowledgements confirmed that it was! (Also, it took me until writing this bit to go from "aww, that means Avi read LotR and was struck by Gondor was I was" to "Avi would 100% try to take the One Ring and use it to defend Gondor -- no wonder I imprinted on him like I did" XD I am just so incredibly consistent in my faves, it's kind of funny.
And a note on the title -- Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum est" is a poem I've liked a lot ever since first reading it in high school, and it's a really good source for the title of this book -- the more complete line is "To children ardent for some desperate glory", and that is a GREAT choice of title for this book specifically.
Quotes:
“Why didn’t they shoot you anyway?” “Probably because I’m a genius,” Avi said.
"Unfortunately then Yiso woke up again and turned out to be chatty, so Kyr hated him after all. Not the way you were supposed to hate majo, with the cold implacable fury of the living hand of vengeance. She hated him roughly the same way she hated doing Nursery rotations, supervising six-year-olds who just never stopped talking."
"All it would cost her was her war. All it would cost was the memory of the dead, and the service she’d been born for, and the knowledge that out in deep space, clinging to a cold rock orbiting an unfriendly star, the last soldiers of humanity were still refusing to surrender, and Kyr was not among them. [...] Her family was her station. Her family was her cause. Her family was fourteen billion dead, and her mother was a murdered world."
"Kyr would have to say something when she went home. Oh, she remembered. She would never go home. She was Strike now. She was the hidden blade of humanity’s lasting defiance"
Avi: “And that’ll be it, Valkyr. For whatever you were planning here, which I’m guessing was random and fairly stupid, and for what I was planning, which was brilliant."
"Medical had never taught them about aliens. Drill had, but only in reverse: how to hurt them, how to kill them."
Leru to Kyr: “We were once-I imagine you don’t know this-a crepuscular species. Sound is the great betrayer in the twilight. I am exquisitely well adapted to identify the noise of a large predator moving through the bushes."
Leru: "I would like you to know that I am not, in any way, humanity’s enemy.”
“You killed our world!” “A tragic, unavoidable sacrifice.” “Fourteen billion people,” said Kyr.
“Yes,” said Leru. “Set against the interests of trillions. I doubt that will sway you. Most humans are quite bad with numbers. And in any case I do understand that one must take some things personally."
"Kyr had never even thought of kissing Lisabel. She did not know how she had managed not to think of it."
Avi: "You aren’t going to think of something better, because if there was something better I would have spotted it first.”
"When she tried to sleep everything that could go wrong laid itself out on the backs of her eyelids like the feeds from a combat mask."
Avi: “Wow, you look ready to burn the world down. Did someone break a minor regulation somewhere? Or did you just not do enough chin-ups to tire yourself out properly today?”
"Kyr felt suddenly and forcefully the weight of legacy. She wasn’t Earth’s child. She was Elora Marston’s, and Yingli Lin’s, and Ursa’s, and she owed her duty not to some abstract unknown planet but to the women who’d come before her."
The Wisdom yacht: "I intend to experiment with unseriousness. I am finally of a size appropriate for levity."
Anyway, so, I really enjoyed that, as you can probably tell from the length of this review, and also I enjoyed it in a way that makes me want to talk about it. If you also have read the ARC, talk to me! (or talk to me later, once the book is released :)
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Taskmaster Australia, ep 5 -- this was a really good one! and, wait what, spoilers! Julia is in the lead now? XD (the scores that someone posted on Reddit are Julia on 81, Jimmy on 78, and Danielle on 77 -- having slipped to third, from the lead, after the roses performance and popcorn disqualification. Nina is on 62 and Luke is on 60, which is an interesting 3+2 formation in terms of breakdown of scores.
Prize tasks -- OK, this is a fun prize task, but half of these people don't seem to know what "pretentious" means XD I do feel like Julia at least tried for a spin, although I don't buy it, but I don't know what Luke's problem with prize tasks is. Danielle's prayer candle wasn't pretentious either, I think. Jimmy's (vinyl records when he doesn't own a record player) was great and totally deserved the win, and I also liked Nina's art talk about the gay door art installation.
Popcorn fort -- I'm pretty sure Alex would have eaten Julia's and Luke's popcorn; Lesser Tom is a wimp/a sensible person. I'm very amused that Jimmy's totally penetrable fort that deterred Tom for all of 13 seconds, still ended up being the second (third) best showing, because Danielle broke at least one rule (I don't really agree that the net was an "attack"), and Nina broke the rules and then missed a kernel of popcorn anyway so Tom could eat popcorn in 14 seconds. TM!Tom's scoring is mad in this taskk; I could certainly understand giving him third place rather than second given that you could argue that Julia and Luke tying for first place used up first and second places, but how does one justify giving Jimmy two points? This is not a subjective task, he should've gotten 3 points (if not 4)!
Roses password task -- wow, this was pretty hopeless all around XD I'm amused by how many people figured out or thought they may have figured out the alphabet thing, and then still completely failed to get the password in the next 26 tries. OMG, poor Danielle -- she had started looking so competent, back in the first episode. Danielle crying in the VT and in the studio again, and Tom apparently weeping with laughter in the VT. And TM!Tom trolling her by claiming she dropped a rose. Other highlights: "Have you accepted Jesus, Tom?" (Julia), Jimmy having, as TM!Tom justly pointed out, a tantrum. And I'm glad Nina got to win one; she'd been having some rough episodes otherwise.
Team task with the giraffe -- they may not be very functional, but the Bad Improv Troupe (Nina: "Yes, and-- that's really mean") team are both entertaining and adorable, skipping along holding hands, putting the giraffe on a bike (that did look cool than just carrying it under a sheet), Nina's feminist commentary, and just their overall vibe.
Team live task to spell out TASKMASTER one letter at a time -- I do think the team of three had a disadvantage on having an extra person to use up, but at least the only difference was 1 pt vs 2 pts. (There was a discussion on Reddit about whether having a team of 3 is an advantage or the reverse, which included the following exchange: "I feel like this is the only season of Taskmaster I've seen across UK, NZ and Oz, when being in a team of three is a disadvantage." "The John Kearns team." "They weren't disadvantaged because they were in a team of 3, they were disadvantaged because one of the three was John Kearns." Which makes me consider that it would be awesome to see the UK series 14 lineup perform this task.
TM!Tom was quite funny this episode, and in general has grown on me since the first one, when I found him better than Jeremy but still nothing to write home about. He doesn't have Greg's range, I think, and is not as funny as Greg, but for sure a positive contribution to my enjoyment of the show, which Jeremy I don't think has ever managed.
In other Taskmaster news, YouTube helpfully threw this short Alex Horne interview my way, which was fun, and also features the answer to the question "How many times did Rhod Gilbert take off your pants?" -- twice that made the show ("quick change" and water feature tasks), and a couple of times that they couldn't show on television, so Alex is going with 4-5 times XD
In other Taskmaster-adjacent things, I also watched the National Comedy Awards (Stand up to Cancer), which was interesting now that I know quite a few of these people, mostly from Taskmaster, but a few (like Tom Allen, who was hosting) from some other things, like WILTY, too. with spoilers for winners
I was enjoying Tom Allen's opening poetic monologue, which I was admiring for rhyming stadium/Palladium/"a pub with one single lady in", and then it turned out it had been written by Munya Chawawa. (Probably some other rhymes which I was kind of wonering about would've worked better in Munya's own rendition.)
Female Performer -- I enjoyed seeing the clips from Fern Brady, Sarah Millican, Judi Love from Taskmaster, and Sandi Toksvig on QI. Katherine Ryan won, which was not who I was rooting for, but I did like her on Taskmaster, too, back in the day. It was neat to know everyone nominated.
Podcast -- nominees were Chris Ramsey and wife's podcast; Off Menu; a Rob Beckett and Josh Widdicombe thing, and a fourth one I didn't recognize anyone from, but Chris and Rosie's podcast won, so there was a cute Chris and Judi TM s13 reunion, which I approve of.
Male Performer -- wow, I would not have recognized Lolly with her hair down and in that pantsuit (co-presenting with Bill Bailey). Alex and Greg both nominated along with Munya, Lee Mack with a WILTY clip, and Joe Lycett. I like all five of them, but was rooting for Munya -- but Lee (the winner) is really funny too and I was amused by his speech.
Comedy Actress -- I recognize Rose Matafeo and Daisy Mae Cooper but have only seen Charlotte Ritchie in Ghosts, and don't know anything about the winner. Still, yay Ghosts and yay people I know from Taskmaster.
Joe Lycett won the special Comedy Game Changer award, and dedicated his award to the Channel 4 lawyers, lol.
Best Comedy Entertainment Show -- Taskmaster represented by the series 14 live team task "which aircraft... crashes more... into mountains" with Dara having apoplexy on stage, excellent choice; Chris and Rosie Ramsey show; Bob Mortimer show, and the Graham Norton Show. Taskmaster won, which I already knew because there had been an Alex and Greg clip on the TM channel that I had seen. But it was fun to watch the acceptance speech from Alex, thanking "the elephant that isn't in the room" and then managing to make his acceptance speech 85% about Greg XD
Rhod Gilbert's first TV appearance after being diagnosed with cancer (stage 4 head and neck cancer :((( ). He looks pretty good, considering, and sounds really good.
Male Actor (presented by Katherine Ryan and Munya Chawawa; what is that jacket he is wearing XD) -- Kiell (Mike on Ghosts) was the only one I knew (well, I also know Ricky Gervais, but I haven't watched him in anything).
Panel show -- presented by "Thomas" and "Pat" from Ghosts: Mock the Week, WILTY (represented by David having a breakdown about Bob Mortimer, good call), QI, 8oo10C. I think I've actually enjoyed my glimpses of 8oo10C the least of what I've seen, so I'm quite meh on it winning vs ones I actually like, but I like Jon Richardson and I enjoyed hearing from him in the acceptance speech.
I didn't know the breakout star winners or the person honored with the special Impact in Comedy award, but those seemed like lovely presentations, too.
Best Stand Up Show via live voting -- presented by Hugh Dennis, who is looking/sounding quite a bit older than series 4 of Taskmaster (wonder if he can still do all those gymnastics moves tho XD) And a little series 4 reunion there when Joe Lycett won! ("Desky's given me an award!")
Best Supporting Role -- aww, Lolly as Kitty is nominated! I didn't know any of the others, but it was lovely to see the clip from Ghosts. And another one when Ghosts was nominated for Best Scripted Comedy (and also didn't win).
So, yeah, I don't know how I have become, in the last year, a person who watches comedy award shows, but here we are, and it was a good time.
**
Back to Person of Interest: SPOILERS!
3x11-12 ("Lethe/Alethia"), a lot going on here. Treating both episodes together since "Lethe" ends on a cliffhanger.
First, the Finch backstory -- both in actual flashbacks and as revealed by Arthur his MIT friend adrift in time. Young Finch taking apart a tractor and asking about birds was a bit on the nose, but I enjoyed the older Finch, fighting his own unwinnable battle with entropy for his father's independence in the face of dementia (or whatever), delaying college because he can learn anywhere. And present-day Finch hot-wiring a car with a very nerdy "Engines are go" and "You're right, Arthur, just like college" (I liked Arthur; he played both lucid and befuddled well, and lucid pretending to be befuddled. I'm not sure that pairing Finch's backstory with his father's deterioration with Arthur's brain tumor was the best call/necessary -- it feels a bit on the nose. I do think it helps explain why Harold is as good iwth Arthur as he is, why he is so gentle with him and just sort of rolling with his time displacement, but also never talks down or discounts him -- but I think it would have worked better if we'd gotten the backstory in a previous episode already. But I did really like seeing Finch and Arthur together.
Reese and Fusco in Colorado -- the conversation in the jail cell, Reese talking about "entropy, decay" while Fusco is advocating to keep fighting -- made me think of the "high hope mindset" that I learned about in work training recently. Part of that was a segment on "the death of hope", that at first there's anger (blocked path to goal), and then there's despair (all paths are blocked, and the goal appears unreachable), and the final stage is apathy (when the person no longer has a goal). I feel like Reese, when we find him at the beginning, is inhabiting despair, having passed through anger and found that vending his anger did not bring him any peace. And Finch pulls him out of despair by giving him a new goal, which is what you do with people in that stage, according to the work coach person. (Shaw, when she walks onto the stage, is in the anger phase, I think, although anger of course looks pretty different on her. And Finch -- I'm not sure he ever loses hope, even after Nathan's death -- I don't think he is ever lost, he seems to be punishing himself, and regrouping, but I feel like all his actions are very deliberate and, like, weirdly rational even when they don't make sense -- predicated on flawed assumptions but still logical. Anyway, it's interesting to think about.) But Carter's death sends him right back to despair and past that -- to apathy, which I don't think we've ever seen on John before. But Finch being in danger snaps him out of it -- keeping Finch safe is still a goal he can't ignore, even if it's pointless on the grand scale. He says it's because the world can't afford to lose Finch, but I don't think it's as grand and altruistic as that, whatever he may think he believes. I was surprised, like Finch, that he just plans to leave right after, though.
Finch agrees with Shaw that she is "a hammer" but compares Reese to a scalpel, with more finesse, which, he has not been very scalpel-y since Carter died, but OK, in general I suppose I agree. Shaw's "it's hammer time" (when proposing to build a pipe bomb so they can escape through the sewer when the vault is blasted open by Vigilance) was a great callback, though.
I find the identity of Control interesting -- that the scary person in charge is a heavyset middle-aged woman who has to put on glasses to see detail -- and the torture of Root is set up interestingly, too: the on-screen actions are nothing too violent, just a couple of shots, a very small surgery, but the setup manages to be quite menacing. Root's deranged "I am the interface" is a great line! Root sacrificing her ear so she can steal Control's knife and overpower her was also a great bit, and Root speaking for the Machine was really cool. And the Machine's gift to Arthur was lovely; I suppose he is her (oh deal, Root's got me doing it too XD) uncle, in a way, to Nathan's father and Finch's mother.
I find Hersh boring, though, and I find Vigilance and their whole deal also boring (even though Collier is interesting to watch; I didn't recognize him at first, but that's Leslie Odom Jr, who is familiar on account of Hamilton even though I've never seen any version of Hamilton, just clips). When Finch led Arthur away from the doors, preparing for the blast, I was wondering if they were just going to leave the bank lady behind (Reese would not have, if he could help it), but apparently bank lady was a plot point, swapping the drives, and Samaritan actually survived.
3x13 ("4C") -- aka, the one where Reese and Finch make up at a sidewalk cafe in Rome XD Finch landing the plane by remote control was not a scene I expected to see, but if that's what it takes for Reese to get over his sulk, I'm fine with that. In general, this felt like kind of a weird episode, and I was not surprised to see that one of the writer duo was the writer from "Reasonable Doubt", which I hadn't liked at all and though the characterization was off in. Here, too, the plane stuff feels fairly generic... John, dealing with the first class people, is pettier than he usually is, although he's not on the job and is sulking, so I don't think that's implausible. It's just kind of... broader strokes than this show usually is, I feel.
Case in point is Reese telling off Owen while Finch is on the line, listening: "You computer guys, you build something you can't control, and when it backfires, you won't accept responsibility. [...] Have you really made anything better? Does it look like you've stopped the violence?" I like the idea of argument by proxy, actually. And I find it plausible that, in the actual argument he is having with Finch, Reese does not accept that taking down HR is worth Carter's death ("have you really made anything better"), even if Carter herself would feel that way. But I find it hard to buy that he would a) throw a tantrum and walk off, and b) that the events of this episode would bring him back around if he had. What actually changed? Is it just the realization that the Machine put him on the plane to save 130 people that would be dead if he hadn't been there? (except maybe it wouldn't have come to that if Reese hadn't interfered to save Owen from the first hitman, or the ex-Mossad couple) But, like, that's not news to him surely, that this is what the Machine does. And then Finch's speech at the cafe is a nice speech, and very Finch-y, but I don't feel like it addresses the things actually bothering Reese, except that Finch says, "yes, it's ineffable because I tried to make it ineffable" -- but I certainly don't feel like that's what convinced Reese to come back; he must've made up his mind before he sat down next fo Finch. So what was it really -- did he just need to get laid a nice date in Rome with the flight attendant?
On a random note, I pegged "the newlyweds as Israelis, or at least spekaing Hebrew (subtitles just have "foreign language"), before the show identified them as ex-Mossad, and thought it was neat that that's who they were because I knew that the Israeli mafia was heavily involved in the Ecstasy trade (I learned this from a book I won at a murder mystery dinner thing XD)
Oh, and I guess the title is a pun for "foresee", which I did not get until I read about it in Wikipedia. It is not a very good pun.
3x14 ("Provenance") -- ahaha, so this is where the "oh my, he's gorgeous" clip comes from that's in all the Finch/Reese vids, with Finch's little "I know, right?" eyebrow thing XD Which, Reese does fill out that new Italian suit nicely, even if he's not as good at tying a bow-tie as at stripping a gun upsidedown in the dark. Shaw also cleans up nicely. As for the case itself, hm. I mean, they clearly wanted to do a heist episode, but the explanation for why stretched my suspension of disbelief pretty thin, and for stretches at a time nobody but Fusco had any interesting dialogue. But OK, Finch got to play with a 3D printer, and I enjoyed the Interpol guy's French accent. "I always thought you deserved the gold" definitely surprised me, but I guess Kelly had to get a happy ending after all that. Probably my favorite part was the bit at the end where Fusco has clearly gotten a taste for heists and Finch is wearing a wistful smile contemplating stealing diamonds (I would totally read a diamond-thief!Finch AU).
3x15 ("Last Call") -- wow, two completely non-arc episodes in a row all of a sudden. I liked Sandra the 911 operator and the sad backstory with her babysitting charge who drowned. Nice to see Finch directly involved in a case (and threatening to electrocute a guy), and nice to see Reese and Shaw kicking ass together as a team. The mastermind behind the whole thing is intriguing; I think they're laying on the "evil Finch" comparisons too thick, but I do want to see how this develops.
3x16 ("RAM") -- ooh, another flashback episode! Wow, Dillinger is a dick, and I'm not surprised Finch was as paranoid about trusting John after that as he was. Seeing Reese in CIA mode was pretty chilling, and Kara continues to be a piece of work. That's interesting that Reese let Casey go on his own judgement, but I guess he was getting close to being ready to walk away even before Ordos. I liked Casey and the nerd bonding with Finch, and I'm glad he survived. And I've missed Root the last couple of episodes -- nice to have her back, even if it was just for a bit at the end!
This seems as good a place as any to talk about Sorting Hat Chats: back in 2020, I was talking about my sortings for Reese and Finch with sunlit_stone, who got me into watching this show. With an additional season and a half behind me, I have some more thoughts on this.
I had originally thought of Finch as a Hufflepuff primary, but sunlit_stone convinced me that he was a (burned) Ravenclaw Primary instead. I am now convinced of it firmer than ever, having watched the flashback with Nathan and the ferry at the end of season 2. Because Finch does not start out wanting to save the irrelevant numbers -- he believes thy are indeed irrelevant, and the thing that convinces him otherwise is Nathan's death: it's not a fundamental belief in the sanctity of human life, it's an empirically established truth that just because the numbers are irrelevant to national security doesn't mean the people are unimportant. And he incorporates this new truth into his worldview and embraces the truth Nathan was pursuing, and off he goes, this is now his whole life. The thing he was repeating in flashbacks, too, "if they didn't want me to get in, they should've built it better" also feels pretty Ravenclaw to me. So, yeah, OK, Finch is conclusively settled as a double Ravenclaw. (Finch having to land a jumbo jet, outside of his area of expertise, freaking out quietly and grasping at things he knows how to do and talking imself thorugh it, while getting the job done near-impeccably, is such a Ravenclaw Secondary thing, it's adorable. ♥ Finch)
We were also debating Reese's Primary -- which is clearly burned at the start, but what was it before it burned? I was positing Slytherin (with himself excluded from the circle from some point onward) but willing to be convinced otherwise at the time. Well, now I'm settled on this too: DEFINITELY Slytherin, because of the way Carter's death affects him. Because the mission has not changed: the Machine still allowed them to put away Quinn and dismantle HR, but that doesn't matter to John anymore, not when he lost a person he cared about, a person inside his very small circle. The "Carter wouldn't want you to pull the trigger" speech would've worked on a Gryffindor Primary, but it doesn't work on Reese. Fusco's appeal in the jail cell, that there are still innocent people to save, still good to be done, would've worked on a Hufflepuff Primary, I think, but John ignores it: because he is willing to be used as a tool for Finch's Hufflepuff model ideas, but that is not his own driving factor. The only thing that drives him to action in this state is danger to another person he cares about (Fusco saying he hasn't heard from Finch in a while, which is not like him) -- that is very Slytherin, I think.
I hadn't yet met Shaw and Root when I was sorting the POI characters last time. Root is definitely a Slytherin Secondary -- that's a large part of the fun of her character, how she will readily do ANYTHING to advance her ends -- play a role, shoot a bunch of people, kidnap and torture pretty much anyone, endure torture and mutilation, sit meekly in her cell, talk philosophy at Finch -- it really feels like all tools and approaches are morally equivalent to her and she just uses whichever is going to be most effective. I feel like even her line about how if she were a psychopath the things she's had to do would've been easier is a very Slytherin Secondary kind of sentiment -- she knows some of the things she's done are evil, but they were the most effective things to do, so they are the ones she went with, even if she didn't enjoy doing them. And I don't think I would've been able to name Root's Primary before this season, but I think the way she takes the Machine and makes it her whole morality is a very Ravenclaw Primary thing -- she seems so ecstatic to be given this constructed morality, when the Machine starts directing her. I'm going to guess that younger Root tried on various truths and found counterexamples or places they didn't work and rejected them one by one -- so it really feels like a gift to be handed one she can believe in again. So, yeah, Ravenclaw Primary/Slytherin Secondary for Root, and I feel like she's been the easiest person to sort on this show full of quite complicated and damaged people.
Shaw is definitely a Gryffindor Secondary (hammer time indeed XD), but I am kind of stumped as to her Primary. Her emotions are really muted, and she doesn't seem interested in introspection, which makes it harder to tell what her motivations are for anything. She doesn't seem to be a Hufflepuff in that I don't think she registers people as people, and that was one of the reasons she didn't make a good doctor. Ravenclaw Primaries are really hard for me, but I'm going to assume she isn't one because if she were, I would assume she would interact differently with the Ravenclaw Primaries of Finch and Root. She just doesn't seem philosophically inclined enough anyway. So, is she a Gryffindor Primary with a peculiar moral compass or is she a Slytherin Primary with a very small inner circle? So far, I've come across two instances of Shaw getting moved to take, hm, action that would require a lot of activation energy on her own initiative -- going after Gen the Russian girl when she should've checked herself into a hospital, and going rogue after her partner Mike Cole is killed. And I could see those as either Slythering Primary motivated -- she cared about her partner, she comes to care about Gen, in her own non-demonstrative way -- but also a Gryffindor Primary way -- those things could've tripped over an idiosyncratic personal code. I'm leaning Slytherin in terms of interpreting her motivations, but on the other hand, I do think Reese is Slyth Primary/Gryff Secondary, and it would be boring to have another character who was also that... (although while Reese embraces Finch's Hufflepuff model, Shaw doesn't seem to, which is still a difference.) And I could see Shaw as a double Gryffindor -- they are not necessarily nice people, and their intrinsic moral codes are not necessarily nice, either.
I had met Carter and Fusco when I was trying to sort these guys last, but hadn't tried to sort them. Well, no time like the present to sort Carter, who got quite a bit more interesting to me since then. For example, I would not have guessed that her secondary was Slytherin, but I'm pretty sure it is -- she holds on to her Gryffindor and/or Hufflepuff models of the forthright, hard-working cop as long as she can, but when corruption makes it impossible to get anything done that way, off she goes, snatching away Elias and making deals with him (always on her own moral terms), hijacking a truck full of drugs, blackmailing Laskey. Primary -- I see Gryffindor or Hufflepuff for her, and I think Gryffindor more than Huff because I do feel like she dismissed Laskey before he gave her a reason to suspect him, which strikes me as a Gryff judgementalness (a Hufflepuff would give more of a benefit of the doubt). Also I like the idea of Carter being Gryff Primary/Slyth Secondary to complement Reese, who is the reverse. Fusco, I think, is another Gryffindor Secondary -- the way he mouths off in a tough situation is I think a Gryff trait, because it's a kind of attack even when he has nothing to actually attack with. At first I was thinking a burned primary for Fusco at the start, which heals under Carter's role-modeling of hers, but actually, I'm now thinking maybe a Ravenclaw Primary for him? Because he never fully breaks -- he's in a bad way, but not fully lost when the show starts -- and I feel like Ravenclaw primaries are the most resilient, undergoing change without totally falling apart. So I think Fusco starts out with a Gryffindor Primary model, trying to be a good cop, but his corrupt buddies pull him in and convince him of a different truth -- they're brothers, they help each other, and then that it's pointless to oppose HR. But Carter and Team Machine show him yet another truth, and he comes over to that side. So, yeah, I'm liking Ravenclaw Primary/Gryffindor Secondary for Fusco (which makes half of this bunch Ravenclaw Primaries, but that doesn't feel wrong).
2. Deadly Ever After by Ben Aaronovitch and Andrew Cartmel (RoL GN #10) -- joins The Fey and the Furious as an emminently skippable outing, at least for my interests. I preorder these books so I don't forget about them, and when this one arrived, I read through the first chapter and then set it aside with nothing really drawing me back -- for over a month, until I knew I had to get it into a package I was sending to aome. If it wasn't for the package, I'm not sure when I would've bothered to go back to it. The focus is on Olympia and Chelsea, teenager river goddesses (by this point, they're 19 -- this is after the birth of Bev and Peter's twins), with a bunch of OCs and cameo appearances by Bev and Abigail (and the foxes), and Peter and Nightingale sort of glimpsed in the background doing wacky things a la the non-Xander, non-Faith cast of BtVS in "The Zeppo". Except I'm not sure it works nearly so well in GN format, or maybe the difference is that I just don't really care about the foreground stuff here. Of the people who actually do anything with the plot, the only one I care about is Abigail, really. I do enjoy cameo levels of Bev, so I enjoyed cameo levels of Bev here, especially her approach to punishing her baby sisters for changing the Netflix password -- that was cute! I don't feel about Chelsea and Olympia any more strongly than I did before I read this. As for the OCs, the only one I found at all interesting was the frog prince guy, and his lovingly rendered abs were like 80% of that. As for the plot/theme/whatever -- I can definitely enjoy updated, subverted, fractured, etc. fairy tales, but it's got to have something new and interesting to say, and I didn't think this had anything new and interesting to say, except, marginally, maybe with the frog prince.
3. Emily Tesh, Some Desperate Glory (read in ARC; publication date is April 6) -- I've had such a weird trajectory with Emily Tesh's work before this -- I loved Silver in the Wood, it was one of my favorite books the year I read it, loved the beautifully crafted prose, the interesting characterization for everyone including the antagonist, the lovely novella-sized plot -- and then I read the sequel, and wished I hadn't read it, because it spoiled some of the things about the first book (not in a spoiler way, just making it harder to enjoy way) while not adding much that I cared for. So when I heard that Tesh had written a novel, I was approaching it with trepidation, especially on the subject of sticking the landing. And a sci-fi novel, compared to the fantasy I've read from her before, was also a source of slight concern, because a lot of what I had especially liked in 'Silver' was the numinous fantasy feel. So, trepidation, but also excited to check it out, so getting my hands on an ARC broke through my general lack of reading at the moment.
I'm not really sure how to talk about this book. I have a lot to say, and a lot of it is positive, and some of it is "hmm, not sure", and some of it is in the context of other fannishing things, and a lot of it is stuff I want to talk about, and that's the frustrating thing about reading something in ARC -- I don't have enough people to talk about it with, now when I most want to talk about it! It is a book I enjoyed reading quite a lot. It is a book that I think attempts some impressive, difficult things and does at least some of them pretty well. It also makes some choices I was frustrated or puzzled about, but nothing that made me outright mad, which is becoming kind of a rarity, so I guess I'll take it. I liked the character work even in those cases where I didn't end up liking the characters (which is not a surprise, given how much I liked the character work in 'Silver'), and there's one character I ended up liking enough that they (obscuring choice of pronouns, not their actual pronoun) might show up on my Yuletide request this year (depending on what the fandom for this ends up being like, probably); I'm pretty sure anyone familiar with my taste in characters will know instantly who they are. Anyway, let's dig in.
I started reading the book a little ahead of cafemassolit, who was the one who alerted me to the existence of this book, and almost immediately wanted to talk about it. K had heard it described as "Azula in space", and when she asked me if it was that, I had to do a double-take, and then was slightly insulted on Azula's behalf, because Kyr is definitely NOTHING like her, except for being strong-willed and brainwashed as the result of an abusive upbringing, but that's, like, every dystopian protagonist. What the beginning of the book reminded me of was the start of the new She-Ra -- Kyr is like pre-series Adora in terms of drinking the Kool-Aid dished out by the abusive authority figures of Gaea and embracing the black-and-white mentality and militaristic/freedom fighter rhetoric, but, I said to K, with Catra's people skills -- and once K had met her too, she was like, actually, worse than Catra, which is impressive, and yes, both worse and impressive XD I also saw some reviews reference Ender's Game, and I did get that feeling from the early chapters, the child soldier setup and agoge (~simulation/live action video games) drills, though I don't think it's trying to be Ender's Game -- just in conversation with it. According to one of the Goodreads reviews, the marketing pitch was "the Vorkosigan saga meets Gideon the Ninth in a world reminiscent of Mass Effect" -- I've seen the Mass Effect comparison a lot, which I have nothing to say to since I haven't played it and know nothing about; I did think the book had more video-game-feel-y scenes than I really wanted, though. I have a separate comment on Gideon under the spoiler-cut, but it did not feel Gideon-like to me AT ALL -- and I do not understand where the Vorkosigan Saga comparison is coming from, like, at all. Like, who came up with that? (apparently editor Ruoxi Chen) what was their angle? I'm very puzzled... The beginning, which starts with a ~space Wikipedia article (ok, it's an actual book, followed by a scathing in-universe review, which I thought was a cute touch) is extremeley the "Humans are Space Orcs" meme, to the point that I wondered whether this book began as Humans are Space Orcs fic :P spoilers from here I also don't get where people on Goodreads are getting the comparisons to Locked Tomb/Gideon the Ninth from, unless it's very specifically the in-universe AUs, which did remind me of the pocket universes in Harrow, but the pocket universes in Harrow were brief asides, where here it is 50% of the book spent in a Groundhog Day fix-it kind of thing. But enough about things this book did or did not remind me of.
I guess the first thing to talk about is Kyr, since she is the consistent POV throughout the book (other than the epistolary bits quoting from books at the start of each part), and since so much of the first section, especially, is flavored by seeing everything through her eyes. Pretty much all reviews agree that Kyr starts out unlikable, and yep, she sure does -- she is very thoroughly bought into Gaea's militaristic mindset of being the last children of murdered Earth, keeping themselves honed as a blad to avenge her 14 billion dead -- before Kyr was born but in living memory of the adults on Gaea station, Earth was destroyed by an alien federation. As you might guess from the "aliens killed Earth" thing, Gaea (a sort of makeshift space station jury-rigged out of four surviving dreadnoughts and an asteroid and a population drawn and bred from their crews) is extremely anti-alien and Kyr has been raised to think of them as the enemy, and also as not-people. She's also unquestioningly accepted the ableist views of Gaea, which makes sense, what with the focus on physical training and humans being the scariest motherfuckers in the galaxy physically, since the majoda have the technological advantage. She doesn't question Gaea's general homophobia either, and I liked the way this part was handled viz Kyr's character -- she uses slurs and doesn't see why the gay characters can't just suck it up and contribute to the station's population efforts anyway, it's just duty, but she doesn't have a problem with her messmates who are a f/f couple or to learning that her brother is gay (which is not to say that she handles his coming out well, but that's Kyr being bad at people, not Kyr being actively homophobic). And I believer Kyr herself is meant to be on the aro/ace spectrum, although she does get a love interest, and I liked the way the asexuality stuff was set up, too -- the ugh, why is kissing such a big deal, can't you just focus on running drills stuff felt really nicely in character. Gaea station is also racist, but that part felt tacked on and not as well integrated to me (like, the point about the names chosen for the two Black children at the station was an interesting point but awkwardly made). And honestly the homphobia and racism felt a lot less organic to the setting than other aspects of Gaea; like, yes, it's a totalitarian regime/cult, and those do tend to be repressive, and with a straight guy in power I can see why he'd want the expectation that all women, regardless of orientation, had to be available to him/his cronies, so the Nursery set up worked for me pretty well (as in, it was horrible and I'm glad Kyr didn't spend any time there except the visit) but the rest of it is kind of generic/transplanted "bad person has bad views", which, eh. It didn't actively interfere with what I liked about the book, but I do think it contributed to the "that's too many battles, put some back" feelings I had about it.
Anyway, right, so Kyr starts out as an ulikable product of her shitty upbringing, bullying her mess-mates, who all dislike her (except for one, who pities her instead), when she thinks she is leading them and honing them into proper instruments of Earth's vengeance, pathologically competing with everyone and being dismissive of her twin brother in a way that she later realizes is petty jealousy, and just being all around unpleasant. I actually found it quite refreshing that her POV was allowed to be so immersive, without "xenophobia, homophobia, and ableism are bad actually" authorial asides that I've frankly resigned myself to expect from the current crop of SFF. And when Kyr is betrayed by the system she's so wholly bought into, the one that promised her, well, basically a glorious and meaningful death if her training scores are good enough and instead assigned her to Nursery duty -- combination of childcare, prostitution, and forced reproduction -- she does actually leave Gaea station, but I appreciated the way her departure is very much "they made a mistake with my specific assignment, I will show them I'm worthy" rather than anything more enlightened and informed, and it is only very, very slowly and very grudgingly that she comes to any sort of larger view. But I think my favorite thing about Kyr is actually that when she meets her Alternate Universe self, Valery Marston in the universe where Earth *wasn't* destroyed, how much the two of them loathe each other XD I'll talk more about the AU stuff later (I liked the AU stuff, as you might imagine) but in addition to it just being funny how much Kyr and Val despise each other when they come into contact in the space of her mind, how Kyr comes to realize some of her own flaws by seeing them repeat slightly differently in Val's timeline -- Val's fixation on test scores over knowledge when she's given all this access to education that Kyr never got; Val's fond but dismissive and belittling view of her brother. So, I never got to a point where I liked Kyr -- I don't think Kyr is the kind of character I'm likely to like anyway -- but I appreciated her arc (mostly; there are some things about the ending that didn't work for me as well, but I'll talk about the ending separately) and I respected the commitment to her difficult POV and general unreliable narrator stuff, like her being determined not to figure out what Ursa saying the child Kyr recognizes as Jole's (massive cognitive dissonance with Vorkosigan's Jole, btw XD) is hers, or Kyr fumbling her way through pronoun usage for Yiso and the (presumably nonbinary) reporter with the arms.
Right, so, Kyr definitely makes the first strong impression in the book, but then at the 14% mark I met Avicenna, who instantly became my favorite character and my favorite thing about the book. I expect this is a surprise for absolutely no-one, because "arrogant asshole who actually is Just That Good" is kind of my thing, and Avi is certainly that. I did not expect him to be quite this intractably committed to mass murder as a problem-solving technique, but I do actually appreciate that his lesson learned from "I killed 20 trillion aliens, which caused Mags to commit suicide and Kyr to snap my neck" (for which he isn't sure he's sorry / isn't sure he wouldn't do it again if he had the ability) is not "maybe cool it with the mass murder next time" but "it was the wrong mass murder, I'll make sure to kill the other guys next time" -- that is some impressive commitment XD (but also, like, he didn't actually get a growth arc, as such, the way Kyr did, so I'm not writing him off as hopeless; he's had less time). But, yeah, I loved Avi in all three universes, and enjoyed the book a step function level more whenever he was around, being kind-of-friends with Kyr and Mags in the first universe or getting the rebellion sprung on him in the last or the middle one where he actually has the recognition and respect he lacks in Gaea's world and is still kind of a jerk, who maybe does not commit mass murder, but also doesn't seem to be terribly horrified by it. I really enjoyed his sniping at Kyr, the "I'm smarter than everyone" attitude with Lin, where it's very much not justified, and was having a lot of fun when in the last timeline he got to actually interact with Cleo, who was my second favorite character in this (or possibly third, after Lin). He is definitely not a nice person -- mass murder aside, he tortures Yiso, who is at best a prisoner and also someone who considers him a friend -- but the complicatedness worked for me, and I thought a lot of what he did in the lead-up to his actions in the first timeline was in a sort of "so are you gonna stop me?" way where I do think he was kind of hoping to be stopped, and his sort of deranged "I'm already damned, might as well push through" demeanor in the first universe, but also kind of in general -- this sort of embracing and weaponizing of the worst parts of his personality that I generally find compelling.
So, yeah, Avi is the part of the book I want fic about! All the Avi AUs -- I want to see how prickly and fucked up he is in other scenarios, and where he can get to without the memories of his AU self, and he is also the character I'm really curious to see interacting with other universes and crossover characters. In that first timeline, I kept thinking that it would be really interesting to watch him interact with Elliot Schafer from In Other Lands, who is also prickly and arrogant (for I suspect similar reasons) but whose morality is diametrically opposed to Avi's, and watching them argue about it would be very entertaining I feel. The other person who Avi made me think of was Kujen in Machineries of Empire -- not out of similarity, but the failure mode of a very smart person who is capable of doing great things; Avi doesn't have to spoilers for Revenant Gun amputate his own morality the way Kujen did to go through with his great plans -- but that's probably in large part because Gaea has warped his morality from birth. And I could see him, like, making similar choices. /Hexarchate spoilers I'd eagerly read a Nirai Avicenna fusion, too. The thing is, if this book ends up having a fandom (and I think it well might) I expect Avi to actually be a prominent part of it, in the context of Mags/Avi. Which I will check out with curiosity, but I also suspect that what people will end up writing will be smoothing or reforming the aspects of Avi which are a big part of why I find him interesting, but I'm curious to see what will happen.
Other characters -- I liked Cleo, in particular in the "Earth survives" AU, and the relationship between her and Val there -- the rivals-to-friendly rivals-to-friends (I saw a Goodreads review complaining about that being a platonic relationship vs the less interesting/developed one with Lisabel/Lisa, but that didn't bother me at all; it's pretty clear that for Val/Kyr sex is just not that important, so I think it's actually cool that her strongest relationships are platonic -- although I can understand people being disappointed if they were going by the "queer space opera" and female lead perspective and expecting a lesbian love story. (I was not expecting that. Actually, for a good chunk of the early part of the book I was wondering if Kyr was going to turn out to be a trans guy or otherwise not-a-woman; I wonder if other people were, too, and if that's what's partly behind the several Goodreads reviews that were disappointed by the lack of trans characters.) Speaking of Kyr's relationships, I liked the complicatedness of her relationship with Mags/Max. I didn't find Mags himself all that interesting, even after Kyr started paying attention to him, but I liked the glimpse of him at the Nursery, being good with little kids. I wish we had gotten more of Ursa's character in either of the universes. I liked Lin a lot, her histore with Jole and telling Avi off about opsec and playing Tetris at a tense moment before drawing Jole's attention and fire. I saw some reviews complain about Jole as the antagonist, how petty and small he turns out to be; I think that actually works well thematically (and him being small doesn't mean he is not clever or dangerous), but he wasn't a particularly interesting villain. Who I actually did find compelling was Leru, the Prince of Wisdom who had made the decision to destroy Earth. This is obviously a monstrous decision (although, weirdly, it feels like the book justifies it as the correct one, but more on that below), but Leru themself is interesting -- there's the "ten thousand years of condescention" but I liked them in the conversation with Kyr and reaction to Avi, and their death feels sad rather than triumphant, and Yiso is allowed (in terms of narrative sympathies, I mean) to mourn them. Oh, and I would've liked to know a bit more about Admiral Russell, whom we see as an old man complicit in everything Gaea is doing, benefitting from the arrangements of the Nursery, but whom we also hear about as a war hero who put his own troops at risk to rescue enemy civilians (and got a medal from them); the dichotomy is cool, but I would've liked to see more about where his head is at -- did Doomsday make him feel that he'd been wrong to treat aliens like people? did he think Gaea was truly going to be the last stronghold of Earth only to be pushed aside by Jole and lulled into complacency with comfortable arrangements? It's not critical to know this about a tertiary-at-best character, but there's this interesting thing set up using him as an example of human honor, so it feels like a waste that the conflict with how we see him in the present day isn't addressed at all...
This is probably a good time to talk about the AUs. I was definitely NOT expecting Avi to blow up the alien homeworlds ~50% into the book, and when it did happen, was wondering what Kyr was going to do with all that and not having stopped him when she had the chance, but after Mags killed himself and Kyr killed Avi, it became pretty clear that we were heading for a reset with the oh-so-convenient Wisdom capability. I was kind of meh on the idea of making everything that had happened not-happen, but had not been expecting to roll things back to Doomsday. I enjoyed the Terran Federation AU, seeing what Val and Max and Cleo and not-Avi were like, and how the worldbuilding diverged. I mean, from a logical perspective, it doesn't make much sense for all the same people to exist in the absence of Gaea -- Max and Val, sure, because they were the offspring of an established pair -- but Cleo and Lisa and Avi, with their exact genetic makeup? not very likely. But, whatever, I like AUs, and I enjoyed seeing how things were different in this one, and what was still the same -- how Val and Cleo's rivalry is still a rivalry but a much more positive one outside of the toxic environment, that Jole still ended up in charge under false pretenses but on a much larger scale, etc. Second reset was less successful for me, and was kind of where I felt the book was starting to falter. I think just in general you start losing the stakes, emotionally, even though the Wisdom had destroyed itself so no more reboots would be possible -- the AUs being possible in the first place was pretty tenuously explained, but then it was just pretty arbitrary when, after explaining that the Wisdom does not choose, only the people in control of it do (Leru, Avi, Jole) the Wisdom does choose and sets up this "this is the last time scenario" pretty arbitrarily. I was expecting a full-on Groundhog Day rerun after the second reset, but the Wisdom being gone changes things, which meant that certain plot beats could be different, like Kyr getting assigned to Command instead of Nursery (and I did like the way that change was justified by which was going to grant Jole easier access to her under the different circumstances). I liked Kyr having awareness of the other universes, and Yiso having access to them made sense, given what he is, but I thought that giving those memories to Cleo was a cheat code -- I would've liked to see Kyr win her over without that. (I don't mind Avi getting the memories after he demanded them, because I did enjoy his reaction, the need to talk it over with Kyr but also the need to tell her that he wouldn't necessarily choose differently given the chance.)
Kyr being back on Gaea and around Jole with two other universes' worth of memories was less effective for me than either the unreliable narrator stuff at the start or the conflict between Val and Kyr in the second universe. I think the stuff that happens in this part of the book is less interesting and/or felt less... organic? coherent? something to me. Going from "we've got to get off Gaea and warn Ursa" to "we've got to hijack the Victrix and save the good/innocent ones" to "we've got to save everyone who is willing to be saved" is... nice. I even buy it of Kyr, who seems to be a Hufflepuff Primary who's been indoctrinated into having a very narrow definition of "person", excluding not only aliens but also any humans who do not fully subscribe to the views of Gaea (traitors and collaborators), and once her view of who is a person starts expanding with Yiso, then can't just leave people behind. The stuff with Jole worked for me less well. I did like the temptation of just trusting him again, when he's giving her everything the old Kyr would have wanted, the temptation to believe his explanation about Ursa. The part where he kisses her and she finds herself unable to fight back -- I think that's making an important point, that even someone who is strong, someone who is trained can freeze up or be overwhelmed, but I had trouble believing that of Kyr specifically in those specific circumstances. But regardless of whether it was plausible or not, I didn't feel like it was doing anything interesting? It seems fairly random for Kyr, and it doesn't reveal anything new about Jole, so was one of those "put some of the battles back" moments for me. Whereas Lisabel using agoge techniques that Kyr made her drill to get free was quite cheesy, but at least felt thematically relevant to things that had gone before.
My biggest disappointment, I think is how jarringly antiseptic the ending is, relative to where the book started. It's not that I wanted to stick with the interplanetary slaughter of the first or second timeline, but, really, no casualties at all? Except for a Disney villain ending for Jole? Lin apparently survives her heroic sacrifice gambit, and, like, I liked Lin! I'm glad Lin is alive -- but it's hard to believe that nobody likable dies in this coup. Yiso survives and, despite supposedly not having access to the Wisdom anymore can carve out a temporary pocket in space for themself and Kyr, and then, the most deus ex machina rescue of all, the pleasure yacht which is the remnants of the Wisdom just jumps them aboard -- so a) they are saved and b) apparently even the Wisdom didn't fully sacrifice itself, just sort of... pruned itself into a tame and manageable size. (Which, this actually was foreshadowed, at least, with the very puzzling way Kyr escaped from Cleo the first time -- I thought I had missed something in the description, but apparently the reason this wasn't explaine dbetter is that this was foreshadowing for the deus ex machina, and I guess neither Kyr nor Yiso (who were probably not following things very well) or Avi (which is much more surprising) bothered to wonder what had happened?) Anyway, I suppose there is something to be said for a quiet, non-tragic ending to a book called Some Desperate Glory, but I suspect there was a satisfying quiet, non-tragic ending that could be found for this, and that wasn't it. Also, what is the deal between Kyr and Yiso? Is Kyr into them? That was the sense I got (which, whatever, just also not really necessary/too many battles IMO) from an earlier line and from the crest/hair touching scene at the end (which scene at the end Rebecca Roanhorse had an interesting critical point about).
And, OK, this niggle is not about the ending specifically, but kind of related. The Wisdom's agency and a little weird throughout, but I think the explanation is that up until the last reset, the Wisdom-as-omnipotent-AI is not deciding anything, but just executing according to the moral weighting -- and biases -- of the people controlling it. So Leru can use the Wisdom to destroy the Earth because they believe that, tragic as it is, that is the best outcome for the universe. And then Avi and Jole can use the Wisdom, once they take over it, to destroy the alien homeworlds, and the Wisdom is just executing the choice. But then at the third reset, the Wisdom itself chooses -- and it chooses to put Kyr back in the universe where Earth was destroyed. Which -- the Wisdom has now chosen the destruction of Earth, and Kyr doesn't seem to have a problem with that -- and the narrative doesn't seem to either. This is kind of an odd take! Are we really supposed to accept that humanity is so warlike that, really, unless they exist in the universe as "homeless" refugees, you cannot build a good outcome on that foundation? The Wisdom choosing this and self-annihilating I could sort of accept, but here we are at the end, with the yacht-sized remnants of the Wisdom -- which chose the universe in which Earth is destroyed -- and I guess we are cool with it?
I thought I would miss the lush descriptions of forest fuckery from Silver in the Wood, and it certainly doesn't have the same crunchy, grounded prose, but I still liked the writing -- Kyr's tendency to do things and then realize she was doing them and be surprised by them is not subtle but it worked for me, and the propaganda speeches are really, really good, properly stirring and glorious, and there's the occasional very descriptive phrase like "the bright bleak awe of watching the dreadnought come alive" and "the jury-rigged defiance of Gaea"
Totally random bit: when I was reading the description of Kyr visiting Avi's simulation he made for Mags and was squinting at the description like, "Is this meant to be Minas Tirith? It sounds a lot like Minas Tirith..." -- and then the Acknowledgements confirmed that it was! (Also, it took me until writing this bit to go from "aww, that means Avi read LotR and was struck by Gondor was I was" to "Avi would 100% try to take the One Ring and use it to defend Gondor -- no wonder I imprinted on him like I did" XD I am just so incredibly consistent in my faves, it's kind of funny.
And a note on the title -- Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum est" is a poem I've liked a lot ever since first reading it in high school, and it's a really good source for the title of this book -- the more complete line is "To children ardent for some desperate glory", and that is a GREAT choice of title for this book specifically.
Quotes:
“Why didn’t they shoot you anyway?” “Probably because I’m a genius,” Avi said.
"Unfortunately then Yiso woke up again and turned out to be chatty, so Kyr hated him after all. Not the way you were supposed to hate majo, with the cold implacable fury of the living hand of vengeance. She hated him roughly the same way she hated doing Nursery rotations, supervising six-year-olds who just never stopped talking."
"All it would cost her was her war. All it would cost was the memory of the dead, and the service she’d been born for, and the knowledge that out in deep space, clinging to a cold rock orbiting an unfriendly star, the last soldiers of humanity were still refusing to surrender, and Kyr was not among them. [...] Her family was her station. Her family was her cause. Her family was fourteen billion dead, and her mother was a murdered world."
"Kyr would have to say something when she went home. Oh, she remembered. She would never go home. She was Strike now. She was the hidden blade of humanity’s lasting defiance"
Avi: “And that’ll be it, Valkyr. For whatever you were planning here, which I’m guessing was random and fairly stupid, and for what I was planning, which was brilliant."
"Medical had never taught them about aliens. Drill had, but only in reverse: how to hurt them, how to kill them."
Leru to Kyr: “We were once-I imagine you don’t know this-a crepuscular species. Sound is the great betrayer in the twilight. I am exquisitely well adapted to identify the noise of a large predator moving through the bushes."
Leru: "I would like you to know that I am not, in any way, humanity’s enemy.”
“You killed our world!” “A tragic, unavoidable sacrifice.” “Fourteen billion people,” said Kyr.
“Yes,” said Leru. “Set against the interests of trillions. I doubt that will sway you. Most humans are quite bad with numbers. And in any case I do understand that one must take some things personally."
"Kyr had never even thought of kissing Lisabel. She did not know how she had managed not to think of it."
Avi: "You aren’t going to think of something better, because if there was something better I would have spotted it first.”
"When she tried to sleep everything that could go wrong laid itself out on the backs of her eyelids like the feeds from a combat mask."
Avi: “Wow, you look ready to burn the world down. Did someone break a minor regulation somewhere? Or did you just not do enough chin-ups to tire yourself out properly today?”
"Kyr felt suddenly and forcefully the weight of legacy. She wasn’t Earth’s child. She was Elora Marston’s, and Yingli Lin’s, and Ursa’s, and she owed her duty not to some abstract unknown planet but to the women who’d come before her."
The Wisdom yacht: "I intend to experiment with unseriousness. I am finally of a size appropriate for levity."
Anyway, so, I really enjoyed that, as you can probably tell from the length of this review, and also I enjoyed it in a way that makes me want to talk about it. If you also have read the ARC, talk to me! (or talk to me later, once the book is released :)
*
Taskmaster Australia, ep 5 -- this was a really good one! and, wait what, spoilers! Julia is in the lead now? XD (the scores that someone posted on Reddit are Julia on 81, Jimmy on 78, and Danielle on 77 -- having slipped to third, from the lead, after the roses performance and popcorn disqualification. Nina is on 62 and Luke is on 60, which is an interesting 3+2 formation in terms of breakdown of scores.
Prize tasks -- OK, this is a fun prize task, but half of these people don't seem to know what "pretentious" means XD I do feel like Julia at least tried for a spin, although I don't buy it, but I don't know what Luke's problem with prize tasks is. Danielle's prayer candle wasn't pretentious either, I think. Jimmy's (vinyl records when he doesn't own a record player) was great and totally deserved the win, and I also liked Nina's art talk about the gay door art installation.
Popcorn fort -- I'm pretty sure Alex would have eaten Julia's and Luke's popcorn; Lesser Tom is a wimp/a sensible person. I'm very amused that Jimmy's totally penetrable fort that deterred Tom for all of 13 seconds, still ended up being the second (third) best showing, because Danielle broke at least one rule (I don't really agree that the net was an "attack"), and Nina broke the rules and then missed a kernel of popcorn anyway so Tom could eat popcorn in 14 seconds. TM!Tom's scoring is mad in this taskk; I could certainly understand giving him third place rather than second given that you could argue that Julia and Luke tying for first place used up first and second places, but how does one justify giving Jimmy two points? This is not a subjective task, he should've gotten 3 points (if not 4)!
Roses password task -- wow, this was pretty hopeless all around XD I'm amused by how many people figured out or thought they may have figured out the alphabet thing, and then still completely failed to get the password in the next 26 tries. OMG, poor Danielle -- she had started looking so competent, back in the first episode. Danielle crying in the VT and in the studio again, and Tom apparently weeping with laughter in the VT. And TM!Tom trolling her by claiming she dropped a rose. Other highlights: "Have you accepted Jesus, Tom?" (Julia), Jimmy having, as TM!Tom justly pointed out, a tantrum. And I'm glad Nina got to win one; she'd been having some rough episodes otherwise.
Team task with the giraffe -- they may not be very functional, but the Bad Improv Troupe (Nina: "Yes, and-- that's really mean") team are both entertaining and adorable, skipping along holding hands, putting the giraffe on a bike (that did look cool than just carrying it under a sheet), Nina's feminist commentary, and just their overall vibe.
Team live task to spell out TASKMASTER one letter at a time -- I do think the team of three had a disadvantage on having an extra person to use up, but at least the only difference was 1 pt vs 2 pts. (There was a discussion on Reddit about whether having a team of 3 is an advantage or the reverse, which included the following exchange: "I feel like this is the only season of Taskmaster I've seen across UK, NZ and Oz, when being in a team of three is a disadvantage." "The John Kearns team." "They weren't disadvantaged because they were in a team of 3, they were disadvantaged because one of the three was John Kearns." Which makes me consider that it would be awesome to see the UK series 14 lineup perform this task.
TM!Tom was quite funny this episode, and in general has grown on me since the first one, when I found him better than Jeremy but still nothing to write home about. He doesn't have Greg's range, I think, and is not as funny as Greg, but for sure a positive contribution to my enjoyment of the show, which Jeremy I don't think has ever managed.
In other Taskmaster news, YouTube helpfully threw this short Alex Horne interview my way, which was fun, and also features the answer to the question "How many times did Rhod Gilbert take off your pants?" -- twice that made the show ("quick change" and water feature tasks), and a couple of times that they couldn't show on television, so Alex is going with 4-5 times XD
In other Taskmaster-adjacent things, I also watched the National Comedy Awards (Stand up to Cancer), which was interesting now that I know quite a few of these people, mostly from Taskmaster, but a few (like Tom Allen, who was hosting) from some other things, like WILTY, too. with spoilers for winners
I was enjoying Tom Allen's opening poetic monologue, which I was admiring for rhyming stadium/Palladium/"a pub with one single lady in", and then it turned out it had been written by Munya Chawawa. (Probably some other rhymes which I was kind of wonering about would've worked better in Munya's own rendition.)
Female Performer -- I enjoyed seeing the clips from Fern Brady, Sarah Millican, Judi Love from Taskmaster, and Sandi Toksvig on QI. Katherine Ryan won, which was not who I was rooting for, but I did like her on Taskmaster, too, back in the day. It was neat to know everyone nominated.
Podcast -- nominees were Chris Ramsey and wife's podcast; Off Menu; a Rob Beckett and Josh Widdicombe thing, and a fourth one I didn't recognize anyone from, but Chris and Rosie's podcast won, so there was a cute Chris and Judi TM s13 reunion, which I approve of.
Male Performer -- wow, I would not have recognized Lolly with her hair down and in that pantsuit (co-presenting with Bill Bailey). Alex and Greg both nominated along with Munya, Lee Mack with a WILTY clip, and Joe Lycett. I like all five of them, but was rooting for Munya -- but Lee (the winner) is really funny too and I was amused by his speech.
Comedy Actress -- I recognize Rose Matafeo and Daisy Mae Cooper but have only seen Charlotte Ritchie in Ghosts, and don't know anything about the winner. Still, yay Ghosts and yay people I know from Taskmaster.
Joe Lycett won the special Comedy Game Changer award, and dedicated his award to the Channel 4 lawyers, lol.
Best Comedy Entertainment Show -- Taskmaster represented by the series 14 live team task "which aircraft... crashes more... into mountains" with Dara having apoplexy on stage, excellent choice; Chris and Rosie Ramsey show; Bob Mortimer show, and the Graham Norton Show. Taskmaster won, which I already knew because there had been an Alex and Greg clip on the TM channel that I had seen. But it was fun to watch the acceptance speech from Alex, thanking "the elephant that isn't in the room" and then managing to make his acceptance speech 85% about Greg XD
Rhod Gilbert's first TV appearance after being diagnosed with cancer (stage 4 head and neck cancer :((( ). He looks pretty good, considering, and sounds really good.
Male Actor (presented by Katherine Ryan and Munya Chawawa; what is that jacket he is wearing XD) -- Kiell (Mike on Ghosts) was the only one I knew (well, I also know Ricky Gervais, but I haven't watched him in anything).
Panel show -- presented by "Thomas" and "Pat" from Ghosts: Mock the Week, WILTY (represented by David having a breakdown about Bob Mortimer, good call), QI, 8oo10C. I think I've actually enjoyed my glimpses of 8oo10C the least of what I've seen, so I'm quite meh on it winning vs ones I actually like, but I like Jon Richardson and I enjoyed hearing from him in the acceptance speech.
I didn't know the breakout star winners or the person honored with the special Impact in Comedy award, but those seemed like lovely presentations, too.
Best Stand Up Show via live voting -- presented by Hugh Dennis, who is looking/sounding quite a bit older than series 4 of Taskmaster (wonder if he can still do all those gymnastics moves tho XD) And a little series 4 reunion there when Joe Lycett won! ("Desky's given me an award!")
Best Supporting Role -- aww, Lolly as Kitty is nominated! I didn't know any of the others, but it was lovely to see the clip from Ghosts. And another one when Ghosts was nominated for Best Scripted Comedy (and also didn't win).
So, yeah, I don't know how I have become, in the last year, a person who watches comedy award shows, but here we are, and it was a good time.
**
Back to Person of Interest: SPOILERS!
3x11-12 ("Lethe/Alethia"), a lot going on here. Treating both episodes together since "Lethe" ends on a cliffhanger.
First, the Finch backstory -- both in actual flashbacks and as revealed by Arthur his MIT friend adrift in time. Young Finch taking apart a tractor and asking about birds was a bit on the nose, but I enjoyed the older Finch, fighting his own unwinnable battle with entropy for his father's independence in the face of dementia (or whatever), delaying college because he can learn anywhere. And present-day Finch hot-wiring a car with a very nerdy "Engines are go" and "You're right, Arthur, just like college" (I liked Arthur; he played both lucid and befuddled well, and lucid pretending to be befuddled. I'm not sure that pairing Finch's backstory with his father's deterioration with Arthur's brain tumor was the best call/necessary -- it feels a bit on the nose. I do think it helps explain why Harold is as good iwth Arthur as he is, why he is so gentle with him and just sort of rolling with his time displacement, but also never talks down or discounts him -- but I think it would have worked better if we'd gotten the backstory in a previous episode already. But I did really like seeing Finch and Arthur together.
Reese and Fusco in Colorado -- the conversation in the jail cell, Reese talking about "entropy, decay" while Fusco is advocating to keep fighting -- made me think of the "high hope mindset" that I learned about in work training recently. Part of that was a segment on "the death of hope", that at first there's anger (blocked path to goal), and then there's despair (all paths are blocked, and the goal appears unreachable), and the final stage is apathy (when the person no longer has a goal). I feel like Reese, when we find him at the beginning, is inhabiting despair, having passed through anger and found that vending his anger did not bring him any peace. And Finch pulls him out of despair by giving him a new goal, which is what you do with people in that stage, according to the work coach person. (Shaw, when she walks onto the stage, is in the anger phase, I think, although anger of course looks pretty different on her. And Finch -- I'm not sure he ever loses hope, even after Nathan's death -- I don't think he is ever lost, he seems to be punishing himself, and regrouping, but I feel like all his actions are very deliberate and, like, weirdly rational even when they don't make sense -- predicated on flawed assumptions but still logical. Anyway, it's interesting to think about.) But Carter's death sends him right back to despair and past that -- to apathy, which I don't think we've ever seen on John before. But Finch being in danger snaps him out of it -- keeping Finch safe is still a goal he can't ignore, even if it's pointless on the grand scale. He says it's because the world can't afford to lose Finch, but I don't think it's as grand and altruistic as that, whatever he may think he believes. I was surprised, like Finch, that he just plans to leave right after, though.
Finch agrees with Shaw that she is "a hammer" but compares Reese to a scalpel, with more finesse, which, he has not been very scalpel-y since Carter died, but OK, in general I suppose I agree. Shaw's "it's hammer time" (when proposing to build a pipe bomb so they can escape through the sewer when the vault is blasted open by Vigilance) was a great callback, though.
I find the identity of Control interesting -- that the scary person in charge is a heavyset middle-aged woman who has to put on glasses to see detail -- and the torture of Root is set up interestingly, too: the on-screen actions are nothing too violent, just a couple of shots, a very small surgery, but the setup manages to be quite menacing. Root's deranged "I am the interface" is a great line! Root sacrificing her ear so she can steal Control's knife and overpower her was also a great bit, and Root speaking for the Machine was really cool. And the Machine's gift to Arthur was lovely; I suppose he is her (oh deal, Root's got me doing it too XD) uncle, in a way, to Nathan's father and Finch's mother.
I find Hersh boring, though, and I find Vigilance and their whole deal also boring (even though Collier is interesting to watch; I didn't recognize him at first, but that's Leslie Odom Jr, who is familiar on account of Hamilton even though I've never seen any version of Hamilton, just clips). When Finch led Arthur away from the doors, preparing for the blast, I was wondering if they were just going to leave the bank lady behind (Reese would not have, if he could help it), but apparently bank lady was a plot point, swapping the drives, and Samaritan actually survived.
3x13 ("4C") -- aka, the one where Reese and Finch make up at a sidewalk cafe in Rome XD Finch landing the plane by remote control was not a scene I expected to see, but if that's what it takes for Reese to get over his sulk, I'm fine with that. In general, this felt like kind of a weird episode, and I was not surprised to see that one of the writer duo was the writer from "Reasonable Doubt", which I hadn't liked at all and though the characterization was off in. Here, too, the plane stuff feels fairly generic... John, dealing with the first class people, is pettier than he usually is, although he's not on the job and is sulking, so I don't think that's implausible. It's just kind of... broader strokes than this show usually is, I feel.
Case in point is Reese telling off Owen while Finch is on the line, listening: "You computer guys, you build something you can't control, and when it backfires, you won't accept responsibility. [...] Have you really made anything better? Does it look like you've stopped the violence?" I like the idea of argument by proxy, actually. And I find it plausible that, in the actual argument he is having with Finch, Reese does not accept that taking down HR is worth Carter's death ("have you really made anything better"), even if Carter herself would feel that way. But I find it hard to buy that he would a) throw a tantrum and walk off, and b) that the events of this episode would bring him back around if he had. What actually changed? Is it just the realization that the Machine put him on the plane to save 130 people that would be dead if he hadn't been there? (except maybe it wouldn't have come to that if Reese hadn't interfered to save Owen from the first hitman, or the ex-Mossad couple) But, like, that's not news to him surely, that this is what the Machine does. And then Finch's speech at the cafe is a nice speech, and very Finch-y, but I don't feel like it addresses the things actually bothering Reese, except that Finch says, "yes, it's ineffable because I tried to make it ineffable" -- but I certainly don't feel like that's what convinced Reese to come back; he must've made up his mind before he sat down next fo Finch. So what was it really -- did he just need to get laid a nice date in Rome with the flight attendant?
On a random note, I pegged "the newlyweds as Israelis, or at least spekaing Hebrew (subtitles just have "foreign language"), before the show identified them as ex-Mossad, and thought it was neat that that's who they were because I knew that the Israeli mafia was heavily involved in the Ecstasy trade (I learned this from a book I won at a murder mystery dinner thing XD)
Oh, and I guess the title is a pun for "foresee", which I did not get until I read about it in Wikipedia. It is not a very good pun.
3x14 ("Provenance") -- ahaha, so this is where the "oh my, he's gorgeous" clip comes from that's in all the Finch/Reese vids, with Finch's little "I know, right?" eyebrow thing XD Which, Reese does fill out that new Italian suit nicely, even if he's not as good at tying a bow-tie as at stripping a gun upsidedown in the dark. Shaw also cleans up nicely. As for the case itself, hm. I mean, they clearly wanted to do a heist episode, but the explanation for why stretched my suspension of disbelief pretty thin, and for stretches at a time nobody but Fusco had any interesting dialogue. But OK, Finch got to play with a 3D printer, and I enjoyed the Interpol guy's French accent. "I always thought you deserved the gold" definitely surprised me, but I guess Kelly had to get a happy ending after all that. Probably my favorite part was the bit at the end where Fusco has clearly gotten a taste for heists and Finch is wearing a wistful smile contemplating stealing diamonds (I would totally read a diamond-thief!Finch AU).
3x15 ("Last Call") -- wow, two completely non-arc episodes in a row all of a sudden. I liked Sandra the 911 operator and the sad backstory with her babysitting charge who drowned. Nice to see Finch directly involved in a case (and threatening to electrocute a guy), and nice to see Reese and Shaw kicking ass together as a team. The mastermind behind the whole thing is intriguing; I think they're laying on the "evil Finch" comparisons too thick, but I do want to see how this develops.
3x16 ("RAM") -- ooh, another flashback episode! Wow, Dillinger is a dick, and I'm not surprised Finch was as paranoid about trusting John after that as he was. Seeing Reese in CIA mode was pretty chilling, and Kara continues to be a piece of work. That's interesting that Reese let Casey go on his own judgement, but I guess he was getting close to being ready to walk away even before Ordos. I liked Casey and the nerd bonding with Finch, and I'm glad he survived. And I've missed Root the last couple of episodes -- nice to have her back, even if it was just for a bit at the end!
This seems as good a place as any to talk about Sorting Hat Chats: back in 2020, I was talking about my sortings for Reese and Finch with sunlit_stone, who got me into watching this show. With an additional season and a half behind me, I have some more thoughts on this.
I had originally thought of Finch as a Hufflepuff primary, but sunlit_stone convinced me that he was a (burned) Ravenclaw Primary instead. I am now convinced of it firmer than ever, having watched the flashback with Nathan and the ferry at the end of season 2. Because Finch does not start out wanting to save the irrelevant numbers -- he believes thy are indeed irrelevant, and the thing that convinces him otherwise is Nathan's death: it's not a fundamental belief in the sanctity of human life, it's an empirically established truth that just because the numbers are irrelevant to national security doesn't mean the people are unimportant. And he incorporates this new truth into his worldview and embraces the truth Nathan was pursuing, and off he goes, this is now his whole life. The thing he was repeating in flashbacks, too, "if they didn't want me to get in, they should've built it better" also feels pretty Ravenclaw to me. So, yeah, OK, Finch is conclusively settled as a double Ravenclaw. (Finch having to land a jumbo jet, outside of his area of expertise, freaking out quietly and grasping at things he knows how to do and talking imself thorugh it, while getting the job done near-impeccably, is such a Ravenclaw Secondary thing, it's adorable. ♥ Finch)
We were also debating Reese's Primary -- which is clearly burned at the start, but what was it before it burned? I was positing Slytherin (with himself excluded from the circle from some point onward) but willing to be convinced otherwise at the time. Well, now I'm settled on this too: DEFINITELY Slytherin, because of the way Carter's death affects him. Because the mission has not changed: the Machine still allowed them to put away Quinn and dismantle HR, but that doesn't matter to John anymore, not when he lost a person he cared about, a person inside his very small circle. The "Carter wouldn't want you to pull the trigger" speech would've worked on a Gryffindor Primary, but it doesn't work on Reese. Fusco's appeal in the jail cell, that there are still innocent people to save, still good to be done, would've worked on a Hufflepuff Primary, I think, but John ignores it: because he is willing to be used as a tool for Finch's Hufflepuff model ideas, but that is not his own driving factor. The only thing that drives him to action in this state is danger to another person he cares about (Fusco saying he hasn't heard from Finch in a while, which is not like him) -- that is very Slytherin, I think.
I hadn't yet met Shaw and Root when I was sorting the POI characters last time. Root is definitely a Slytherin Secondary -- that's a large part of the fun of her character, how she will readily do ANYTHING to advance her ends -- play a role, shoot a bunch of people, kidnap and torture pretty much anyone, endure torture and mutilation, sit meekly in her cell, talk philosophy at Finch -- it really feels like all tools and approaches are morally equivalent to her and she just uses whichever is going to be most effective. I feel like even her line about how if she were a psychopath the things she's had to do would've been easier is a very Slytherin Secondary kind of sentiment -- she knows some of the things she's done are evil, but they were the most effective things to do, so they are the ones she went with, even if she didn't enjoy doing them. And I don't think I would've been able to name Root's Primary before this season, but I think the way she takes the Machine and makes it her whole morality is a very Ravenclaw Primary thing -- she seems so ecstatic to be given this constructed morality, when the Machine starts directing her. I'm going to guess that younger Root tried on various truths and found counterexamples or places they didn't work and rejected them one by one -- so it really feels like a gift to be handed one she can believe in again. So, yeah, Ravenclaw Primary/Slytherin Secondary for Root, and I feel like she's been the easiest person to sort on this show full of quite complicated and damaged people.
Shaw is definitely a Gryffindor Secondary (hammer time indeed XD), but I am kind of stumped as to her Primary. Her emotions are really muted, and she doesn't seem interested in introspection, which makes it harder to tell what her motivations are for anything. She doesn't seem to be a Hufflepuff in that I don't think she registers people as people, and that was one of the reasons she didn't make a good doctor. Ravenclaw Primaries are really hard for me, but I'm going to assume she isn't one because if she were, I would assume she would interact differently with the Ravenclaw Primaries of Finch and Root. She just doesn't seem philosophically inclined enough anyway. So, is she a Gryffindor Primary with a peculiar moral compass or is she a Slytherin Primary with a very small inner circle? So far, I've come across two instances of Shaw getting moved to take, hm, action that would require a lot of activation energy on her own initiative -- going after Gen the Russian girl when she should've checked herself into a hospital, and going rogue after her partner Mike Cole is killed. And I could see those as either Slythering Primary motivated -- she cared about her partner, she comes to care about Gen, in her own non-demonstrative way -- but also a Gryffindor Primary way -- those things could've tripped over an idiosyncratic personal code. I'm leaning Slytherin in terms of interpreting her motivations, but on the other hand, I do think Reese is Slyth Primary/Gryff Secondary, and it would be boring to have another character who was also that... (although while Reese embraces Finch's Hufflepuff model, Shaw doesn't seem to, which is still a difference.) And I could see Shaw as a double Gryffindor -- they are not necessarily nice people, and their intrinsic moral codes are not necessarily nice, either.
I had met Carter and Fusco when I was trying to sort these guys last, but hadn't tried to sort them. Well, no time like the present to sort Carter, who got quite a bit more interesting to me since then. For example, I would not have guessed that her secondary was Slytherin, but I'm pretty sure it is -- she holds on to her Gryffindor and/or Hufflepuff models of the forthright, hard-working cop as long as she can, but when corruption makes it impossible to get anything done that way, off she goes, snatching away Elias and making deals with him (always on her own moral terms), hijacking a truck full of drugs, blackmailing Laskey. Primary -- I see Gryffindor or Hufflepuff for her, and I think Gryffindor more than Huff because I do feel like she dismissed Laskey before he gave her a reason to suspect him, which strikes me as a Gryff judgementalness (a Hufflepuff would give more of a benefit of the doubt). Also I like the idea of Carter being Gryff Primary/Slyth Secondary to complement Reese, who is the reverse. Fusco, I think, is another Gryffindor Secondary -- the way he mouths off in a tough situation is I think a Gryff trait, because it's a kind of attack even when he has nothing to actually attack with. At first I was thinking a burned primary for Fusco at the start, which heals under Carter's role-modeling of hers, but actually, I'm now thinking maybe a Ravenclaw Primary for him? Because he never fully breaks -- he's in a bad way, but not fully lost when the show starts -- and I feel like Ravenclaw primaries are the most resilient, undergoing change without totally falling apart. So I think Fusco starts out with a Gryffindor Primary model, trying to be a good cop, but his corrupt buddies pull him in and convince him of a different truth -- they're brothers, they help each other, and then that it's pointless to oppose HR. But Carter and Team Machine show him yet another truth, and he comes over to that side. So, yeah, I'm liking Ravenclaw Primary/Gryffindor Secondary for Fusco (which makes half of this bunch Ravenclaw Primaries, but that doesn't feel wrong).