Book Recommendations Terry Pratchett Book Club

Terry Pratchett Book Club: Unseen Academicals, Part II

May your sherry whisper wonderful things to you, too

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Published on April 12, 2024

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Who’s up for practice? Who wants Rincewind on their team? (Me, I do.)

Summary

Glenda and Juliet head back to the university to give themselves an alibi for not being at the match. Ottimony comes in to tell them all about it after leading the wizards there, and he swears that Juliet looks like the girl at the match. Glenda is summoned to the Stollops because Juliet’s dad got a letter from Vetinari, asking him to attend a dinner with the wizards to talk about the future of football. Trev finds Nutt asleep at the university, having eaten a large quotient of Glenda’s pies. He tells Glenda and Juliet what happened, and when Nutt comes to, he start up his work again. But he says a few things about how Trev really feels about his late father that sends Trev catatonic. Glenda asks Nutt how he knows all these things, how he managed not to die, and where he comes from. Nutt isn’t entirely sure; he only knows how he came to be in Ladyship’s castle and that there’s a door in his mind that he can’t access. Nutt thinks about writing love poetry for Trev to give Juliet, and Juliet bothers Glenda the next day about going to a fashion show, which has an ad in the paper next to an article about the origins of football going back a millennia. Glenda agrees to the show, but only after she gets a chance to listen in on the University Council meeting.

The wizards are putting together thoughts for what they need as a team, including the pies, the uniforms, and the fans. Glenda is bemused by the whole conversation and accidentally interjects herself, letting them know that they’ve got it largely wrong—they won’t be able to change much about how football functions, and they won’t be able to dictate how people enjoy it. She also tells them not to make their uniforms sport a UU across the front, or it’ll make the team look like they have bosoms. Ridcully asks what she does, and they all learn that she runs the Night Kitchen and makes the incredible pies they’re all so fond of. After she leaves, Ponder notes that Glenda’s talk of football invoked memories in the group, whether or not they had them; it was a kind of religious experience. Glenda goes with Juliet to a dwarf chainmail fashion show run by Madame Sharon, who has her assistant Pepe measure Juliet and asks them to help her because her model dropped a pickaxe on her foot. Glenda negotiates a hefty sum for Juliet to model the new cloth-like micromail. The wizards begin their first practice round of football, which they don’t rightly understand.

Glenda sees Juliet through her first fashion show. She’s very drunk and stumbles into the next room after it’s over, having a talking with Pepe, who turns out to have converted to being a dwarf with Madame Sharon’s help. They want Juliet to keep working for them, planning to pay her lots of money travel her around the Disc. They know Glenda is the key to her cooperation, so they ask her to consider it, and Glenda decides they’re going home for the night first. Despite the fact that Ridcully promised never to use it for these sorts of purposes, he demands that Ponder let them in to the Cabinet of Curiosity so that it can make them a proper football—because they don’t have one. They can only keep the ball outside the cabinet for about fourteen hours before causing trouble, so Ridcully stops Trev and Nutt in the hall and asks them if they know where to have the ball replicated. He gives them money for the job and they set off. Glenda tells Juliet that they’ll open up a bank account for her so that her father can’t get at her money. Trev and Nutt run into Andy again, and when he threatens Trev, Nutt threatens to break his hand. They make it to a dwarf shop, and ask him to replicate the ball in exchange for money and a university license to make more of them.

Juliet decides she agrees with Glenda about staying in her job at the university, which makes Glenda feel wretched; the next day her picture is in the paper. Trev goes to pee out back while Nutt and the dwarf artisan are working and sees two vampire women outside, which Butt later tells him are protection for Ladyship. Nutt delivers the love poem he wrote for Trev to Glenda, so she can give it to Juliet. Glenda reads the letter for Juliet and knows that Trev didn’t write it, but doesn’t tell her. Pepe wakes to Times reporters in their store and everyone asking about Juliet. King Rhys has the paper sent via clacks, and the grags are in a tizzy about Juliet’s appearance, deeming it undwarfish. Ponder returns the Cabinet’s ball to the Cabinet and they begin creating teams again. (Rincewind tries to get out of this to no avail.) The (former) Dean has arrived at the university, but the game is interrupted by Nutt, who means to tell Ridcully that they’re playing the game all wrong, and more strategy is needed and, indeed, more theater. Trev comes to Nutt’s defense to make sure no one gets upset with him for speaking out of turn, but Ridcully is amenable to the idea. Glenda sells a lot more for Stronginthearm and gives him ideas for whole new troll fashion lines.

Commentary

There are several overlays going on with the Juliet and Trev story, one of them obviously being the Romeo and Juliet angle that you get from her name and the “two houses” being their two football teams. This is mostly funny to me because I saw some Tumblr post just a few days ago that was pointing out that the Montagues and Capulets being “both alike in dignity” as houses did not preclude any level of poshness—they just needed to be the same. Hence, footballer families.

But the more intriguing slice here is the Cyrano parody, at least to me. Nutt is effectively playing the Cyrano part, writing letters on Trev’s behalf, who’s in the Christian role. But the intention isn’t to make a direct parallel, of course, because Nutt clearly isn’t interested in Juliet—he likes Glenda. And I appreciate the lack of conflict, but moreso, I find myself appreciating the fact that someone who’s as bright as Nutt isn’t really interested in someone who’s pretty if they’re not particularly thoughtful? Juliet’s not his type, so no issue there.

And conversely, Juliet’s route to becoming a fashion model for micromail is endearing too, namely due to Glenda learning some things for herself about snuffing out the desire to dream a little bigger. Do I like that it’s helped along by too much sherry? Yes, I do. I wish sherry talked to me like that. Tequila does, though, so I can’t complain too much.

We’re getting more clues on Nutt’s true identity as we go, but I do appreciate that the mystery is drawn out and viewed from multiple character perspectives, making it that much harder to guess point blank.

The bits where the wizards are practicing football are favorites for me because it reads like it’s written by someone who feels exactly the same way about sports that I do. There’s no sense, no real interest in the game itself, nor any inclination toward athleticism (aside from Ridcully’s own personal interest and physical prowess). The only time things make sense is when everyone is thinking about how exciting the game should be, how to generate narrative around it, how to make it a spectacle. I get that part. The rest is just window dressing.

Asides and little thoughts

• Of Vetinari being the wrong sort for Juliet despite being the only available “prince” around, Glenda thinks: Besides, no one was sure which side of the bed he got out of, or even if he went to bed at all. Meaning: We’re honestly not sure if the man is gay, straight, or ace.
• “By his own admission, he would rather run ten miles, leap a five-bar gate and climb a big hill than engage in any athletic activity.” Me too, Ponder.
• Ridcully’s entire response to the concept of possible gayness—that could really just be some wizard having an affair with a married woman and he’s not getting it—being that there’s not enough love in the world and also “Well done, that man!” (which is, itself, actually in response to people playing football and grabbing his attention) is pretty perfect, all things considered.

Pratchettisms

Next week we’ll read up to:

[end-mark]

The post Terry Pratchett Book Club: <i>Unseen Academicals</i>, Part II appeared first on Reactor.

Book Recommendations Terry Pratchett Book Club

Terry Pratchett Book Club: Unseen Academicals, Part I

Archchancellor Preserved Bigger is a helluva name, really

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Published on April 5, 2024

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I regret to inform you that I know zero football chants. This will not be my finest hour.

Summary

Smeems, the Candle Knave of Unseen University, is doing his rounds in the middle of the night with Mr. Nutt, who is acting apprentice. They keep the candles lit all about the place, including the Emperor candle, which is never supposed to go out. (It does, frequently, but Smeems doesn’t discuss it.) Nutt is an unaccountably bright young man, who hopes to see more of the university as time goes on. The faculty finishing their Hunting of the Megapode, which Ponder signs into the record as their new Master of The Traditions. (Rincewind dressed up as the Megapode, and has to go for a lie down afterward.) Ponder has received this new position upon the revelation that no one has held the post for over two centuries. He takes it in part to help keep the staff’s mind off the fact that the Dean has just retired, a thing that wizards generally never do—and to teach at another university for money, no less. Ponder finds an important tradition that the university has ignored the past twenty years; they must play a football match or lose a very important bequeathal to the school from former Archchancellor Preserved Bigger. Downstairs, Glenda scolds her gorgeous friend Juliet for not showing up to work on time on account of watching football.

Turns out Nutt is a goblin, which is a group that endures a ton of prejudice thanks to a long-ago war that no one remembers very well. He does his best not to upset anyone as a candle dribbler, and does most of Trev’s work for him. Trevor Likely has also been watching football (on the opposite side to Juliet), and he takes Nutt up to the kitchens to get them some food from Glenda. Meanwhile, Ponder does some calculations and learns that they could get by without Bigger’s trust if they significantly cut down on food expenses. The wizards are horrified, and Ridcully uses that to get them on board with the football game (which they don’t have to win, but he’d like to). Trev tells Nutt he’s going to take him to the next football match and asks him to find out Juliet’s name from Glenda. Meanwhile, Juliet asks Glenda about Trev, while Glenda suggests that she could get a better gentleman if she tried to speak a little more posh. Nutt used to live in Uberwald in “Ladyship’s” castle, where he learned and read all the time and tried every discipline. He’s a bit bored at the university, but he’s safe there at the moment. Ridcully goes to see Vetinari, who already knows of their predicament and has already made plans to formalize football within the city, insisting that the wizards be a part to it.

It also turns out that Vetinari is aware of Nutt’s placement at the university (and is having him looked after there as a favor to Lady Margolotta). Ridcully asks a boy on the street where the next match will be so that he can observe it. Nutt asks Glenda for Juliet’s name, which Glenda gives knowing full well that Trev is the one who asked for it. She gives him Juliet’s last name too—Stollop, which is bound to cause more trouble for reasons Nutt doesn’t understand. Trev gets Nutt dressed in Dimmers football colors and is, in fact, upset to find out that Juliet is a Stollop because his dad was Dave Likely, a famous footballer who got more goals than anyone in a lifetime. They head to the match and Trev tries to teach Nutt to be more like one of the lads. The wizards are heading to their first match and Ridcully has asked they be accompanied by university bledlows, which makes the group nervous. On her half-day off, Glenda usually goes and sells wares to lady trolls for Mr. Stronginthearm, but she runs into Juliet again. The Librarian always goes to the football matches, and is bemused to find Nutt and his fellow wizards attending this time around. The wizards try to figure out where to stand and observe, while Trev introduces Nutt to Andy, whose dad is captain of Dimwell, and the rest of his friends.

Nutt is learning about being in the crowd of a game, and finds he’s very good and shoving his way through it. He spots Glenda, who has come with Juliet. As Trev is trying to talk to Juliet, she presses a Dollies team pin into his hand, which he hides on his person. Nutt catches an incoming ball, and asks what should be done with it—Glenda points toward the goal. Nutt makes the goal from a great distance, easily, and breaks the goal post. Trev knows this is going to get the crowd angry, so he drags them all away as fast as he can. While Trev is trying to find out about Nutt’s childhood and get help writing a love poem, Juliet’s brothers show up, and then Andy too. Trev tries to stop them from fighting, but Nutt makes a blithe comment, and Algernon Stollop hits him with a club, killing him instantly. The group dispatches, and Trev brings Nutt to Constables Haddock and Bluejohn, begging them to take Nutt to the Lady Sybil hospital. Angua questions Trev because if an Igor needs to revive you, Vetinari has decreed it was still murder. Doctor Lawn arrives to let them know that Nutt was apparently sleeping; he sat up in the hospital, asked for a sandwich, and left. On his way out, Trev is stopped by an Igor who tells him that he thinks Nutt is dangerous.

Commentary

As is sometimes the case in Pratchett narratives, the main arc of the plot is hardly a dour thing at all—the wizards aren’t going to starve regardless, and football’s induction into the larger societal fabric is hardly the most important political change the city has undergone in recent memory.

However, here we learn that Moist von Lipwig is far from the only person Vetinari is keen on giving their one shining chance to. Though, I suppose to a certain extent, we have always know this: Vimes was the first experiment the reader is exposed to on that front, and there have been many others. Vetinari’s entire schema is built upon it, and while it does nothing to eradicate poverty, war, or general suffering, it is true that on the Disc, if you are lucky enough to possess strange talents in need of nurturing, and happen to cross his path, Havelock Vetinari will do everything in his power to give you that one chance (and arguably many—Moist definitely gets more than one, no matter what he thinks) you need to reach your fullest potential.

It’s an imperfect system, but it does permit for a kinder than average world in certain respects. And, pointedly, if you squander the chance by using your own unique gifts to harm others, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork has no compunction about ending your journey, removing you from the body like a limb with gangrene. For an erstwhile assassin, he’s very particular about how death is employed, but has no difficulty being dispassionate about it.

This is how we wind up plunged into the story of Mr. Nutt, whose species has been basically unknown to us in some three dozen Discworld books so far. (We get out first real hint with Igor feeling the need to warn Trev about him.) There’s a deep Pygmalion-esque vein to this side of the story—even if the My Fair Lady reference goes to Juliet instead—though this is calling to mind my own favorite version, being the musical Bat Boy. Nutt is far closer to Edgar’s tale than he is to Eliza Dolittle.

Trev’s turnaround is one of the main factors that makes this book work, in my opinion. An entire novel that centers around all the terrible “lad” rules and behavior that football comes attached to would have been a slog for me. Having Trev snap to the moment he thinks that his friend has been killed by this sort of nonsense instantly makes me like him better as a character, and helps the story move along to more interesting places.

The structure of the book is still odd, however. It makes out as though we’re finally going to get a book that’s entirely about the university wizards instead of keeping them in their usual comic relief shenanigan sector. This works for a tiny sliver of time before we’re immediately introduced to the “below stairs” group at the university.

The satire is still strong with the collegiate stuffs, of course: Academicals is a word upended to more than one university team, and the Hunting of the Megapode is a send up of the Mallard Ceremony at Oxford. While in their version, someone carries a wooden duck around on a stick for the Fellows to follow, here we’re chasing Rincewind-with-feathers-on about the place. Why didn’t we didn’t get more of that.

Also, someone save Ponder. I realize the overworking is mostly his own fault, but he could use an assistant or something.

Asides and Little Thoughts

• The gap between this book and Making Money was the longest the world had gone without a Discworld book since the gap between its very first tomes. (This book is a bit longer than usual, at least.) And now I’ve made myself sad.
• The pickle carts? They have pickle carts? *cries in sadness that no one has wheeled a pickle cart over to me*
• Lord Vetinari forcing the Ankh-Morpork Explorers’ Society to rename to the Trespassers’ Society because everywhere they “discover” already has people living in it is… look, if you’re gonna be a tyrant, be this kind of tyrant. Inflict your correctness on people.
• Okay, but Alf and Nobby are related, right?

Pratchettisms

Next week we’ll read up to:

[end-mark]

The post Terry Pratchett Book Club: <i>Unseen Academicals</i>, Part I appeared first on Reactor.

Rereads and Rewatches Terry Pratchett Book Club

Terry Pratchett Book Club: Nation, Part IV

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Published on March 29, 2024

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Even alternate history can’t stop this man from creating something kinder than what we’ve got.

Summary

The raiders arrive before dawn, and Mau has the alarm rung and brings his plan to fruition. Cox is in charge of the Raiders now as they feared, but it seems they’ve seen the cannons, so they want to talk. Mau knows they won’t talk to him because he looks like a boy with no tattoos even though he’s chief. He plans to send Milo or Pilu to speak. Cox talks to Daphne, tells her that he’s the new chief, and he’s teaching the heathens to speak his language. Daphne thinks the Raiders look just like men who work directly beneath the king, the ones who know it’s better to be advising the top than be at the top. She talks to Mau and finds out that only one cannon works and they only have gunpowder enough for one shot, but they use that shot to scare the group into single combat, chief against chief. The Raiders are panicked, so Cox agrees to the fight, thinking he’ll get to shoot Milo. Milo steps forward and announce that Mau is their chief, risen from the country of Locaha itself. The Raider priest steps forward to ask questions, disbelieving, but Daphne has all the right answers about Locaha’s country. It makes the priest nervous.

Daphne tries to talk Mau out of the fight because Cox has a revolver and another gun, at least seven shots he can fire before reloading, while Mau only has a spear and knife. He won’t hear of any dissent, however. They are both required to lay their weapons down and the fight begins when one of them reaches for theirs. Because that is the only rule, Mau reaches first for sand and throws it into Cox’s eyes. He runs toward the lagoon, remembering that guns don’t like water. He dives in and Cox continues to fire at him, only managing to hit his ear. Mau ducks under a tree in the lagoon, and Cox reloads the pistol while Mau finds an old axe he buried in the tree during practice as a boy. Cox tells him that the sharks are coming and he wants to watch them feast, but he’s getting frustrated, spending all his bullets. Mau comes up with the axe, hits Cox straight in the chest, and the man falls into the water, just in time for the sharks. Mau goes to the Raiders and tells them to bring their captives to shore and leave. When he comes to later, he learns that Daphne has been performing surgery on the wounded captives using the manual she found on Sweet Judy. The Unknown Woman seems like a completely different person, with a name now—she found her husband with the captives.

Daphne asks Mau if he would go back to a world without the wave if he could, but Mau cannot answer. There are two versions of himself, but this is who he is now. Daphne enjoys her life here and doesn’t want to leave it, but a ship has arrived. Daphne’s father is here, and she tells him about all the things that have happened to her, then brings him to the cave to show him all that Mau’s people have accomplished. Her father isn’t convinced and demands that she use scientific theory to back up her claims; he knows that others will try and disprove this. Daphne makes him promise that they won’t take anything from this place, that if others want to see it, they’ll need to make the journey, not steal away the Nation’s ancestral heritage. Daphne gets to spend nearly two weeks showing her father the island and helping him to learn that language. They play cricket with the Nation’s people. And then the Cutty Wren finds them. They explain to Daphne’s father that he’s king now and they need to do a cursory coronation right here. They’ve brought Daphne’s grandmother. But once the coronation is done, Daphne’s father finds his courage and manages to tell his mother to be silent and not insult their island hosts.

Cookie did indeed survive in his coffin at sea, and is reunited with Daphne. Daphne’s father gives the Nation the option to join the British Empire willingly, but Mau’s doesn’t want that; he wants to join the Royal Society, and says they will welcome all men of science to their island. In return, he will give the king the gold door to their sacred place of record. They ask for a telescope and a large ship the size of Sweet Judy filled with books and salted beef and other things. Mau also asks the scientists who comes to the island share their knowledge, and they ask for someone to teach them more about medicine. A week later, the king is loaded onto his boat. Mau shows Daphne that he has received his tattoos, and they say goodbye, despite wanting nothing of the sort—they both must go where they are needed. And then we move forward to Today, where an old man is telling this story to two children on the island. They learn that Daphne became queen and married a man from Holland, and that they died within two months of each other—and Daphne demanded to be buried at sea where he was. The children ask if he believes in Imo, and the old man tells them that he “just believes.”

Commentary

It’s killing me, y’all. Because he did it again.

We’re not even reading the Discworld, but Pratchett can’t stop himself. He created an alternate history to the world he lives in, and he made it to give us a kinder world. A world in which an island nation is protected from the horrors of imperialism because the princess of England (who rightly never believed she had any chance of becoming royalty at all) lived among its people and was clever enough and humane enough to understand how they should be treated.

Daphne takes her father to the temple and he makes literally every argument that colonizers make about why this place should be stripped and transported elsewhere. He says “it belongs to the world,” and Daphne tells him that is thinking like a thief because she knows that ‘belonging to the world’ to her people means ‘stolen and displayed at home.’ He tells her that the island is far away from anywhere important, and she tells him that this place holds import. He tells her that some will argue that the spectacles she found there were left by previous European explorers, and she tells him that they couldn’t have come here before because all the gold is still there. She makes this argument before she knows that she and her father will have the power to make that choice on behalf of their people, which is relevant only because it lets the reader know where her morals reside. But it’s likely that without this twist of fate, there would have been nothing they could do to protect Mau and his people from the rest of the world or England itself.

This book already started with the end of the world. It couldn’t end that way too. And it deserves marking because how often are alternate histories used to examine the worst options history had on offer? Nearly every time?

Not this time.

And it’s never done in a trite way that robs the story of meaning. The work is still hard, the thinking still needs to be done, and no one escapes without pain. There’s just that little golden lining at the end to reward people for trying their hardest and putting in the time.

It occurs to me that Mau is exactly like Nawi—over time, he learned to use his disability (in this case, his lack of soul) to his advantage. Because that manner of difference often gives a person a unique vantage point on the world and their place within it. And it’s poignant as always that the fight against Cox at the end takes up practically no time because that’s not where the meat of the story resides; Cox is simply the obstacle, and not a very absorbing one at that. He needs to be stopped, but his cruelty doesn’t merit our time or deep thoughts. There’s nothing interesting about evil, to paraphrase Ursula K. Le Guin.

In the end we come to a meditation on belief with the old man, a great-great-great-great-grandson of Pilu, living in present day. The children keep asking if he believes in Imo, and he gives them a lot of answers that aren’t yes or no. Until finally, he says:

I’m trying to put my finger on a thing, because this is pretty much exactly how I wish we handled religion of any sort, including the kind we make up for ourselves outside of institutions. It’s sort of the faith-based version of “Strong opinions, lightly held,” if that makes any sense? And I find it far more comforting than any answer-based faith can possibly be. Believe in things, generally. Which is to say, not specifically, and not virulently. Believe in some stuff, to exist. That works, too.

And I come back around to the question of whether or not this is Pratchett’s best book. He believed it was, which is all that matters as far as he is concerned—because belief is how we’re made up. Do I think it’s the best? Well, no, but part of the reason for that is I’ve never really liked “best” as a marker. It’s too broad. But this book is beautiful, and I’m glad to have read it. Which is really the best any author can ask for at the end of the day. To write something worth reading. In that, Pratchett never had to worry overmuch.

Asides and little thoughts

• When I started the book, I didn’t think I’d care too much about whether or not the parrot made it, but by the end I was so glad? It needs to live to fight the grandfather birds another day.
• A number of famous scientists get name-dropped for having visited the island in the modern-day section, including Einstein, Patrick Moore, and Carl Sagan. Darwin, too, of course. He liked the octopuses.

Pratchettisms

Next week we’re back to Discworld with Unseen Academicals! We’ll read up to:

The post Terry Pratchett Book Club: <i>Nation</i>, Part IV appeared first on Reactor.

Rereads and Rewatches Terry Pratchett Book Club

Terry Pratchett Book Club: Nation, Part III

“One person is nothing. Two people are a nation.” Emmet Asher-Perrin discusses chapters 9 through 12 of Pratchett’s Nation.

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Published on March 22, 2024

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Can we separate out a nation from the concept of nationalism? In this book I’d argue that we can, which is a great thought exercise.

Summary

Daphne comes to and finds that Mau is still asleep, but no longer in a coma. She is hearing voices still, gods of the island, but not the Grandfathers—the Grandmothers. They tell her that she must tell Mau to roll away the stone, so she puts a new little girl named Blibi in charge of Mau and tells her to make sure he has soup on waking before setting off. Daphne heads through the jungle to the Man’s Place and yells at the Grandfathers for bullying Mau. She’s attacked by the grandfather birds, but Mau arrives with Blibi to give them beer, and they talk about the experience they just had. She tells him that the Grandmothers have started talking to her, and that they don’t want anyone else to die. Mau brings up the Raiders and Daphne suggests that perhaps they should hide, but then agrees that they should fight them off when they come. Mau tells her that he has figured out what Ataba thinks, that the trousermen left the stones and some tools ages ago. He wants to know why Daphne’s people are smarter, but she doesn’t think they are; she thinks that bad weather gets them working and moving. They gather a group to roll the stone away with a crowbar, and head inside with lamps.

Mau, Daphne, and Ataba enter the crypt and find hundreds upon hundreds of Grandfathers in this place, all bone, tied together with papervine. They get deep enough to find one Grandfather sitting on a white stone, and he and all the men around him looking in a different direction from the other bodies. They follow that direction to see where it leads. Mau finds the door to a sea cave and hacks away at it. They all enter to find statues of the gods and more white god stones. The air is too thin to them to survive long there, but Daphne notices that there’s a body there with something in its mouth, and she thinks that there could be an indication of Greek or Egyptian in the cave. One Grandfather falls over in the dark, and a line of them begin to fall like dominoes, so the group runs and runs as the dust of the Grandfathers makes to escape their tomb. When they finally make it back to daylight, Daphne sees boots—trousermen, Foxlip and Polegrave, some of the mutineers against Captain Roberts. Daphne tries to think how to keep everyone here safe when they’ve got pistols, but Ataba has seen his gods, and holy fervor seizes him. He waves a spear at Foxlip, who kills him.

Daphne knows she has to outthink these men so they don’t kill anyone else. She tells them to take her back to her father for a reward and leave the rest of these people alone because they don’t have enough pistol shots between them to take everyone out. She takes them to the Women’s Place and Mau and the others follow silently behind to help her. Daphne offers the men beer, which they insist she drink first. She learns that Cox is coming soon with the cannibal Raiders. Foxlip drinks his beer without spitting in it and singing the song, and he dies. Daphne breaks Polegrave’s nose and steals his gun, then tells him to run, which he does. Then she thinks on how she’s committed murder, and Foxlip and Ataba are buried at sea. Daphne insists on a trial for the murder, so everyone tries it out for her. She winds up needing to explain the whole story to them—how Cox came aboard Sweet Judy and made himself first mate, how the mutiny began, and how Captain Roberts didn’t wind up killing the man, but did set his group adrift in a small boat with pistols on a small island nearby. The group learn that these men kill dolphins and brown people for sport. They decide they’re demons and already dead, therefore Daphne is absolved of any wrongdoing.

Daphne tells Mau that he must follow her back into the crypt to see what she saw—a globe of the world that has fallen from Imo’s statue hands. She thinks that his people were exploring other parts of the world during the ice age. The white stone was brought there by their ancestors to make carvings and steps and statues of gods. Daphne wants scientific men to come here and explain what this place means, but Mau knows; it means his ancestors wanted people to know they were here. It also means that they are all connected, and Daphne’s explains that Mau’s people were incredibly advanced; their stories are descriptions of planets you should only be able to see with a telescope, and they made glass, and false teeth out of gold. (The Sky Woman takes the set they find.) Pilu tells the story to their band, that they were the first people and now they must fight the Raiders off with what the Sweet Judy has provided, namely cannons. Daphne warns against using them, but Mau promises he has plans. She tells them how to get the people ready for a battle more effectively and they practice. The Gentlemen of Last Resort stop to rescue someone in a floating coffin…

Commentary

This book is genuinely a great read, but it’s also just incredibly useful for getting your brain working? I dunno, you could take a philosophy class or you could read this, and I think this is a more engaging way of going about the subject. Both Mau and Daphne serve as perfect distillators of these thoughts, entirely wrapped up in questions of what building a society is and means. As Mau says of what he owes Daphne for saving his life (by making him want to live at all):

Again we come back around to this idea that we are nothing without each other. We are not beings made to exist in loneliness. It only takes two people to make meaning. And it’s true in the most mundane ways as well as the Big Idea ones, too. I think of that every time my partner and I cook dinner together—if it’s me alone, I’d probably just… starve? At any rate, I wouldn’t feed myself well. It’s hard to see the point in making good meals for only me. Making that meal for us is a different beast. Us has a purpose, it means something. Me doesn’t hold the same weight. It never has. (Is this why I had so many imaginary friends as a kid?)

There’s also the continual point that even our smallest thoughts are designed to make us more relevant, which is a helluva existential splinter to the foot. Mau is scared at the possibility of moving skeletons in the crypt, and knows he thinks of it because the idea is more interesting to his mind. Moving skeletons make him feel more important. And then he thinks:

…I don’t even know what to do with that. Because, again, we’re using this sort of supernatural example, but isn’t that exactly what anxiety is? The first point I always use to comfort the anxious people in my life is that no one is ever thinking about you as much as you assume they are. But that’s the functional bludgeon of anxiety; it’s making you scared via the fear that everyone is paying attention. Why is being a person like this.

Admittedly, I was worried that there wasn’t going to be much thought put into Mau’s frustration with trouserman technology, his feelings of inferiority and anger at their abundance. And I should’ve known better, of course: We’re being given the history of much of the world here, which comes with an acknowledgment that plenty of ancient civilizations were far more advanced than we give them credit for, and gained their knowledge through means that we still can’t piece together. Mau’s people sailed the world in ages past, and knew the shape of the heavens. They had many of the same inventions and came to them far earlier than Westerners, but the record has been lost and dwindled down into mythology.

This is true the world over, and is often the reason behind “Ancient Aliens” theories. There’s obviously racism bound up in that, and general superiority and fear as well—after all, if any great civilization could forget much of what they’d created over time, then it’s bound to happen again, right?

Mau understands the implication of all this immediately, and what it means for the origins of other peoples. He tells Daphne:

In this particular alternate history, my assumption is that Pratchett is intending Mau’s people as the Ur civilization that all others have sprung from. If that’s the case, it makes Mau’s survival and leadership of his people a far heavier tale. This is a brand new beginning, a major rebirth, if they can all survive it.

But even without Cox and his ilk, there’s still the very real question of imperialism to contend with. Will Daphne’s presence and connection to these people spare them any more than they would have been spared in our real-world timeline? I guess we’ll find out.

Asides and little thoughts

• Ataba tells Daphne that imperialism/colonialism is basically the same thing as cannibalism because it’s just another way of eating people and, damn. Just, uh. Yeah.
• Daphne thinks of Foxlip and Polegrave like those fish that swim around sharks (Cox) so they never get hurt—but she doesn’t know why the shark would allow it. Of course, now we know that it’s a sort of symbiosis thing, where the fish eat parasites off the sharks. I doubt Foxlip and Polegrave are doing anything so useful for Cox. It’s just useful for a bully to have other more malleable bullies around.

Pratchettisms

Next week we finish the book! [end-mark]

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Rereads and Rewatches Terry Pratchett Book Club

Terry Pratchett Book Club: Nation, Part II

Emmet Asher-Perrin discusses chapters 5 through 8 of Nation.

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

|

Published on March 8, 2024

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We finally find out how to scare the shark away with a word. Well, it’s not a word, really. That’s the good bit.

Summary

Mau cooks yams and plantains in beer at the Women’s Place and brings that to a hog with babies so that he can get her drunk enough to take her milk for the baby. He has to do it again, and is not looking forward to it by any means, when another canoe shows up. In it are brothers Pilu and Milo; the latter’s wife, Cahle, is about to give birth. They’ve been searching the islands to find a proper place and people who know the rites. Mau tells them that Ataba will lead them to the Women’s Place and plans to send Daphne to help them. Ataba balks at this because she doesn’t know their ways, but Mau insists that there are no other options available to them. He goes to the Sweet Judy and manages to tell Daphne about the woman and the baby, but Daphne is horrified by the idea of having to help—she lost her mother in childbirth. She realizes that Mau has dealt with far worse and follows him. Pilu knows some English, and speaks to her, and Mau helps Daphne get Cahle into the Women’s Place. Daphne kicks Mau out of the hut and remembers that they said she needed to sing a song to welcome the baby. She begins to sing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” which calms Cahle down.

The men listen outside to the song Daphne sings, and Pilu translates best he can—they all believe it is a portentous song about a child who will be a guiding star, which they decide to name the child. Daphne tells the men to bring the Unknown Woman and her baby up to the hut to that the baby can be fed by Cahle. Two weeks pass, and Daphne is still helping the women, more people have arrived (an old woman and a boy named Oto-I), and Cahle has been carefully teaching Daphne the ways of their women so that she can find a husband, while the men strip the Sweet Judy down for its timber and tools. Pilu and Mau talk as they work and Mau asks if he’ll teach him more of the trouserman language so he can talk to Daphne. Pilu recommends that he wear a pair of salvaged trousers, since that’s very important to her people, and they discuss their strange ways. (Pilu and Milo lived among them very briefly and learned a few things.) Daphne gets a grass skirt to wear from the Unknown Woman while Mau tries on the trousers. Mau makes Pilu cry by continually questioning the existence of the gods and where Pilu’s people went, and then he hears the thundering of the grandfathers, only it’s much louder this time. He tells Pilu that they want him to bring up the last of the god anchors, the one for the god of Water.

Daphne makes the beer using a different song, and is encouraged to go to the beach. She and Mau see each other—her in the grass skirt, him in trousers—and the whole group laughs together. Milo spots sails and more people arrive. Now they number eleven women, eight men (not including Mau because he has no soul), and three dogs. These people believe that the final god anchor needs to be brought up to protect them. Mau tells them he will do it. The water god anchor will not nudge from the lagoon, however, stuck under a piece of coral. Mau tells Ataba that he thinks there’s a fourth god and it is a trouserman; he gathers Pilu and Milo to help him free the god anchor with trouserman tools. Mau tells them that there is another stone down there, and Ataba heads down to try and smash the new stone with a hammer, almost drowning. He jumps back in and hits the coral, bleeding, which calls a shark. Mau uses Nawi’s advice to scare the shark off (shouting at it) and they bring Ataba back to the shore. He knows the reason that the old man tried to smash the new stone—it had trouserman marks on it, and Mau thinks that the god anchors may have been made by them. Mau asks Ataba who made the god anchors, but the old man insists that Mau is wrong to ask, and that he won’t like the answers.

On the Cutty Wren, Mr. Black is informed about the tsunami and asked what they should do about finding the Sweet Judy. He decides to continue as their orders dictate and not veer off course to search the islands ahead of time. Daphne starts hearing voices of her own, but she’s unsure where they come from, or if she’s perhaps talking to herself. A voice tells her to go quickly and she finds Mau unresponsive—he appears to have succumbed to hypothermia and is comatose. Milo brings the two god anchors to shore despite Ataba being furious at the presence of the fourth. Pilu tells the story of how Mau saved Ataba from the shark and everyone is moved. Cahle believes that Mau is dying, but Daphne insists that he’s still there, so Cahle tells her to talk to the Sky Woman (the old woman Daphne has been calling Mrs. Gurgle in her head) because she is powerful and will know what to do. Mrs. Gurgle says Mau is caught in a shadow place between life and death, and Daphne volunteers to go get him. Mrs. Gurgle agrees to this, but says that the only way to get Daphne there is to poison her; she agrees. Mau is running from Locaha, who taunts him. Daphne arrives and pulls Mau in a different direction, toward life, though it is very hard to get back…

Buy the Book

Nation

Terry Pratchett

Buy Book

Nation

Terry Pratchett

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Commentary

The philosophical musings just get deeper and gnarlier as we go, but it’s important that they’re being mused on in the wake of devastation. Because it’s different for Mau to make Pilu cry about the possibility of their gods and the afterlife being plumb made up when the young man is actively thinking of all the people he’s lost—which is everyone. And, pointedly, moments of active grief are often the only times people think of these things.

It makes Ataba’s smugness hard to swallow because when he tweaks at Mau about people needing their faith, it’s not really a fair argument. Faith is a thing that people often fall back on in the wake of tragedy and the book keeps pointing this out—the ways in which people bury themselves in tradition and dogma when they’re afraid because the brain doesn’t know how to make sense of larger tragedy. Ataba says they need it, but it’s more accurate to say that they simply can’t help it. The alternatives are too horrible. The alternative is feeling the way Mau feels, and he’s furious and miserable.

Daphne thinks this of Mau:

And like… it’s genuinely the same thing. Standards not being Upheld isn’t really any different from Mau’s anger because they’re both anger at the same thing; The world being wrong. I dunno, it just seems important that you can draw that line between two people who couldn’t have less in common because that’s clearly what this book is about, on one level. Humanity loves to poke the “we’re not so different, you and I” button in a million different ways, but it’s always a little extra poignant when you can do it with two people like that.

As always, Pratchett says the quiet part out loud with regard to religion and people. For example, here are thoughts on god(s):

And then on people:

Gods are what you rely on when you need an answer and can’t find one. Which is frequently, to be fair. Even the most learned members of our species don’t know all that much. It’s one aspect of the more virulent strain of atheism that I can never get behind—religion isn’t surprising or pathetic, even if it’s not your thing. We continually ask “why?” and sometimes we find an answer. When we don’t, we’re all going to cope with that differently.

Conversely, Pratchett has both Daphne and Mau coming to terms with people being the point. People being really all there is. People making things sacred by feeling and existing in a place. Even with all the frustrations and difficulties they bring, the more people come to the island, the better Mau feels. Locaha can’t have him yet.

Asides and little thoughts

• The fictional rule about cannibal raiders is that once you bring them up, they have to appear, right? That’s what’s going to happen, right? The most obvious and loaded Chekov’s Gun.
• I do love the bit with Mau trying on the pants and Daphne trying on the grass skirt because it’s that sort of scene that’s always used as a precursor to romance in a way that can often feel kinda icky? (Especially in this case because they’re very young?) But here it’s just so dang wholesome and ends with everyone laughing and feeling human and normal together for a moment.
• The bit with needing to sing to the beer reminds me of something I read that talked about how people used to recite prayers/hymns/rhymes/etc daily as a form of timing; meaning, if you needed to bake bread, you knew how long to knead the dough based on how many times you should recite the Lord’s Prayer. I assume that’s what’s going on here, too.

Pratchettisms

Next week we’ll read Chapters 9-12! [end-mark]

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Movies & TV Dune

Dune: Part Two Asks Questions That the Original Never Dared

Denis Villeneuve’s new Dune film alters the arcs of key characters, but not everyone gets such careful treatment

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

|

Published on March 4, 2024

Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

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Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

If you had the ability to reconsider one of the cornerstones of the science fiction genre, what would you do with that chance?

It is perhaps enough to say that I cannot stop thinking about Dune: Part Two since leaving the theater. That is more than a satisfactory reason to recommend it, to my mind. Films don’t need to be perfect in order to provoke us, and Dune: Part Two certainly isn’t perfect. What’s exciting to me as a viewer and a critic is knowing that no one is likely to agree on the ways in which it falters or triumphs. What is also exciting to me is knowing that a particular stripe of fan is going to be very displeased about what was altered, after an initial salvo that seemed to indicate a careful adherence to the basic narrative.

While Dune: Part One looked and felt like its source material perhaps more than any other screen adaptation, it drew a number of pointed criticisms, particularly where its depiction and casting of the Fremen were concerned. For my part, a lack of focus given to Lady Jessica’s narrative was also drew ire. Given the ways in which Part One was successful—namely in the look, feel, and scope of the film—what would director Denis Villeneuve create to complete this journey?

Building on the framework that Part One painstakingly put in place, Part Two is more stunning, more grotesque, and somehow far grander than the first. We are given the diaries of Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh) as scaffolding in place of her written histories in the book, but the device offers the same anchoring, the same helpful exposition by way of a new figure who is learning precisely how dangerous her father’s machinations have become. The design choices of these films continue to be immaculate in every sense of the word, from the sand of Arrakis slipping into every crevice to the monochrome oil and iron stylings of the Harkonnen homeworld Geidi Prime.

There are moments designed to make you gasp. Paul’s (Timothée Chalamet) first worm ride to become Fremen is perhaps the key point among these, a feat that Villeneuve is determined to make the audience feel with every muscle as the prophisized chosen one clings to the hide of a sandworm as big as a skyscraper with two metal hooks his only hope for survival. The introduction of Austin Butler’s Feyd Rautha is similarly arresting, Butler’s casting easily being one of the more impressive choices for Part Two—Butler plays the role simultaneously calculating, feral, and deeply horny, and the choice pays out dividends every time he steps on screen.

The primary changes that Dune: Part Two enacts come from choices made about the Fremen people and their willingness to believe the legends seeded on Arrakis by the Bene Gesserit generations ago, all about the outer world prophet sent to deliver them. Rather than making Paul’s ascent a simple question of when he is ready to follow the path, a much-needed dose of realism is injected into the story—not every Fremen believes in their religious dogma. There are divisions among their people when questioning who can save Arrakis and its people, and who should fight to free them. Importantly, Chani is one of the key dissenters against the path that Paul will eventually take.

It makes sense of the casting of Zendaya in the role because up until this reveal, it had been something of a mystery as to why this would be a part she would want to play. (As an actor, she has always been very exacting about the roles she has taken on as an adult, and the book’s Chani decidedly does not fit that mold.) In reconsideration of Chani’s story, Zendaya is perhaps the brightest piece of this puzzle, intent on convincing her people that they are the arbiters of their own destiny, that only Fremen can liberate themselves.

The awkwardness then comes from the fact that following this arc seems to be in service of taking the sting out of Paul Atreides’ role as a brutal colonizing force, to reposition his choices as an evil he is actively aware of and trying to overcome. Paul is willing to openly critique Fremen prophecies as the Bene Gesserit trick that they are, to insist that he’s not a savior and merely wants to become Fremen and fight alongside them. His desire to defy that path set down by his mother and the Bene Gesserit is a large part of why Chani falls in love with him. This creates a better story, certainly, and it further humanizes many characters that don’t feel fleshed out enough within the pages of the novel (Paul, Chani, Stilgar). The question then becomes how does this change the overall story?

Because there are many pieces left barely on the board in Dune: Part Two and it makes for confusing viewing. After having her own arc utterly decimated in Part One, Rebecca Ferguson’s Jessica Atreides becomes more perplexing than ever. While it’s initially suggested that she’s following the path laid down by the Bene Gesserit in order to keep them alive, Jessica is also doing so against her directives from the order to ends that are never clarified. Furthermore, the purpose of creating the kwisatz haderach is completely lost in this story, making matters more puzzling. Paul winds up drinking the water of life to… get better visions? Which is important for him, sure, but makes the Bene Gesserit schemes suddenly nonsensical—why bother working to create the kwisatz haderach if he’s not really that important in helping you achieve your aims?

The result makes it seem that Paul’s true difficulty is being caught between his mother (and his unborn but fully conscious sister) and the woman he loves, respectively representations of a shadowy order of eugenics-wielding politicking women and the indigenous people he wishes to join and liberate. Without any attention paid to the Mentats or other various power players that Frank Herbert’s tome showcased, this genuinely damages the core of the story. It was the right choice to pay more attention to Chani and the Fremen people, but an equal amount of attention needed to be paid to other female characters in order for it to plumb make sense… which the film neglects to do.

And tellingly, it has no problem spending an outrageous amount of time on the stories of men instead. The centering of Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin) in this film is a strange mistake that seems to be making a meal out of an overarching revenge theme for several of the film’s central characters. Paul, Jessica, and Gurney are all driven out of a desire for revenge on specific people—Paul against the Emperor (Christopher Walken) and Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard), Jessica against her own Reverend Mother (Charlotte Rampling), and Gurney against Rabban (Dave Bautista). While revenge is certainly an underlying motivation throughout Dune, the choice to zero in on it does nothing for the story, and actually serves to take time away from figures who need and deserve more development. It also reassigns defining narrative moments for characters who will become incredibly important down the line, if Villeneuve gets the money to make more movies in this series. (Yes, for those wondering, I am talking about Alia.)

The timeline of the film is greatly compressed as well, a choice that is frequently made in film—rules around screenwriting often tout that immediacy is king, and it’s just not true—that I will never understand. Rather than taking place over years, Dune: Part Two takes place over months, robbing the characters of their chances to truly root and grow as groups, and turning up momentum on the story like a boulder gaining speed as it rolls down a mountainside. It takes time to become a legend, but here you just need one big speech, and you’re good to go, apparently.

And then there are a the bits that manage to be good and bad at once. The last hour of the film is overwhelming, undoubtedly an intentional choice meant to heighten tension and saddle the audience with the same increasing dread that the characters are feeling. While the sound design for Dune is incredible fullstop, it might prove too much for some viewers by the end, not just in terms of auditory stimulation but bodily punishment—the whole room heavily vibrates for a solid 45 minutes. (I am saying this as a person who loves the immersive sound quality of a movie theater more than anything on this earth. If I think you’ve maybe overdone it, that’s… probably not the best sign.)

Having said all of this, I still enjoyed the hell out of Dune: Part Two. As a film experience, a spectacle, a sideways look at a familiar story, it is top tier. As a movie you’ll leave the theater talking about, there are none better. I’m content to let it have its moment. But I’ll meet you at the bar later to tease out all the things we can’t stop prodding at, our very own misshapen bruise that somehow resembles a desert mouse.[end-mark]

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Rereads and Rewatches Terry Pratchett Book Club

Terry Pratchett Book Club: Nation, Part I

Emmet gets started on the book Pratchett considered the best one he ever wrote…

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Published on March 1, 2024

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Who is the Nation if its people are gone?

Summary

We are told a creation myth where Imo creates the world and creates Locaha, the god of death. But the world is flawed, so Locaha tells Imo to make another, better world while he looks after the mortal one. And if people are particularly good, they will be sent to Imo’s better world, but if not they will be reincarnated as dolphins until they’re ready to be people again. Captain Samson is tasked with the journey during an outbreak of Russian Influenza that has killed the King of England. He must take Mr. Black and his people (the Gentleman of Last Resort) to Port Mercia. His men will be well-paid for the journey—they must find one of the heirs to the throne and bring them back within nine months to claim their birthright according to the rules of Magna Carta. Captain Robert’s ship is lost, marooned in a forest, and there is only one human survivor (and a parrot). A boy named Mau, who has recently completed his time on Boys’ Island, is taking his canoe back to the Nation to celebrate his entry into manhood. On his journey he witnesses the largest wave he’s ever seen, and he’s uncertain what its effect has been on his people at home. He arrives back at the Nation, but his people have been wiped out by the tsunami.

Mau wakes (having barely slept), finds the bodies of his people and buries them at sea, though he blocks the memories out, thinking of himself as Locaha as he does it. A “toeless” creature leaves him food while he sleeps, and on waking he walks to the forest. The forest has been destroyed by something more than a wave—it’s the Sweet Judy, and Mau finds bodies of men from the ship. He briefly thinks that perhaps he is the one who died, but he hears the voices of the Grandfathers telling him that he is not and that he must continue the traditions of his people so that the Nation survives. Mau thinks of Granddad Nawi, a member of the village who was “cursed” by the gods because he had a bad leg. Mau talked to him once and found that Nawi didn’t consider himself cursed at all, and he told Mau a word for keeping sharks away. Later, Liu comes across a woman from the “trousermen” people, and she points a gun at him. She fires it in fear, and he sees it spark and believes she has given him the means to start a fire. He takes the gun and runs, making a fire with it, and a dinner of tubers.

On the Sweet Judy, the woman who survived the shipwreck writes a card to Mau. Her name is Ermintrude Fanshaw, and she delivers the card in the night. Mau wakes up and believes that the card’s rudimentary pictogram is telling him to throw a spear at the ship. He goes to the Women’s Place (where he was not allowed before), and gets beer to bring to the Grandfathers, who scold him for not doing everything they have commanded. He goes to meet Ermintrude who introduces herself by the name Daphne (she never liked her name), and Mau assumes she’s telling him where she’s from. She asks for his help in burying Captain Roberts at sea, which he does. When the captain’s hat bobs to the surface, Daphne tells him that the captain wants Mau to have it and she jumps into the water to get it… but she can’t swim, so Mau has to dive in after her. They both nearly drown, but Mau gets them to shore, retrieves the blanket from the ship (and accidentally releases the parrot in the cage beneath it), and watches over their camp all night. Daphne saw her life flashing before her eyes as she was drowning and remembers what brought her here: learning about geography and astronomy as a child; the death of her mother; her grandmother’s imperiousness; and her father’s insistence that he will go govern England’s island territories and that she will follow him once he’s settled.

Daphne wakes to the smell of stew that Mau has made. They both eat the stew and laugh over the fact that she keeps trying to be polite when she spits out the fish bones. Then they both fall asleep and when Mau wakes, Daphne has gone back into the jungle. Mau had considered letting himself die when he rescued her from the water, and he wants to teach Daphne his language so that someone will remember his people. He retrieves two of the god anchors at the behest of Grandfathers, large white stones that were thrown into the lagoon by the wave. Mau isn’t sure what he believes in anymore, or why he tries to keep his people’s traditions alive when they’re gone. Daphne returns with a book, and they begin to teach each other their languages so they can communicate. Then Mau draws the tsunami. Daphne shouts about a canoe, and Mau sees that one is trying to enter the island. He helps them to shore and meets Ataba (a priest from a neighboring island who studied in the Nation when he was young), a feeble young woman who will not eat, and her dying infant. Mau and Ataba argue about the gods, and Mau begins making a plan to get everyone fed so the baby will get the milk it needs to live.

Commentary

Pratchett said of Nation: “I believe that Nation is the best book I have ever written, or will write.” In fact, Pratchett said a lot of things about this book and how he writes in his acceptance of the Boston Globe-Horn Book Fiction Award for this novel.

Not to dispute him straight away (and, of course, I won’t have a complete opinion on that until I’ve finished it), but this aspect of being an artist fascinates me. In the acceptance, Pratchett talks about how he doesn’t really measure up to “real writers” who make lists and plan out their books and research things properly. And yet, his description of how he created “the best book I have ever written” is the opposite of that process in every way. What he tells us is that the narrative overtook him and wouldn’t leave his brain (despite needing to shelve the concept for a time due to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami) until he let it out, that the story is a culmination not of specific research, but of all the knowledge stacked into his brain over a lifetime. That the characters sort of created themselves and used him as a conduit.

What he’s describing is what most writers, I think, long for in the pursuit of their craft. An act of creation that simply pours out, a story that needs to be told, a feeling that makes one more like a vessel for fable than a human being.

Buy the Book

Nation

Terry Pratchett

Buy Book

Nation

Terry Pratchett

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

What I do appreciate is that Pratchett never suggests that Nation is his best book because it’s somehow more high brow or artistic, two labels that have less meaning than we think, and also far more baggage than we often allow. No, Pratchett seems to feel this is his best work because of the manner in which it exited him, and I can understand that feeling. There is only one place where I’d quibble with his reasoning, which is when he notes that Nation is not a very comical book, as he is often known for. And it seems as though that is an indication to him that the book might have more artistic merit than his usual fare—so said the man who was knighted for his contributions to literature and said “I suspect the ‘services to literature’ consisted of refraining from trying to write any.”

There is a humility in that, certainly, and humor can be a shield of sorts, too. A way to sidestep the deeper darker sadder bits. And there are facets to everything, dualities and complexities abounding. Nothing is ever only one thing. I suspect that sometimes the humor was a shield, or at least something that Pratchett felt was easy for him to fall back upon, and so easy to write off.

And yet, he still knows that it isn’t. I’m certain of that because he wrote this into Nation, his purported best book:

Laughter (and therefore comedy) is not a cheat or an aversion—at least not in every case. It is necessary to our ability to survive. It is built into us. And while we are all understandably wary of the person who makes everything into a joke, it is equally true that the person who believes that humor has no place in art, in life, in the making of meaning, is someone to be wary of.

I can’t say yet if I agree that this is Pratchett’s best book, but I do think it is looking more directly at the questions he is always wrestling with, and without the sly cutting edge of satire there to guarantee that his blows land. Instead, he is simply given over to people and their lives and what they think and how they feel. In the opening chapters, much of this is bound up Mau losing belief in… everything. Do I find it interesting that he chose to do this with a character whose culture is clearly an amalgam of many different folklores around the world rather than a Christian one? I suppose I do, insofar as I wish I could ask him questions about the desire to create a cultural amalgam in the first place, and also ask him whether he felt it would have been harder to tell this story from a perspective that was closer to his own lived experience day-to-day.

That said, Mau’s loss of everything leading to utter disillusion is an incredible place to begin with any character. It’s also a perfect place to ask much larger, darker questions about being, reality, and faith. As Pratchett has shown us over and over, people make meaning and belief things into being. How can you make meaning without other people? How can any of us find meaning when there’s no one to share that meaning with? And what does it say that these things cannot truly survive in a vacuum?

I have to take a moment to talk about Granddad Nawi. The segment where Mau remembers talking to him is as sharp a commentary on ableism I’ve ever seen, but particularly in the moment when Mau tells him that his word for keeping sharks away is a trick, and he replies:

Oh, this. This is the thing about being disabled and looking at the world around you. Our entire species is dependent upon creating things for ourselves so that we don’t die: clothes, agriculture, shelter, you name it. We are a species that exists by making modifications. But as soon as your disability is too uncommon for everyone to need the same accommodation, well… then it becomes a trick, then you become a problem. Granddad see that easily enough.

Asides and little thoughts

• Captain Samson and his wife who will be very happy for him to get knighted, eh? I see what you did there, sir.

• The use of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species helps to anchor the book to a time period, which is important when establishing an alternate history. Fashions and plagues and technologies can be said to occur at any point with the right events and incentives, but specific peoples and works are a far less malleable marker. So we know this story take place sometime after 1859, probably a few years following.

• Daphne thinking on Dad Jokes: “[…] concluded that Mrs Ethel J. Bunky’s Birthday Island was a Father Joke, i.e. not very funny but sort of lovable in its silliness.” I will now call them Father Jokes.

Pratchettisms

Next week we’ll read Chapters 5-8! [end-mark]

The post Terry Pratchett Book Club: <i>Nation</i>, Part I appeared first on Reactor.

Movies & TV Avatar: The Last Airbender

Netflix’s Avatar: The Last Airbender Is More ‘Ember Island Players’ Than It Is the Real Deal

The live-action adaptation of Avatar needs to do something about those hamfisted scripts.

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Published on February 27, 2024

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The biggest problem with creating unique stories that capture the imagination of a generation (or sometimes several of them) is that someone is always going to try to get you to rehash that story in the hopes of making more money off of it. The second biggest problem is that if said story was animated on in its initial telling, the first option is always going to be a live-action retelling. The third biggest problem is that if the people who created the story in the first place don’t agree with the people putting up all the money for the retelling, they’re probably going to get the boot.

Which is exactly what happened to Avatar: The Last Airbender at Netflix.

There is a separate conversation I would love to have here, being ‘Why do some people vehemently believe that live-action is superior to animation?” It’s sort of the same question as “Why will some people always watch the movie/tv show and never read the book?” when all is said and done. There’s a subset of audience that wants the art (and its form) to cater to their desires, rather than the other way around. And it’s unfortunate because—as everyone who has watched the original ATLA will tell you—Avatar is an excellent television series fullstop. The fact that it’s animated is, in fact, a feature not a bug.

Fans of the show have been nervous ever since the early departure of ATLA’s creators from the Netflix live-action series. Though Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino were vague and diplomatic in their reasoning, it wasn’t a good look for the fledgling show, and it was only a matter of time before we could all see what the trouble was. It’s not hard to parse out, at literal first glance: The first half of the season is awful. In fact, the first episode itself might be one of the worst pilots on TV. It feels cruel to say it, but it’s hard to overstate how much the initial scripts destroy one of the hallmarks of the series—tackling complex ideas and emotions without over-explaining them.

Instead, the live-action version of ATLA chooses to begin the show with Fire Lord Sozen’s invasion of the other kingdoms, with his genocide of the Air Nomads. Audiences are treated to a brutal Game of Thrones style battle sequence, complete with numerous murders by firebending—we essentially witness Aang’s people being burned alive. Which… who wanted that? Was there a genuine clamoring for more violence in a show that is already dealing with the subjects of mass murder, authoritarianism, and grief?

There’s an awkward issue where many links to southeast Asian cultures seem much thinner on the ground in this version as well, particularly on the spiritual front: In the original story, one of the ways that Aang is tested and found to be the Avatar is through his toy selection as a child, where he chooses the toys of former Avatars—this is meant to be a clear connection to the Dalai Lama, who is similarly tested. This time around, Aang’s discovery as the Avatar is awkward and vague all the way around. The concept of reincarnation is soft-balled in this iteration as well: When Aang spiritually contacts previous Avatars, the idea of them all being the same soul is carefully avoided in those conversations, despite it being relevant. It’s also a known piece of trivia to fans that Momo the winged lemur might have initially been conceptualized as the reincarnated soul of Aang’s beloved friend and mentor Gyatso (Lim Kay Siu), though the creators never confirmed it within the series. There is no possibility for this in the live-action series as we later encounter Gyatso’s spirit… in a place where he is only able to contact Aang for a short period of time with no explanation given for the limitation, his secrecy about it, or his sudden disappearance.

And honestly, don’t get me started on what they did to Bumi (Utkarsh Ambudkar). No, do get me started, in fact, because I have a vested interest in how the original story very deliberately shored up their child heroes with adults who encouraged, mentored, and stood by them, and the way that King Bumi is changed within this version destroys one of those key connections. I’m incredibly unhappy about that, especially given that he was one of the originals’ stand-out characters (and my personal favorite).

There are other small yet seismic tweaks that speak to a lack of understanding about the source material; for example, Aang (Gordon Cormier) isn’t there when his people are destroyed because he’s just learned that he’s the Avatar and has taken a little trip into the clouds on Appa so he can think about it. Rather than allowing Aang the ability to make mistakes—in the original, he was frightened and angry that the monks were planning to send him away for his Avatar training and runs away from home—it’s simply a thoughtless mistake that leads to his absence. The result hollows out the pathos of Aang’s guilt when he emerges from his accidental slumber one-hundred years later. With the agency of stronger choices removed, it was simply a “whoops!” that leads to the new state of affairs for their world, and the whole narrative is poorer for it.

It’s heartbreaking because the actors cast for the show are largely pitch-perfect in their roles. Cormier is practically a ball of sentient sunshine as Aang, and Ian Ousley understands Sokka’s need for comedic timing tempered by self-doubt. Once the story actually remembers to focus on Katara, Kiawentiio shows incredible strength and compassion. Dallas Liu is flawless in the tightrope walk of anguish and ridiculousness that is Prince Zuko (without once resorting to aping Dante Basco’s iconic performance), and his love for Paul Sun-Hyung Lee’s Iroh is more palpable with each frame.

In addition, Ken Leung gets this paragraph all to himself because I have never watched an actor take a nothing-muffin character like Admiral Zhao and go so hard on the comedy and idiosyncratic delivery that I thought “The man should win an Emmy for this.” Give him awards. All the awards. Ken Leung has won, everyone else can truly go home.

Much of the story is smashed together and reordered, which is both nonsensical and unnecessary—with hour-long episodes, there’s really no reason to cut so much or sandwich arcs into the wrong places. There are too many places where the show is clearly putting in fan favorite moments without working for them: The “Secret Tunnel” song makes an unearned appearance, as does our favorite cabbage merchant, whose first shout of the infamous line in no way warrants such an overwrought delivery. And the soundtrack is an unfortunate blend of other well-known orchestrations (you can hear Lord of the Rings and Batman Begins and The Prince of Egypt all over the place) when the original soundtrack provided all the template that was needed.

The scripts suffer horribly from spelling out every important thought or piece of development that the characters endure, to a truly baffling degree. The original cartoon had a mastery of knowing when to let moments marinate without commentary, and when to hang a lantern on them with a goofy joke. (Remember Zuko’s forlorn cry of “Why am I so bad at being good!”) Conversely, the live-action version never met a heartfelt exchange it didn’t want to explain away in big THIS IS THE THEME marquis letters—often times through terrible voiceover monologues. It’s impossible to understand why anyone felt this was needed when the original show proved it wasn’t over and over again, and did so in a show aimed at small kids.

But there are a few places in the latter half of the season where more attention is paid to underserved arcs—and those moments show us what the series has the potential to become if anyone is interested in giving them a real shot. The Blue Spirit storyline leads to more than one conversation between Aang and Zuko, further strengthening a connection that will be essential going forward. The sexism found in the Northern Water Tribe is given more realistic layers and nuance. Sokka’s crush on Princess Yue (Amber Midthunder) is better rendered and given a depth it never received on the first run. The ways in which Fire Lord Ozai (Daniel Dae Kim) is manipulating his children against one another, and how this starts us on the path to Azula’s (Elizabeth Yu) deterioration is excellent and precisely the place where this show has room to expand.

It’s imperfect, but it’s enough for hope’s sake. After all, it would genuinely be a shame for this show to get canceled before they cast Toph for season two. [end-mark]

The post Netflix’s <i>Avatar: The Last Airbender</i> Is More ‘Ember Island Players’ Than It Is the Real Deal appeared first on Reactor.

Rereads and Rewatches Terry Pratchett Book Club

Terry Pratchett Book Club: Making Money, Part IV

One last look at Ankh-Morpork’s odd banking situation…

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Published on February 23, 2024

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Of course you are Vetinari. We’re all Vetinari here.

Summary

Moist has Gladys press his gold suit, and Cosmo arrives with Vimes in tow to check on the vault and potentially arrest him. A gathering crowd is asking what Moist will do about having no gold. He insists this is not a problem, and Harry King suddenly arrives… to deposit more money into the bank. Cosmo advises the crowd to take their money back, leading Vimes to close the bank and threaten Cosmo for attempting to incite a riot. Adora Belle is brought to the bank because all the city’s golems have stopped moving—the ancient golems are arriving. Hicks and Flead show up with a portable magic circle, explaining that the four golden golems was a mistranslation, and it’s actually four thousand golems. They surround and flood the city, and go silent. There’s a meeting at the palace where everyone argues about how the golems should be used, since they look like a declaration of war, defending the city. Vetinari thinks to use them as a labor force, but Hubert insists they can’t or all the people would lose their jobs and the economy would collapse. Moist goes with Hicks and Flead and convinces the latter to translate Umnian for him while convincing that former to “insorcise” Flead from the department.

Moist gets the golems to follow him out of the city, getting them to bury themselves in a disused stretch of plains beyond. He wants to put their currency on the golem standard, based on the possibility of what they could achieve—were the city to put them to use—and he tells Sacharissa this. (He also thinks that one horse golem should be given to the dwarf king to smooth things over, a half dozen horse golems should go to the Post Office, and a few hundreds should man the clacks towers, while the rest are looked after by the Golem Trust.) Vimes and Vetinari arrive, and the Patrician is pleased with that plan, but he still has Moist and Mr. Fusspot arrested for the gold theft, and insists on a hearing the next day. Cosmo sends Cranberry to kill Mr. Bent. Bent awakes in his room to find Miss Drapes looking after him, and she tells him what has happened at the bank. Moist is brought to the inquiry the next day and is certain he’s about to be hung out to dry. Word comes to the hall that murdered men were found in Bent’s quarters—Cranberry and his associate. Slant begins to question Moist, but he realizes how to get out ahead: He confesses to being a criminal, ruining Cosmo and Cribbins’ plans.

Vetinari corroborates and gives an (only slightly) altered version of the events that landed Moist his job at the Post Office, confessing that Topsy Lavish asked for his help finding a member outside the family to run the bank. Mr. Bent arrives in full clown regalia and hits the Lavish family with custard pies; Moist catches the one meant for Vetinari to protect him. Miss Drapes comes in behind Bent with his ledgers—ledgers that show that the Lavishes are the ones who spent all the gold and forced him to hide it in their books all these years. Cosmo begins to unravel and draws his replica Vetinari sword. Moist tries to talk him down and addresses him as Patrician. He takes the man’s putrid glove off and beckons “Vetinari” outside to get the stygium replica ring in the light. Moist wakes up the next day in the Post Office as Vetinari’s clerks are going through the bank again. Gladys is reading a new book that Adora Belle gave her and no longer seems to have a crush on him. Pucci was taken away after blabbing everything, and Cosmo’s life was saved after some careful amputation. Vetinari’s coach is waiting outside, and he brings Moist and Adorable Belle to the Fool’s Guild to see Mr. Bent.

It turns out that Bent’s mother had an affair with a clown and when she died, his father took him back to the circus and put him in the family makeup as the Charlie Benito clown. There Bent was laughed at, a thing he could not endure, so he ran away. Moist asks Bent to come back to the bank and help him run things properly. Vetinari brings Moist and Adora Belle to the palace gardens and agrees to all of Moist’s earlier terms, as he has already figured out that the golems listened to him because of the golden suit—they think that makes him an Umnian priest. Moist suggests that the Patrician tell all the countries the golden suit secret so that no one can use them as an army. It turns out that someone has already sent a clacks message to that effect, which would be treason, of course. Despite being the most likely suspect, Moist knows Vetinari is the one who did it, and that no one will ever be able to pin it on him. Owlswick Clamp has also mysteriously “died,” though Vetinari assures Moist that if he needs any more design work done, there’s someone at the “palace” who will be able to help him. On the way back, Adora Belle’s life is threatened by Cribbins, but the man’s dentures explode before he can extort anything out of Moist. Vetinari thinks that perhaps he should apply Moist to the taxman’s position at some point in the future. Mr. Bent and Mrs. Drapes announce their upcoming nuptials on their return to the bank. Hubert orders Igor to use the Glooper to get all the gold back into the bank vault, which interrupts Moist and Adora Belle’s flirting. Cosmo awakens in a ward of the hospital where everyone thinks they are Vetinari—but obviously he’s the real one.

Commentary

The Moist von Lipwig books are so interesting because they are ultimately about the effects of the industrial era, right? And as I said previously of Going Postal, they manage to deal with very heavy and dour subjects by allowing fantasy to take the sting out of the wound, as it were. Though in the previous tome, it was handled far more literally—the person doing the majority of the harm was stopped and punished for his crimes. In this story, the solution is more fantastical than the last in one aspect, being that the banks are all revealed to be run by crooks, but Moist handily fixes the problem by changing their system.

It’s all a bit romantic, isn’t it? Which is very Moist, in its way. He devises a system of currency that is built on the value of the city in a literal sense; it becomes the buried golems rather than the denizens themselves, but it’s still ultimately what he proposed. The bank is backed by the potentiality of Ankh-Morpork’s industry and might. As a result, Pucci’s reveal that all the banks are constantly using their vault gold however they please doesn’t really touch anyone. The bank-owning class might be a bit nervous for a while, but they will ultimately go back to doing business as usual. More citizens will likely have access to the banking system now that Moist chose to open up lending, but it’s hardly the same sort of triumph that the Post Office was.

It’s accurate for satire, of course, which is merely mirroring the world we have at an angle. Because this is ultimately what industry did for the world: Lead us to globalization. Which has its own list of pros and cons certainly, but is, from a cynical vantage point, merely about getting along so that we can all make more money off of each other. As the Discworld books are bemusingly poised with one foot in the medieval(ish) era and one foot in the industrial one, that is the choice that Vetinari is presenting at the end of this story: Do we want an empire or a modern city of commerce? He’s already chosen the way, of course, but it’s hilarious seeing it laid out like an either-or choice rather than something that happened gradually over centuries.

The reveal of Mr. Bent’s heritage is not only a fun twist, but winds up making good on all of the Fool’s Guild jokes in previous books, at least for me. It’s fine to rib about clowns, but having one of them use their skills to bring down those in power is inspired and, more importantly, an actual tactic used by anti-fascists and anti-authoritarians. Moist is correct when he jumps to take the pie meant for Vetinari—most tyrannical powers cannot survive being made to look foolish. It strips them of their might. A pie to the face is quick and easy means to that end.

Having said that, while Drumknott and Vetinari are both keen to note Moist’s grasp of theatrics, it’s much funnier that they both roundly refuse to acknowledge Vetinari’s own. (Moist knows, of course. And appreciates the man’s timing as much as the rest of the city.) Grabbing a bit of custard out of the air and announcing that it’s pineapple is every bit as vaudevillian as his juggling act, after all.

There’s a softness to Vetinari at the end of this story that I have to note because it foils Vimes’ development in its own way; while Vimes seems to grow sharper in the mind’s eye, Vetinari rounds at the edges. The fact that he insists Cosmo’s cane-sword is a replica of a fiction (whether or not it is really isn’t the point so much as his desire not to be thought of as a man who murders thousands to get enough iron for his blade), the way he tests Moist by having him hold the replica (because he wants to be sure that Moist isn’t a violent man as well), and most of all… the way he adopts Mr. Fusspot simply by feeding him treats and calling him home. It makes me feel a little soft in turn, which is a weird way to feel about a self-professed tyrant. Only Pratchett could manage that.

Asides and little thoughts

• Would just like to point out that, though they are doing good in this particularly instance by keeping the people safe, one of Vimes’ officers accepts a bribe from Moist with those stamps. Kind of important, that.
• “Indeed, the leopard can change his shorts!” Look, I just need to know if the idiom is different on the Disc, or if Vetinari heard it wrong and everyone followed suit rather than telling him so. I need to know.
• The “Gladys Is Doing It For Herself” chapter subhead is a reference to the song “Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves,” which I first heard in its Spice Girls cover form. Which probably says something about me, though I’m not sure what. (No, I do know. You are free to hazard a guess, though.)
• On a heartbreaking note, I’m feeling ways about the fact that I was on this book, where we learn that Vetinari lost Wuffles, when I lost my own pup. GNU Archer. Miss you, my sweet little guy.

Pratchettisms

Next week, I thought we’d take a detour and start Nation! Which I’ve definitely never read, so this should be fun. We’ll read Chapters 1-4. [end-mark]

The post Terry Pratchett Book Club: <i>Making Money</i>, Part IV appeared first on Reactor.

Books Terry Pratchett Book Club

Terry Pratchett Book Club: Making Money, Part III

Back to Moist and Adora Belle…

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Published on February 9, 2024

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Time to talk about golems and gender and gendered golems?

Summary

Moist catches Adora Belle up on all that’s happened, including Gladys believing herself to be a woman (and possibly having a crush on him). Mr. Bent meets with Cosmo and mentions the run-in with Cribbins. Adora Belle explains what really happened out there during her mining operation to Moist; they’re fairly certain they’ve found four gold golems that were made by the Umbrians, but rather than take them out, Adora Belle had her own golems fake a tunnel collapse so that the golems underground could get out via the water and head straight for the city. Moist knows this is going to anger the dwarfs, who will consider golden golems partially theirs according to the mining agreement Adora Belle struck, but she insists that this won’t be an issue because the golems are alive and leaving on their own steam. They head to meet wizard John Hicks, Head of the Postmortem Communications Department (basically restyled necromancy), to conduct their ceremony to meet Professor Flead. He agrees to translate the Umnian on Adora Belle’s golem arm, though it will take time. Mr. Bent is in the midst of a self-effacing breakdown, uncertain of who to trust as the bank changes.

Mr. Bent lets Hammersmith Coots know he has made an error in his clerical computations only to learn that he is wrong for the very first time in the bank’s history. Cribbins researches Moist via back issues of the Times, knowing this is his shot at the gravy train. Back at the bank, Igor has bled so much of Mr. Clamp’s anxieties away that he can no longer produce good art, so Moist tells Igor to put him back the way he was. He gets up to the floor to find that Mr. Bent has vanished and the clerks are worried about him; they genuinely think he’s good at running their department and treats them all like people. Moist decides to see if he’s gone home and Miss Drapes volunteers to be the one who comes with him. Igor has made the Glooper impossible to adjust because it’s become like a witch’s wax doll, a thing Hubert could use to actually change the economy—but the Glooper is currently indicating that the bank has no gold. Heretofore tells Cosmo that he thinks he can get Lord Vetinari’s sword stick (he can’t, but he’s been making a replica), and Cosmo is delighted. Vetinari tries to relax with a number puzzle, bothered by the fact that even he doesn’t know the truth about Mr. Bent’s past.

Moist and Miss Drapes go to Mr. Bent’s rooms, but he’s not there. He heads back to the bank, having drawn the conclusion that Mr. Bent is a vampire. Adora Belle arrives at the bank for dinner (seemingly disappointing Gladys), and Moist takes her downstairs to see the new dollar bill that Clamp has drawn up. It looks brilliant and he’s decided to keep the first name Owlswick. Adora Belle also meets Hubert, who is incredibly shocked to be in the presence of a woman and insists that they haven’t done anything wrong with their work on the Glooper. Moist and Adorable Belle head upstairs to find Mr. Fusspot missing and Gladys standing over the pot holding their dinner. Moist briefly panics, assuming the worst, but Mr. Fusspot shows up with Peggy. Cribbins leaves the Times office with Ms. Houser, who is very interested in his opinions as a “reverend,” and is found by Heretofore, who means to take him to Cosmo. Moist and Adora Belle discover hidden drawers in Joshua’s old desk and then his sex cabinet. In it, Moist also find his journals and looks for information on Mr. Bent. As they sit down to dinner, Moist realizes that Mr. Bent is likely in the gold vault of the bank.

Unable to get into the vault because Mr. Bent has left the key in on the other side of the door, Moist realizes that Bent’s desk is right over the vault and he and Adora Belle asks Gladys to break the floor to get to him. Constable Haddock hears the commotion and asks Moist to explain it to him. Because Moist has lock picks on him, Detritus is called in, and because he can’t understand why this is happening, Carrot is called in. Carrot manages to corroborate most of what Moist tells him, but that still leave the matter of the bank vault being empty of gold. Cribbins has a meeting with Cosmo and tells him who Moist used to be, getting himself employed. Professor Flead shows up in Hicks’ office to tell him that he knows what kind of golems are coming, and he wants to see the fun for himself. Moist is being held at the bank, while Adora Belle is in the Watch cells for trying to step her stiletto heel through Detritus’ foot. In the course of all the commotion, Moist did manage to learn that Sergeant Angua is the Watch’s werewolf rather than Nobby. He heads down to see Hubert, and Igor fixes him a cup of splot, traditional Uberwaldian drink made of herbs (many of which are poisonous). Then Moist prays to Anoia to help him out of this mess, and decides he should probably wing it.

Commentary

I forgot how weirdly this book is laid out. For the most part, I like it, because it’s genuinely unexpected? But it also feels like the elements for a few different books tied together in oddly portioned amounts. Instead of a neat little carousel of different parts, we’re weighted in one direction or another at random intervals. Sometimes you get way more Cosmo Lavish that you’re expecting, and sometimes way more golem history, and so on. It’s bemusing how little time we actually spend on the concept of the banking system and what Moist means to do with it. The ploy is in there, but it’s utterly secondary to literally every other plot in the book. Which, again, speaks to the difficulty of trying to make a story about Building a Better Capitalism. It doesn’t actually make for great reading.

What we get from the other arms of the plot more than makes up for this, by and large. The golem piece is particularly interesting in my mind once we get to the overview of how golems came to be the way they are. There’s always a need to catch people up on the actions of previous Discworld novels in these moments, but it occurs to me that this might be the first time it’s ever couched fully as myth within the narrative? Often we get explanations by way of a close omniscient third person dump, or even one that’s aligned with a specific character. But this time we get the story of golems as it’s likely told, where Carrot’s role in changing the golem way of life is not noted as a historical fact with a name attached, but as part of a legend:

Someone did that. Some person who is a function in this story. The first name in the story is Dorfl’s because this is a story about golems and how they came to own themselves, and I love the choice to write it that way within the book.

I need to dig into Gladys’ journey for a moment because it’s such a sharp yet simple way of handling fiddly gendered stuff. It is incredibly funny that Adora Belle Dearheart devotes all of her time to helping golems, yet can’t quite get her head around the idea that their genders are constructs that they can easily choose. I mean, it’s not surprising, in that it’s frequently difficult for activists and socially aware folks to get all those intersectional angles when thinking of how oppression functions, but the fact that she finds Gladys choosing femininity strange while never once questioning the concept of a male golem is silly. Or it is to me, at any rate, because this is where my brain lives, and it’s always amusing to watch others accept it at face value.

Gladys’ journey here could be taken as a argument that gender (the way humans tend to stereotype gender, I mean) is entirely a social construct back-to-front; Moist is blaming the counter girls without acknowledging that this is Gladys’ environment, what she’s learning day-to-day from the women that surround her. And being surrounded by them, she’s adopting what they teach her. They think of her as a woman, so she’s assuming that she must be one and acting accordingly.

And this is where we come back around to the idea of the invisible default that I mentioned in part one: The only reason no one considers it strange that many golems have come to consider themselves nominally “male” is because male is our societal default, and therefore considered a “neutral” state of being. Being female then becomes “weird” as a choice because it’s a step away from that default, the simplicity and lack of thought we’re meant to believe it carries. (Because being male isn’t actually simple—it comes with just as many rules. We’re just taught to think of those rules as more “universal” when they’re not.) I’d love to know how many of the golems we’ve encountered so far truly consider themselves male as opposed to accepting the default that humans project onto them.

This becomes even funnier when you get into the decidedly gendered argument that Moist and Adora Belle are having over her actions with the golems, insisting that “only a man/woman” could think the way each of them think, which then ends on Adora Belle telling Moist not to be “hysterical.” Adora Belle Dearheart is completely aware of how everyday sexism might shape her life and the world around her, but she doesn’t seem to notice the myriad of ways that she bucks “traditional” femininity herself because she’s still mired that sexism regardless.

Having said that, Moist and Adora Belle are easily among Pratchett’s best-written couples. Their dialogue is crackly, yet easy—they feel like two people who understand and genuinely enjoy one another, who banter in a manner that feels far more modern than most of his relationships on the page. Okay, maybe I’m biased because I think that more fictional couples should accidentally stumble on giant fetish closets.

What? It’s a great scene.

Asides and little thoughts

• Super curious as to what ’Tis Pity She’s an Instructor in Unarmed Combat is about.

• The story Heretofore tells about how Vetinari’s sword stick blade looks is one of those hilarious details that you could only pull off with a person who knows literally nothing about how swords work? (Which is more surprising in this world where they’re far more common to wield and carry.) The fact that Cosmo thinks the blade is flecked with red because it’s got blood on it when no self-respecting user of sharp weapons would ever leave blood on a blade—and also blood doesn’t stay red, but that strays even further from the point—is endlessly funny.

• Vetinari deciding to keep tabs on anyone who can do a crossword puzzle as well as him. That’s it, that’s the entire thought, along with a gif of me silently screaming. (He’s right, of course. That’s the kicker.)

Pratchettisms

Next week we’ll finish the book![end-mark]

The post Terry Pratchett Book Club: <i>Making Money</i>, Part III appeared first on Reactor.

Rereads and Rewatches Terry Pratchett Book Club

Terry Pratchett Book Club: Making Money, Part II

Back to Moist von Lipwig and the Royal Mint…

By Emmet Asher-Perrin

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Published on February 2, 2024

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This week, we are all subject to the whims of Mr. Fusspot, and why would we have it any differently.

Summary

A week previous, a man named Heretofore is nearly blackmailed by a master craftsman who has made him a duplicate of Lord Vetinari’s signet ring, and has the craftsman killed (though he doesn’t want to do it). Presently, Cosmo Lavish offers to buy Mr. Fusspot, which Moist refuses. He heads to the palace to find out if Lord Vetinari somehow made this happen, which the Patrician resents. Vetinari explains that Topsy did Moist a favor and that he needs to start his new job and make the city money. Moist heads to the bank and finds Sacharissa Crisplock waiting to interview him. He tells her that he plans to get rid of the gold and spruce the place up. Then he meets the canine chefs for Mr. Fusspot, Aimsbury and Peggy. Aimsbury can’t hear the word “garlic” without throwing a knife and speaking Quirmian before he comes back to himself. Then Moist is taken to his new apartments, a large and lovely space, and given his “master of the Royal Mint” hat, which is a sad, worn black top hat. Moist thinks about how to fix the bank and realizes that value is in the city itself. He starts making plans. The person who wanted Vetinari’s ring forged turns out to be Cosmo Lavish, who is trying to become Vetinari. Heretofore has been employed to get old items belonging to Vetinari, while Cranberry kills anyone who might give away the plot.

Adora Belle’s mining operation appears to have been successful in retrieving many more golems, puzzling the dwarfs. The Lavishes attend Topsy’s funeral, and Cosmo is given a hard time for “his side” of the family losing the bank. He realizes that Lipwig’s lack of history is the key to solving this problem, and so is Mr. Bent, provided he can get the man on his side. Moist takes the first dollar note to Tenth Egg Street to try it out on the merchants there and see if they’ll buy into the concept. They seem to like it, but still have difficulty with the idea of a bank not backed by gold, so Moist knows he still has more work to do. He gets into a cab in Losing Street containing Cosmo’s sister, Pucci, trying to catch him in a “honey trap”-looking situation. He jumps out the window, with Colon and Nobby on the street watching. Nobby tells Fred that no one will bet against Moist in his usual book for the Watch—they all think he’s going to win. Back at the bank, Gladys almost kills Moist by trying to give him a back rub, and the Times believes Moist is just the man to run the mint. A few people want to close their accounts after seeing the article… but hundreds more want to open them. Pucci Lavish tries to disrupt the scene, deriding Moist’s new bank notes; this ignites a bidding war to buy the one she has.

Mr. Bent doesn’t like what Moist is doing and doesn’t understand what’s needed of him in this new world. They interview people for loans; Moist lends a small about to Dibbler and a very large amount to Harry King, who is looking to consolidate his businesses. Mr. Bent is besides himself at how Moist is running things, but Moist points out that they’ve taken in a lot of money today, mostly from people he’d consider too poor to do business at the bank. He goes to Temper and Spools to ask if they can start making bills, but Mr. Spools doesn’t think they can manage it without major issues in forging and the like… not without the artist who Moist testified against for forging stamps, who’s about to be hanged. Cosmo goes to visit Mr. Bent at Mrs. Cake’s boarding house where the clerk lives and asks him to do something about Moist. At night, Moist steals a Watch uniform and takes paperwork forms he’s stolen from Spools’ office to get the forger out of prison. The man, by the name of Owlswick Jenkins, kicks him in the groin and runs off. Moist thinks on it and figures that the man’s a bit off and has probably gone back home. He find Jenkins in his old place, painting again. When Jenkins threatens to kill himself with poisonous paint rather than go back to jail, Moist talks to him of angels.

Entering through a secret door that only Igor knows about, Moist asks Igor to give Jenkins a shave and haircut to change his appearance. They change his name to Exorbit Clamp, and Moist asks the forger to design the first note, telling him all the various bits he’ll need to render (because the man can’t come up with it on his own). Moist heads to bed and is summoned to see Vetinari in the morning; the Patrician insists that Jenkins was hanged and Moist wonders if he didn’t accidentally steal the forger Vetinari had intended to keep for himself. Vetinari shows Moist his signet ring and notes all the strange deaths occurring around him lately, but Moist can’t figure out why any of it should be happening. The Patrician also asks Moist to lend the city a half million dollars. Igor helps the new Mr. Clamp store his old bad memories and Clamp has already designed the new note. On the floor of the bank, Moist runs into a figure from his past by the name of Cribbins. He gives the men in the Mint their new deal, where they look after the new printing press fellows from Temper and Spools and get nice new uniforms. They agree to the deal, to Bent’s dismay. Adora Belle arrives and takes Moist to the Unseen University to look inside the Cabinet of Curiosity, a thing that wizards wish she didn’t know they had. Bigger on the inside and full of about eleven dimensions, the cabinet once showed Adora Belle an ancient golem foot that matches the markings on the ones she just found…

Commentary

Not saying that it’s surprising, but it’s definitely bemusing how many of the Ankh-Morpork-centered stories have several arms branching from the main action, one of which is inevitably: Someone is enacting a poorly-conceived plot against Lord Vetinari that he may or may not know everything about, and while said plot should be about taking control of the city, there’s frequently some unhinged aspect to it that involves people wanting to somehow sap/rob/absorb his innate powers through increasingly desperate and hilarious means.

You know, we started out normal, with him getting shot. And then the slightly more involved poisoning plot. And then he basically deposes himself for a bit to stop a war from happening while Old Money guys grouse about it. And then a bunch of one-percenters find a guy who can easily pass for him by daylight and try to frame him for murder and embezzlement using the imposter. And now another one of those one-percenters has decided that he can somehow commune with the man through his belongings and then assume his power and abilities and position? Gotta love the escalation; it makes my heart so happy. And it’s the perfect sort of distraction against all the more serious workings of Moist figuring out how to make money… happen.

It’s second nature in the art of the con, but there’s such an ease and preternatural likability to Moist when he’s working that feels almost superhuman? We start the book and he’s more than a little bit pathetic, all the shine rubbed off him, and the instant that his brain starts turning over, the charisma reasserts itself at brute force. I can’t really think of another character who elicits that sort of reaction from me: I like him better when he’s working, when his back is up against the wall.

We get the rudimentary economics conversation when Moist goes on about potatoes being worth more than gold, which is a good place to start, and then a slightly more involved economics lesson as he starts to piece together the city’s value and the need to move away from gold. But again, money is being made fun in this context because it’s part of his con. Even Moist is aware of how he’s manipulating the system and people to his advantage, and as readers, we want to see him succeed because we already know him. You had to do the stories in this order—if Vetinari had started Moist out at the bank before the post office, it wouldn’t be as enjoyable of a ride.

With the newly minted Mr. Clamp, Moist basically gets his own Leonard de Quirm—someone he can rely on to create the complicated mechanisms to make his plans work. (Igor is helping, of course, because Igors always do. They are one of the greatest gifts Pratchett gave himself, an easy solution to any number of narrative problems because there’s very little they can’t figure out.) But we’re currently in the thick of it, and there are key tenets to how Moist operates that are true in cons, in business, and in life in general: Making something look good is half the battle to getting people invested; if change happens quickly enough, it doesn’t seem like change at all; being a bit “real” with people will always help them to trust you.

Moist pointedly gives his first two loans to the sort of people that make the city run, but on very different scales: Dibbler and Harry King. The bank wouldn’t have let either of them set foot inside before he took over, and the bank was wrong. But changing the system doesn’t mean it’s better now in this particular instance—it only means that it can take advantage of more people. Where that leads us will come clear as we continue…

Asides and little thoughts

• Yet again, the fatphobia in this book gets pretty egregious between the descriptions of Cosmo and Pucci. It feels repetitive to keep noting it, but it’s one of the few things Pratchett does that I can’t help but find disappointing. There’s comedy enough in the fact that Cosmo is forcing a ring that’s too small for him onto his hand! But there’s always this extra layer to the avarice with fatness that gets used, and they’re plain cheap shots (that are obvious to boot), particularly with how often it comes up.
• I think this is the first time it’s confirmed that Quirmians speak French? So Quirm is France, for all intents and purposes. Which is somehow weirder to me than all the other not-other-country parallels on the Disc.
• As a person with ADHD, it’s fairly obvious that Pucci Lavish has it. The way she bounces between topics is, uh, reminiscent, shall we say, of talking to my mother.
• Again, it’s so enjoyable to get character’s opinions on characters from other books, and Moist noting that William de Worde is likely the same age as him but writes editorials “that suggested his bum was stuffed with tweed” is a beautiful thing.
• In the annals of Vetinari’s carefully curated preferences toward nothingness, eating the egg white off your hard boiled egg while leaving the yolk is a new level of blandness, I salute him. (And also agree that the grain gravel Drumknott eats is worse.)
• I couldn’t find any evidence that the phrase “drop-dead gorgeous” actually came from people painting their faces with arsenic to look paler, as Moist suggests to Owlswick Jenkins. People did paint their faces that way, I just couldn’t find a correlation to the term drop-dead gorgeous. I’m assuming this was done on purpose, as a sort of anachronistic malaphor, for lack of a better way of putting it?

Pratchettisms

Next week we’ll read Chapters 7-9![end-mark]

The post Terry Pratchett Book Club: <i>Making Money</i>, Part II appeared first on Reactor.

Summary

There is a group lying in wait in the dark somewhere. Three weeks ago, Adora Belle Dearheart offered up a great deal of money to lease dwarf land for unknown reasons. Moist von Lipwig is already bored of his life and nearly gets caught scaling the Post Office Building (he’s part of a shadowy nighttime climbing fraternity). He’s an upstanding citizen now, with his picture in the paper, and calls to testify against conmen forging stamps. At a meeting with Lord Vetinari, he’s asked if he would like the opportunity to make some real money, but Moist insists that he’s very happy at the Post Office and scurries away. He goes back to work, looking through meeting minutes, signing forms, letting Tiddles the cat in and out of his office, walking through the place. The job isn’t exciting anymore. Gladys the golem informs him that Vetinari’s coach is waiting outside, and Moist keeps him waiting for a long while before breaking down and going to find out what this is all about. Vetinari informs him that he has a new proposition for Moist’s employment: master of the Royal Mint. He wants Moist to take control of the bank of Ankh-Morpork and literally make money for a living.

He’s certain that this will solve Moist’s current problem; his new job will be one of adventure and danger where he will never be bored. Moist asks what happened to the last men to run the Mint, and Vetinari informs him that they both died at old ages in their beds, but he’s sure Moist would do something to upset that balance. He asks after Miss Dearheart and her work with the golems; she’s currently checking on golems that might be mining on dwarf land carrying out their last orders. Vetinari introduces Moist to Mavolio Bent, the head cashier. Mr. Bent doesn’t much like Moist because he’s the creator of the “unsecured one-penny note”—being his stamps. Vetinari leaves the man to show him around, and Mr. Bent begins by fixing a clock on the floor that apparently loses one minute a week. He also shows Moist their gold reserves, explaining that coins are not gold, but a theoretical promise that the coin is worth a set amount of gold. Moist is taken to the Mint where the Bad Penny (an odd large treadmill) sits. Moist meets Mr. Shady, the hereditary foreman of the mint, who tells him how his position came to be and how much it costs to make the various coins, which is the reason the Mint doesn’t make nearly so much money as you might expect. They even employ families off site to make certain coins. (And if they work overtime, they have to work more overtime to pay the overtime.)

Moist and Bent discuss the purpose in using the gold standard, then head to meet the chairman, Mrs. Lavish. Her dog, Mr. Fusspot, takes an immediate liking to Moist, a rarity as far as she’s concerned. She has Mr. Bent take the dog for a walk, and beckons Moist closer so she can have a look at him. She knocks him to the ground and announces that he’s a thief and conman—but she likes him. She says that he can call her Topsy, and that Havelock sent him here to tell her how to run her bank. She tells him what she knows about the business, and then tells Mr. Bent to take Moist to Hubert to learn more. Moist learns that she has 51% of the bank’s shares—fifty to her and one percent left to Mr. Fusspot by her late husband. Mr. Bent shows Moist “his world” within the bank, and then takes him to Hubert. Hubert runs a system called the Glooper, which he calls an “analogy machine” that allows him to experiment with how the city changes and how that will affect the flow of money. He’s Mrs. Lavish’s nephew, and he and Moist get on well, but Mr. Bent warns him that most of the rest of Topsy’s family cannot be trusted—they are used to getting their own way and trying to have her declared insane.

Moist heads back to the Post Office and finds a clacks message from Adora saying that she’s heading back. He resolves not to get caught up in this banking business. He’ll be married to Miss Dearheart sometime soon, and dependable husbands don’t do any of this sort of thing. But he keeps thinking about how the stamps are being used as currency. Gladys brings him a meal and informs him that Lord Vetinari is downstairs. He comes down to find Vetinari helping the Blind Letters department and wondering how he feels about the bank. Moist insists that he is staying where he is, so Vetinari has Drumknott draw up paperwork to that effect and sign it. Mrs. Lavish dies in the night, and Moist gets a letter the next day threatening him though he doesn’t know who sent it. He’s informed that lawyers are downstairs. He briefly thinks of escaping his entire life, but Mr. Slant comes in with Nobby and Angua, and he’s informed that Mrs. Lavish left him Mr. Fusspot in her will. She also left the dog her shares in the bank, making him the chairman, and Moist his owner. If the dog dies, the shares will be distributed amongst the Lavish family. A letter from Topsy informs him that he’ll be paid handsomely for this service, but if he doesn’t do it or Mr. Fusspot dies, the Guild of Assassins will kill him. Moist is trapped. Everyone leaves, and he suits up Mr. Fusspot for his walk to go have words with Vetinari. A black carriage pulls up in front of the office and Moist jumps in, finding out too late that it is Cosmo Lavish’s carriage…

Commentary

Being a smart fellow, Pratchett did note that the subject of this book was fantasy in every direction, as the Discworld is a fantasy realm, and money is a fantasy we all agree to believe in.

There’s a reason they tend not to teach much by way of economics in public schools as you grow up, and it’s that, one has to assume—the knowledge that global economies are a shared societal hallucination built on deliberately byzantine systems intended to discourage any person not well-versed in finance from involving themselves. Of course, now we’re going to get the creation of a more robust economy from Mr. Lipwig, and the conman angle is meant to make that easier to stomach. It’s a smart twist, I’ll give Pratchett that, because it’s otherwise pretty hard to sell me on any story that is about people making that system chug along.

And it works because Vetinari rightly senses that you have to keep Moist busy or he’s liable to do something ridiculous to get that thrill he needs to keep existing. The dramatics the Patrician goes to on this one are so good because you can see him upping the stakes purely for the purpose of interesting the conman. He’s being deliberately more obtuse, more sneaky, more blunt, because he knows it’ll make the man uneasy and get the wheels turning. It doesn’t take much, after all. A few mentions of the stamps being currency here, a meeting with an extremely sharp old woman there…

Terrible as she and her whole family seem to be, I have an unyielding respect for women like Topsy Lavish. And there’s something special about being the sort of person Moist von Lipwig can relax around too. In the previous book, the only person who truly saw him was Reacher Gilt, a man you could by no means chill out around. But Topsy Lavish can take him by the arm and ask him what he’s really about, how he concocts his little schemes, and laugh the whole time. Too bad he didn’t get the chance to spend a little more time with a person like that. I think it’s probably good for him.

Extremely rolling my eyes at Moist trying to pretend he should stay on the straight and narrow path for Adora, though, when Mrs. Lavish figures out what she’s after two sentences into a description of the woman: “A contrast, I trust.” Miss Dearheart doesn’t like you for your staid, sensible choices, guy. But then, he’s looking for any excuse at that point, any reason not to do the thing Lord Vetinari wants him to do.

The setup to this story moves along with an enviable ease, and you can see the trap well before it snaps shut. Even if you don’t suspect precisely how Mrs. Lavish will get Moist wrapped up in the bank, you know it’s bound to happen. And you know that Vetinari is happily watching for the places where Drumknott’s pencils ought to be, almost like a parent checking in on their depressed child.

Asides and little thoughts:

• I don’t suppose we could introduce Miss Maccalariat to the concept of the “invisible default,” right? Because that’s the whole reason the golems are presumed male despite having none of the functioning aspects of maleness. It’s not as though Gladys is likely to mind (since the golems don’t really have gender), but it is exceedingly silly.
• Why are banks built to looks like temples, Moist wonders. Oh, buddy. In this case, the building genuinely was a temple, albeit one without an assigned deity, but the reasoning here isn’t hard to parse. What is money but the cleverest form of faith—i.e. the sort that gets to pretend it’s utterly rational and in no way powered by anything so wooly as belief.
• To my recollection, the expense of creating coins has been a real problem throughout history. In the U.S. it costs nearly three times the value of a penny to make a penny at the moment? So the bank’s problems are all too real, unfortunately.
• Topsy’s husband “always said that the only way to make money out of poor people is by keeping them poor.” A thing to keep in mind at all times. Especially whenever anyone tries to blame the plight of the poor on poor people.
• Moist makes a lot of logic leaps in his potential escape plan before deciding that he’ll probably create the persona that could go live at Mrs. Arcanum’s, which is making me wonder how well that house is known to your average single gentleman around the city.

Pratchettisms:

Next week we’ll read Chapters 4-6![end-mark]

The post Terry Pratchett Book Club: <i>Making Money</i>, Part I appeared first on Reactor.

Summary

We are reading Where’s My Cow? through the vantage point of Young Sam and his father (less young Sam). The story begins with the similar framing we’re given in Thud! explaining that Sam Vimes is sure to be home at six o’clock every evening to read Sam his book. Sam Vimes reads the book, and we’re told how well he does the various noises for all the animals—a lovely bit of meta-commentary within the story itself.

But Vimes knows that the story is silly, and tells Young Sam that the subject of the book should report their lost cow to the City Watch. He thinks there should be a different version of the book that more accurately reflects his son’s experiences in the city where he’s growing up—not the country that he’s never seen. The very next night, he makes up a new version of book, about the reader looking for his father. He meets all sorts of strange folk though the city and learns their funny catchphrases. Suddenly, Sybil enters the room, wanting to be sure that Vimes isn’t getting Young Sam too excited. Sam pretends to go back to the regular version of the text.

When Sybil has gone, Vimes finishes the story with the subject of the tale finding his daddy, who arrests people in the name of the law. Then he tucks Young Sam in and bids him goodnight.

Commentary

The picture book version of Where’s My Cow? is illustrated by Melvyn Grant, and it’s those illustrations that really make the whole exercise worth it. There are three distinct styles at play within the artwork: the illustrations from the original book itself, which are simple line drawings; the world outside, which is rendered more realistically, but also drab in color; and Sam’s nursery, which is also rendered in a realistic fashion, but full of color and light and anthropomorphized movement of inanimate objects. By the end of the story, all these styles combine on each page in an avalanche of movement and silliness.

There’s the additional enjoyment of seeing various Discworld characters so fully rendered: Vetinari, Dibbler, Detritus, and so on. (And Sybil, my beloved, with her looming figure, so commanding and affectionate at the same time.) You can even see Gaspode with Foul Ole Ron. And then there’s the meta-fun of seeing the cover of the book inside the book itself as you’re reading the book. So you are being made into the snake eating its own tail, as it were. You’re participating in circle.

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Where’s My Cow?

Terry Pratchett

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Where's My Cow?

Terry Pratchett

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The movement within Sam’s nursery is perfectly indicative of the imagination of childhood and how alive our surroundings can seem when we’re very young and imbue anything with a personality. We’ve got a family dragon following them around, but Sam’s toys are alive, and so are his books, and all the furniture as well. Even the paint on the walls comes to life. On the last page, we can see that Sam’s toys are going to sleep along with him—but that painting with the flowers above his crib is still looking awfully three-dimensional, popping out of its frame. Probably because that’s always how Sam perceives it.

Vimes is very clearly based on Pete Postlethwaite, which Pratchett always insisted was the Sam Vimes in his head. Grant gets a lot of mileage out of that by both being a great illustrator and having a great subject. Postlethwaite was a very expressive fellow, after all.

Ultimately, however, this is a book about exactly what Vimes would want it to be about: a father enjoying time with his son. Every page is plastered with images of them together, having fun and making each other laugh. Because some things are important, as he says. And if you happen to read it to your own kids (or share it with people you care for), you can participate in that ritual as well.

Asides and little thoughts:

• Melvyn Grant has done illustrations for plenty of books, but his most interesting credits are definitely his Iron Maiden album covers. He did five of them, including Fear of the Dark.
• There’s an illustration of Pratchett on the wall of Sam’s nursery (you can see him on the last page), which would make him one of Sybil’s relatives presumably within the story? I wonder which one…
• Okay, but I posit that if Pete Postlethwaite was the person Pratchett envisioned for Vimes and he is no longer with us, the logical successor to that mantle is Christopher Eccleston. (It’s difficult because they’re both too tall to my mind, but Eccleston is still the right fit from Postlethwaite.)

Pratchettisms:

Next week we’ll start Making Money! We’ll read Chapters 1-3.

The post Terry Pratchett Book Club: <i>Where’s My Cow?</i> appeared first on Reactor.

Yes, thank you.

Recap

A child is left on the doorstep of the church on Ruby Road, and is named for it. Years later, that child is Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson), who is currently being interviewed for Long Lost Family by Davina McCall (playing herself) in hopes of finding out who her parents might be. Following this, she has a string of terrible luck, which she attributes to clumsiness. While playing keyboard in her band at a local club, she spots the Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) on the dance floor. He catches a glass that she’s about the drop and tells her that this isn’t just human error, but something much worse. Later, the Doctor saves Ruby from a falling snowman decoration, but it falls on him instead. On Christmas Eve, Ruby arrives home to be told by foster mother Carla (Michelle Greenidge) that they’re getting a new foster infant today. A child is brought to them by the name of Lulubelle, coincidentally having the birthday as Ruby. Carla goes out to get supplies for the baby before the shops close, leaving Ruby in charge. Outside, a neighbor Mrs Flood (Anita Dobson) is complaining to another neighbor Abdul (Hemi Yeroham) that he must be responsible for putting the blue police box on the sidewalk.

Ruby gets a call from Davina McCall letting her know that they couldn’t find any trace of her parents. She also wants to know if Ruby’s been having terrible luck, because she’s been having a horrifying string of it since their interview. She’s killed suddenly by a falling Christmas tree while they’re on the phone. There’s noise through the baby monitor, and Ruby heads to the nursery to find the baby missing. The skylight is open, so she climbs through it and find goblins stealing Lulubelle. She jumps onto a hanging ladder into the sky and gets swept away. The Doctor appears, jumping across the rooftops to ask her what she’s doing, and jumps into the ladder with her. He’s got a special pair of gloves he designed himself that focus his weight into the glove, allowing them to stay on without exertion. They both climb up the ladder into a ship in the sky, and are promptly captured and tied up by the goblins. The Doctor tells Ruby that the goblins are creatures of coincidence and luck, that it gives them power, and that their ship is powered by ropes, which he is trying to learn that language of as well. He slips their bonds and they make it into the ventilation system.

As they’re crawling along, they hear a music number for Janis Goblin (Christina Rotondo) as Lulubell is moved along a conveyor belt toward the Goblin King, who will begin the baby feast. The Doctor and Ruby fall onto the conveyor from above before this can happen, and the Doctor asks why they’ve stopped the music, beginning the song anew. He and Ruby grab the baby and the Doctor uses his gloves in reverse, making them heavier so they slide back down to Ruby’s home quickly. They put the baby back in her crib, and the Doctor suggests that they search for anything in the house that could cause bad luck, and in doing so learns about Ruby’s family—Carla has fostered 33 kids but Ruby is the only one who stayed with her permanently, and Carla’s mother Cherry (Angela Winter) lives with them in an attic flat that she won’t leave due to the rent being fixed. Carla returns from shopping and Ruby tells her that they can’t find her parents. She comforts her daughter and tells her that she’s happy to have Ruby all to herself. The Doctor admits that he was adopted too—a coincidence. And that he doesn’t know who his true parents are either—yet another one. They begin to stack up until a crack forms down the ceiling the flat, which the Doctor assumes is the goblins taking their leave.

Suddenly the cracks heal… and Ruby has vanished. What’s more, Carla never fostered all those children, and only takes them in occasionally for money. Cherry is considerably more ill. The Doctor realizes that the goblins followed the coincidences back in time to take Ruby instead of Lulubell, and heads back to stop them. He finds the ship ladder on the roof of the church, grabs it and reverses the gloves again, dragging the ship down until the spire drives up and right through the Goblin King. The ship dissipates and the Doctor catches baby Ruby and leaves her in front of the church. He sees Ruby’s mother walking away, and heads back to 2023, finding everything has been put right, including the awful crack in the ceiling. Then he remembers to go back and stop Davina McCall from being murdered by a tree. He stands outside Ruby’s home and wonders if maybe he’s the bad luck, then heads back to the TARDIS after being wished well by Mrs Flood. Ruby works out that the Doctor must be a time traveler after the comments he’s made, and she heads outside. Mrs Flood nods toward the TARDIS, and Ruby walks in and asks the Doctor who he is.

After the TARDIS dematerializes, Mrs Flood breaks the fourth wall and asks the viewer “Never seen a TARDIS before?” and grins.

Commentary

The Doctor sang a musical number. They. They did that. They didn’t even hesitate, just dropped him into it. He sounded incredible.

And I love that we already know Ruby is in a band, so you buy that she could seamlessly pick that up, too. Is this the first time a companion has been in a band? I think so? I love this.

Episodes that introduce a new Doctor alongside a new companion are tricky: There’s so much to do and so little time to do it in. But this episode balances it well in part due to the sheer force of nature that is Ncuti Gatwa. Fifteen is so vivid in every single scene, so captivating to watch. We’re getting an even better sense of the personality now, and there’s real grace here, with a wonderful heaping of excuse-me-I’m-working-here to keep things sharp. Coming off of Fourteen and Thirteen, who are both champion wafflers, it’s hilarious to see.

It occurs to me that Ruby might be the first companion who works out that the Doctor is a time traveler on her own? I can’t remember anyone doing that before now. That said, we know Ruby a little less than usual after an introduction—we don’t even entirely know her reasons for stepping aboard the TARDIS aside from curiosity. So here’s hoping we get to know her much better as we go along, but the chemistry between her and Fifteen is great so far.

There’s just one thing that niggles at me in a decidedly bad way; while I understand the impetus to suggest that Ruby is incredibly important to Carla and Cherry’s life, I do not like the suggestion that without her, Carla would become this embittered and cold person who only fosters for the money. There’s a way that you could suggest that their lives are significantly altered for the worse without seeming to say that she needed one of those children to be “hers” in order to be this better version of herself. Foster parents are a key part of a very difficult system in the countries that have them, and hopefully understand the importance of providing stability to children who they will likely not get to adopt as their own. I don’t believe that a woman who is this adamant about taking care of kids in need would become the complete opposite sort of person because she never got to “keep” one of them? It’s a hamfisted way of showing the negative impact of Ruby’s absence, even going so far as to suggest that Carla loves her own mother less due to this change. Nah.

Like, I get the impulse to ghost-of-Christmas-future a Christmas episode, but that wasn’t it.

Having said that, the Doctor’s reaction is a beautiful thing because he won’t stand for that version of events. He is invested in this family and how good they are to each other and all the children who cross their threshold, clearly in response to all he’s recently learned about himself. The way he mentions being adopted, as though he’s suddenly remembered it. The way it instantly bonds him to Ruby despite spending very little time with her compared to your usual first companion encounter. It’s going to be an interesting road for the two of them going forward, and I’m hoping we’ll see plenty more of Carla and Cherry too.

Spearing the Goblins King feels a bit harsh for the Doctor, but the episode seems deliberately unclear on exactly how alive the goblins are in any case—especially since they just evaporate on the king’s death and seem to be creatures that feed on coincidence and luck, which are conceptual. Perhaps they are as well, as a people?

We’re getting plenty of seeds for what’s coming—for one, we never see Ruby’s mother. And you knew something was off about Mrs Flood from go. In the first scene, she just seems like a casually racist neighbor, but the shift in her demeanor when she sees the Doctor is marked, suddenly warm and kindly. There’s a long list of potential suspects, of course. She could be the next iteration of the Master; Ruby’s mother; a member of the Toymaker’s legions; “The Boss” that the Meep mentioned. She could also be any combination of those things, or something else entirely. So that’s a fun little mystery to look out for as we go.

Time and Space and Sundry

• Long Lost Family is, of course, a real UK show that Davina McCall has been hosting for over a decade, so that was a fun bit to throw in there.

• He said MAVITY again, I am going to harp on this for all time. There is no gravity, only mavity.

• The Doctor uses very Holmesian logic to figure out that cop is about to propose. It’s cute of him. Also, the irritation at the woman pushing a pram at midnight, he just has no patience for nonsense and I love that about him. (But some kids want walks in the middle of the night, sorry, Doctor. Even if that’s not what she was doing.)

• Everyone hates the name Lulubelle except the Doctor and that is so damn cute.

• The Doctor slips his ropes after mentioning a hot summer with Harry Houdini, but while this may be the first time it’s been suggested that there was a “hot” factor to that prolonged meeting, the Doctor has mentioned Houdini kinda forever? The Third and Fourth Doctor both use tricks that they claimed to have learned from Houdini (in “Planet of the Spiders” and “Revenge of the Cybermen” respectively), Donna asks the Tenth Doctor about meeting him, and both Eleven and Thirteen make mention of tricks they learned from him as well—with Thirteen using one to escape being drowned as a witch.

• It feels like such a fun little nod to how the character has grown that the Doctor used to be very difficult about people’s mothers and now is not only deeply invested in Carla’s life but also flirting with Cherry? I mean, he’s right, but that’s a big step for him.

• Here’s hoping that Fifteen gets this many costume changes all the time. Yes.

Doctor Who returns in Spring 2024… see you then.

The post Doctor Who Learns the Language of Luck in “The Church on Ruby Road” appeared first on Reactor.

Christmas is a fascinating amalgam of a holiday made up of a great big storm of European traditions, so there is obviously more than one answer to this question. But when the holiday blues set in and it feels like there is nothing more to Christmas than fighting with relatives and struggling to find perfect gifts, it’s as good a time as any to remember what Santa Claus really brings us every December: Magic.

Origins of Saint Nicholas and Sinterklaas and maybe Odin aside, the modern day lore around Santa Claus can be just as captivating… but it often gets lost this time of year. We’re all so caught up in the bustle and frenetic energy that encompass the season, everything around it fades into a cacophony of carols that we wish we didn’t have to listen to in the mall. Are the greeting cards out? Can I even send cards this year? Can I find everyone on my list something that they’ll love and won’t regift the next day? How many parties do I have to attend? How much money have I already spent? Am I making the eggnog this year or the pie or the ham? It seems that the older we get the more the stresses pile on, determined to sap the enjoyment out of something that used to be suffused with excitement and tradition and safety.

The mythology of Santa Claus was always important to me personally; as a kid who never attended religious gatherings of any kind, Santa Claus was pretty much the point of Christmas. It took me some years of distance to actually notice the investment I had in Santa as a figure, a cultural fulcrum that I had hung so many hopes and dreams upon as a child. In an effort to work it out, I thought back over all of my favorite stories featuring the jolly old guy and finally cracked the code: In every one, Santa brought magic into people’s lives, not gifts.

***

I’ve written about my love for The Polar Express around these parts before; needless to say that book by Chris Van Allsburg probably shaped this expectation in me. The idea that a bell from Santa’s sleigh could only be heard by people who truly believed in the existence of Santa’s Workshop at the North Pole? That this was the item a young protagonist would ask for upon being granted the First Gift of Christmas? It made the holiday about something very different for me. It was about asserting my own belief in favor of magic in my life. It became less ephemeral and turned toward the tangible, something I could grasp and control for myself. No one could make me believe in the North Pole—I had to make the decision on my own, and properly-addressed gifts under a douglas fir tree had nothing to do with that.

***

The Christmas classic Miracle on 34th Street has much the same message. The character of Kris Kringle—the real Santa Claus—becomes the hired Santa for Macy’s Department Store because he notes that their current actor is drunk on the job. While consumerism is still at the heart of the tale, taking place in one of New York’s most famous holiday shopping destinations and dealing with a tidal wave of parents anxious to get the right toys for their children, all the basic themes center around love and connection and the power of belief. Kringle’s honesty in his position as the Macy’s Santa leads to him recommending that customers go to the rival department store Gimbels when they have a better product (because the real Santa would never mislead you on quality at the very least). This policy leads to a reconciliation between the owners of each department store, two men who should have buried the hatchet long ago.

Then there is Kringle’s friendship with the Macy’s event director Doris and her daughter Susan, a girl who stopped believing in fairy tales well ahead of schedule. While the storytelling tropes here are pretty dated—we’re supposed to buy that a mother would take issue with her child believing in any form of fantasy because of a bad divorce—Susan’s journey in the film is all about her taking up the mantle of the believer. She tells Kringle that she wants a house, which seems a tall order even for a Christmas wish, but houses are commonly code where kids are concerned. What Susan truly wants is a home, and by the end she gets her wish; her mother is going marry the lawyer Fred Gailey and he decides to buy Susan’s dream house thanks to a helpful nudge in the right direction (a driving route suggested to avoid traffic) by Santa Claus. Again, belief in something magical is what drives the story—Santa cannot make your heart’s desire appear out of thin air, but he can set the world to rights when you don’t close yourself off to the possibilities.

***

Even The Nightmare Before Christmas seems intent on billing Santa as a truth-teller and bringer of joy rather than a purveyor of stuff. While he spends his time in our world undoing Jack Skellington’s damage and delivering the right gifts to children all over the world, his time in Halloween Town is spent grumbling at the Pumpkin King for refusing to listen to Sally (his secret one true love), then returning before the night is through to deliver their very first snowfall. His idea of a gift to the oddballs of Halloween Town is a new experience, something that they can share with each other and play games in.

***

Another unlikely addition to my personal Christmas mythos is none other than The Santa Clause. Admittedly, I was not much of a Tim Allen or Home Improvement fan as a kid, but I was still completely captivated by the idea of “Santa” being a legitimate occupation that had to be undertaken by any old citizen should they find the sleigh unattended. Scott Calvin accidentally takes on that role when his son asks him to put on the former Santa’s suit and get in his sleigh. On arriving at the North Pole, Calvin admits to the elf Judy that he doesn’t not believe what he is seeing. Judy counters by telling him that children don’t need to see the North Pole to know it exists… they simply know it.

The concept of engaging with the magic of Christmas is elevated to an actual form of faith in this narrative, one that deliberately steps away from the focus on things; Scott’s ex-wife and her second husband later relate stories of when they stopped believing in Santa, and for both of them it was due to not getting an expected gift. Their focus on the material aspect of Christmas is what ultimately robs them of their belief as small children. Scott’s son Charlie never loses that faith because for him, Christmas is forever transformed into a time and place where he is finally able to connect with his father. Christmas is truly about family because Christmas is his family.

***

The final tale that always ran near and dear to my heart came from “Bloom County” author Berkeley Breathed, starring the ever hopeful penguin Opus: A Wish for Wings That Work. The picture book was transformed into an animated special on the same year that it was released, but I always preferred the printed version (and apparently so did Breathed). Opus spends the start of the tale depressed over his inability to fly despite having wings. He tries to build a machine that will do the job to no avail and eventually makes a Christmas wish for “wings that will go.” On Christmas Eve, Santa happens to crash into the lake near Opus’s house. Being a natural swimmer, Opus gets Santa to safety but a thankful Mr. Claus still can’t make the penguin’s wings do what they weren’t built to do. The next morning, Opus wakes to a true Christmas miracle—a cadre of ducks who thank him by picking him up as they take flight, granting his Christmas wish.

No sack full of artfully written letters could have made Opus fly—Santa does not simply wave wands and make things happen. Opus gets his wish by hoping as hard as he can, staying proactive, and being a good and helpful soul. His wish is not for a thing, but a desire to experience something completely beyond his scope of understanding, and he achieves it by performing a sort of reverse-Christmas, if you will; doing something for Santa Claus, rather than expecting something from him. Santa provides the magic needed to make it all happen by giving Opus the opportunity to earn what he so dearly wants.

And the next morning, he can fly.

***

These were the tales that shaped my views of the holiday, and they are the ones I return to every time I feel myself turning cynical. When the world seems bleak and the widows are dark by 5pm, I shuffle home to bake a batch of cookies and remember that Santa Claus is not coming to town to bring me a sack of stuff to clutter my walls with—

—he’s a wizard who stops by once a year to help reignite my wonder for the world.

Originally published in December 2016.

Emmet Asher-Perrin would also like wings that work, please. You can bug her on Twitter and Tumblr, and read more of her work here and elsewhere.

The post The Real Magic of Santa Claus appeared first on Reactor.

Summary

The winter gets worse and worse and all Tiffany can do is help Annagramma get better, and use the cornucopia to make sure there’s enough food to see people through; all the witches are running ragged trying to keep their villages alive through the bitter cold. The Wintersmith has finally completed a body and knows what it is to be a man. Granny wakes Tiffany one day and tells her she should go home and be with her people, and that she thinks she expected too much of the girl, thinking she’d come into Summer’s power. Except, she points out that Tiffany did make an oak sapling, and tells her that she suspects Tiffany will be stopping by Miss Treason’s cottage on her way home; Tiffany realizes that Granny knew what Tiffany and the other girls had been doing all along, and had probably planned it that way. Tiffany goes to Miss Treason’s and finds notes on her grave that villagers are leaving to get her help. The Wintersmith shows up, but Annagramma appears in full stereotypical witch garb (she bought the whole Boffo catalogue) to bat him away from Tiffany. She loads Tiffany onto her own broom—as Tiffany is a bit delirious from panic and lack of sleep—and sends her home.

Granny sends the Feegle to train Roland to be a Hero for the story, and to send him to the Underworld to fetch the Summer Lady. Tiffany continues her journey home and stops briefly at Mrs. Umbridge’s to sleep; she dreams of the Summer Lady telling her that she’s ruined everything. When she wakes, Mrs. Umbridge is there and she’s got all the mail for Tiffany that’s been held up, including three letters from Roland and a very expensive paint box. Tiffany makes it the rest of the way home while Granny and Nanny send the Feegles to their task. Once Tiffany is home she feels more herself; she gets to see her family, and feels the ground beneath her feet, and she paints with her new paint box. She knows that people from the Chalk will be asking for her help soon, and it feels like a good day. The Feegle show up in Roland’s room and realize that he doesn’t have any practical fighting experience. They bring him into the armory and get into a suit of armor so that he has someone to practice against. At home, Tiffany’s mother is confused about her inability to use magic to do housecleaning. Roland stands up to his aunts and pauses his fight training to see his father—if he doesn’t see the man every day, his father forgets who he is.

Wentworth, Tiffany’s brother, catches a very large pike from the river, and Tiffany cleans it out for supper the following day. As she finishes cleaning it, she goes to remove the lure and finds it’s actually her silver horse. The Wintersmith knows where she is, and she will have to face him, here, in her home. But first, she finds her father so they can see to their flock of sheep. And with that, we catch up to the start of the book: Tiffany has been taken by the Wintersmith and wakes in a palace he has made for her. Tiffany tries to cow him, but he’s getting better at being a man, and insists that he is keeping her safe from death here. The Feegles get Roland kitted out and are sending him to the Underworld to find the Summer Lady. He encounters bogles, and only manages to survive the encounter because he’s too scared to run. Rob tells him that’s alright, and they make it all the way to the ferry, where Death is waiting to take them across. (Death is not happy to see the Feegle again.) Roland gets rid of his sword because the Feegle admit it’s no use against the bogles. They tell him he’ll have to kiss Summer to wake her; Roland gets to her and she looks just like Tiffany.

The Wintersmith has finally worked out that Tiffany is not the Summer Lady. He promises to bring summer to the Chalk to make Tiffany happy and then they will be happy. Roland retrieves the Summer Lady and fights off the bogles with a sword made of light that he creates in his own head, that is never too heavy. Tiffany knows that the Wintersmith cannot be human because he constructed himself according to the folk song but cannot understand the last three lines because they are not things to build himself from, but attributes he cannot possess. She kisses him and brings down the sun, ending the story. The Summer Lady comes to retrieve her crown from Tiffany and means to give her a reward, but Tiffany refuses: Witches don’t accept payment. The Summer Lady shows Tiffany the beauty and terror of summer, warning her to fear it as much as winter. Tiffany visit Nanny Ogg to tell her the whole story, slips in to see that Annagramma is getting on alright, then heads to Granny Weatherwax’s, and tries to call her on the set-up with Annagramma. Granny doesn’t react. She asks about Tiffany’s new ring, made from the nail the Wintersmith used to become human. Then she brings Tiffany to the Morris dance in Lancre, and Tiffany asks her how to move pain out of a body so she can help the Baron. Granny tells her she’s playing with fire, but seems pleased at Tiffany’s choices. Tiffany sees Summer in the dance, and gives the iron ring to the Fool.

Commentary

Tiffany spends this story in the throes of growing up, and the whole conceit is framed as a romance… but ultimately ends with compassion. And this is true for the previous story as well, with the hiver, but it’s more personal here, of course. Because the Wintersmith believed he was in love with her, but also because she understands better what his mistake was in trying to make himself human, the aspects he would always lack.

There’s one line from the Wintersmith that is underplayed, but actually hit me the hardest, when he says that he and Tiffany will be together and happy: “Happiness is when things are correct.” The gaping flaw in that thought, partly being that plenty of people do think that’s the definition of happiness, but also that imposing “correctness” on the idea of happiness is in itself utterly backward. Ouch.

I also do love the moment when the Wintersmith palace realm creates that dress for Tiffany and we get this:

She was shocked, then angry. Then she wished she had a mirror, felt guilt about that, and went back to being angry again. And resolved that if by chance she did find a mirror, the only reason she’d look in it would be to check how angry she was.

Just the extremely relatable feeling of not having time for this nonsense! But being young and curious and kind of wishing that you did.

The idea that Tiffany’s formative romance, or formative idea of romance (because the Wintersmith is a concept more than a sentient being) is fundamentally tragic seems important as well. Whether it’s because she’s a witch, or because she’s more aligned to Esme Weatherwax’s manner of doing the job, it’s a clue to readers about the sort of adult Tiffany will become. While I appreciate that it feels entirely right for Tiffany, I always want a bit more of Nanny’s perspective on things like this. Just a little, for balance.

There’s the “reckoning” language that gets more prominent as the story finishes, with Tiffany thinking the word more and more frequently whenever she is angry, and I love how dramatic it is? Tiffany’s anger is always her clearest emotion, too, which is so refreshing to see both for the rarity of this being allowed to young women in fiction, but also for how it focuses her. When Tiffany is angry, she knows what she needs, what she has to do. Anger provides clarity. Which is a commonality among Pratchett’s protagonists, but I particularly love the way he executes it in her.

And the way these books seamlessly weave the Feegle plots in, much in the manner Pratchett uses with the university wizards: They’re here to cause mayhem and make jokes, but they’re so enjoyable that you’re never really sorry about it?

These endings with Tiffany and Granny, though… they bring the story back around to its heart, yet again. These moments when you can see how proud Granny is of Tiffany, how comforted she is in knowing that someone like her will be around when she’s gone, and the genuine childlike joy we get from Esme when she shares things with the girl. It anchors these stories in something far deeper than simple coming-of-age mechanics. Being a witch is so much more than that, after all.

Asides and little thoughts:

• FTW being for “Friendly To Witches” is excellent. And the “witch sign” to let people know about it is, of course, similar to the Hobo Code, a way that travelers used to leave each other notes made of symbols to help each other find safe places to rest and eat.

• Orpheo and Euniphon are, of course, just the Disc version of Orpheus and Eurydice, which gets reenacted by Roland here when he retrieves the Summer Lady. That’s why Rob tells him not to look back, of course, the tragic mistake Orpheus makes when enacting his own rescue.

• “He was great at air sword.” The entire bit about Roland’s difficulty with the heaviness of real swords… as a person who adores stage combat, but doesn’t have fully working wrists, and is also a bit small for your average broadsword, I feel all of Roland’s complaints in my bones. Literally.

• Rob on this particular Underworld: ’This one used tae be called Limbo, ye ken, ‘cuz the door was verra low.” How dare he make that joke. It is so good.

Pratchettisms:

The woods weren’t silent. They were holding their breath.

A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.

Before, he hadn’t been apart; he’d been a part, a part of the whole universe of tug and pressure, sound and light, flowing, dancing. He’d run storms against mountains forever, but he’d never known what a mountain was until today.

You couldn’t make a picture by pouring a lot of paint into a bucket. If you were human, you knew that.

Okay, one of them was a cheese that rolled around of its own accord, but nobody was perfect.

It was easier here, and because it was easier it was worse, because he was bringing winter into her heart.

There are times when everything that you can do has been done and there’s nothing for it now but to curl up and wait for the thunder to die down.

We’ve got a break into the new year, but we’ll be back in 2024 with Where’s My Cow?

The post Terry Pratchett Book Club: Wintersmith, Part III appeared first on Reactor.

There’s just one problem. At no point should you apply that sensibility to the character of Willy Wonka.

As a film, Wonka is trying to have it several ways: It wants to be a classic musical. It want to be a prequel. It wants to be a Paul King film. It wants to be a heartwarming tale of those in need for once triumphing over avarice. It probably wants to start a franchise, too. It manages none of these successfully because the movie’s focus and worldbuilding are all over the place, and that’s only the beginning of its troubles.

Willy Wonka (Timothée Chalamet) has traveled the world for seven years after the death of his mother, and has finally come to the city where the Galeries Gourmet—the epicenter of the world’s greatest chocolate companies—sell sweets to the masses. Willy means to do the same but Msrs. Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Fickelgruber (Matthew Baynton), and Prodnose (Matt Lucas) head up a Chocolate Cartel that involves both the police and the clergy to run any hopefuls out of town. Willy stays the night at Mrs. Scrubitt’s (Olivia Colman), but he misses the fine print of his stay, and winds up an indentured laundry servant along with the orphan Noodle (Calah Lane), Abacus Crunch (Jim Carter), Piper Benz (Natasha Rothwell), Larry Chucklesworth (Rich Fulcher), and Lottie Bell (Rakhee Thakrar). But Willy isn’t easily daunted and quickly comes up with a plan to sneak out and sell his chocolate in the hopes of buying everyone’s freedom.

The indentured servitude plot line is meant to avoid an icky little fact about the Wonka name: The character is, when all is said and done, a very good businessman. But making a movie where one guy wins at chocolate-selling over all the other guys who are good at chocolate-selling does not a beloved protagonist make. In any case, Wonka is aiming to be about something deeper than succeeding at business without really trying—it wants to be about family. Noodle doesn’t have one and Willy is hoping that if he succeeds in sharing chocolate with the world, he’ll see his dearly departed mother again (because she promised she’d be with him when he achieved that goal, you see).

The other thing that Willy Wonka is—being a truly unique inventor—is completely scrapped in this tale, by the way. This version of Wonka wanted to be a magician before he decided to become a chocolatier, and so his ability to make fantastic chocolate is no longer the purview of his actual imagination. (You know, that famous song from the 1971 Gene Wilder film? The core of the ethos, you might say?) Rather, Wonka’s delights are merely conveyed by discovery and magic. Not magician-magic mind you, though he does do a few sleight-of-hand tricks in the film, but actual magic of some sort that is never adequately explained. For example, Wonka seems to have an endless supply of the ingredients he needs to make his chocolates… except for one point when he doesn’t, necessitating a trip to the zoo for giraffe milk. The rest of the time, he can pull whatever he wants out of thin air, in any amount or volume. It trims the stakes right off of the story because there’s no work involved in anything Wonka creates—he only has to snap his fingers and make things so.

The effect turns the character into an entirely different beloved children’s hero. That is to say, Wonka’s entire shtick throughout the film is stolen wholesale from Mary Poppins: He has a bottomless hat full of things; his antics cause people to fly and his presence makes the world markedly better and more magical; he’s trying to help a little girl find her place in the world. It’s a shame that King and his cowriter Simon Farnaby either didn’t notice what they were cribbing, or didn’t make more of an effort on that front, because one thing that the movie should have stolen from Poppins was the vantage point—if this was the story they meant to tell, it should have been focused entirely on Noodle from the start.

There are moments where the film comes together for a spell, and that is entirely the work of Neil Hannon’s musical numbers. The songs are largely cute, snappy, and well-arranged, some of them even harkening back to movie musicals of old. Numbers “Scrub Scrub” and the villainous “Sweet Tooth” give the film a few brief interludes of pure fun. The one place where the film seems to become the movie it meant to be is during a duet between Wonka and Noodle at the zoo, where she sings about not wanting to believe things might get better, while he nonsense rhymes her name in song to cheer her up. It’s aggravating that the film doesn’t focus on Calah Lane nearly enough when she is the person who elevates the whole exercise into something far more poignant, and sometimes even manages to drag her costar along with her.

Which brings us to the most awkward problem Wonka has: These days, movies often need a big name attached to get made at all, and no one is bigger at the moment than Timothée Chalamet. And painful as it is to say, he doesn’t have the chops required for the character. He could have tried something entirely different, put his own unique stamp on the role, but there’s simply not enough oddness in the man to make for a decent meal. Every moment where Wonka gets kooky you can see him acting, and it’s enough to throw you out of the action entirely. The only moments when he seems comfortable in the character is when he’s acting opposite Lane, making the choice not to center her character even more of an insult. But even then—he’s not Willy Wonka.

Sheer bad taste brings the film even lower at several points. There is a fat joke that runs the entire length of the film, where Keegan-Michael Key’s chief of police grows in size as his chocolate habit is exploited by the Chocolate Cartel for comedic effect. The movie comes by the plot line honestly, of course; author Roald Dahl was known for rampant fatphobia in his books, among other awful things. But the fact that Wonka felt the need to center such a gag is just as painful as listening to children and their parents cackling about it in the theater.

And, of course, this throws light on another unfortunate choice in the storytelling; Chocolate-eating is largely framed as an addiction throughout the film. The purveyors are a “cartel,” they’ve ensnared the chief of police and the clergy by bribing them with chocolate, and there’s a vault of chocolate beneath the city that the cartel keep sequestered as a means of paying off anyone who tries to prevent their dealings. The movie doesn’t seem to realize that this choice actively makes chocolate into a bad thing. (Which could have been interesting if they were engaging with that! They’re not.) When Willy gives Noodle her first taste of chocolate, she tells him that she wishes he hadn’t because now she’ll be sad for all the days she doesn’t have it. The narrative does have a great big button to wrap up this issue: chocolate isn’t about the confection itself, but about our bonds with others. Which feels entirely trite as an answer to the rampant abuse and dependence we’ve seen throughout the film, but sure.

And this is before really getting into the prequel angle, which the film is adamant about pressing despite the fact that it doesn’t make one lick of sense. We seem to have entered into an era where folks can “prequelize” a story with a few key ties just for the purpose of playing on nostalgia, and nothing else. There’s no part of this film that suggests it could lead into Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory; the setting is wrong, the destruction of Wonka’s competition makes idea theft a non-issue, the Oompa-Loompa element has been reimagined as a species of Uber-Brit for no discernible reason. But there are sound cues aplenty and the flagrant use of “Pure Imagination”; there’s Wonka’s inability to read the fine print as a reason behind his own tricky contract; there’s a deadly chocolate water system; there’s also an absolutely enraging origin for the Golden Tickets which manages to suggest that the entire reason that Wonka will later send out those tickets is to find more people to share with. Because that’s definitely the story we all remember.

Families seem to be enjoying Wonka, and more’s the pity. I suppose this is what the future of family films will look like for the time being. But it seems to me that we should all be more wary of a future where we’ve promised children that nothing will ever be worse than some ugly fine print, fixed by a man with a magic top hat. The world is infinitely more strange than all that… as Willy Wonka well knows.

The post Wonka Turns Its Title Character Into Mary Poppins, For Some Reason appeared first on Reactor.

I have never written about Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. This is perhaps not relevant by itself—it’s not as though it’s important for film critics to write about any and every movie that holds significance to them personally. But it occurred to me that there might be a subconscious factor to my silence all these years, namely: Do you want to invoke the fey all willy-nilly when you write? Does that seem like a good idea?

As is always the case when book-to-screen adaptation is invoked, there’s a fight to be had about which version of a story or character is “best,” and I’ll admit to my own waffling over the years where that question is concerned. People who love books may feel duty-bound to say that the book is best, and any adaptation that hews closest to the book is therefore the best adaptation. By this logic, Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory would hold that place—an argument that I used to make because it felt like sheer sacrilege to suggest otherwise.

But then I remembered that I’m not much for the concept of sacrilege, and finally came back around to my truest opinion on the subject: 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is the best version of Roald Dahl’s story. Including the one that Dahl wrote.

My reasoning is simple as this: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is not a tale about a poor boy being secretly tested by a zany nightmare entrepreneur who hopes to find an heir to his money-making empire of very cool candy. That’s the book that Dahl wrote, certainly, and it might be the film that some people think they’re watching, but they’d still be wrong. Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is a story about what happens when you willingly step into the fairy circle and engage with every single aspect of the territory beyond because you’re a child and none of your guardians were knowledgeable enough to tell you the rules. It’s about modernity coming up against things it no longer remembers or understands. It’s about the dangers of forgetting in a world that is rapidly filling up with distractions and frivolities.

It transcends its original parameters by every measure. And we got one of Gene Wilder’s most iconic performances out of it, from a man whose career is entirely made of iconic performances.

So how were we lucky enough to get this movie? While Dahl received credit for the film’s screenplay, he left early in the process due to creative differences, and his largely unfinished script was completed by David Seltzer in an uncredited rewrite. Yes, that’s the guy who went on to write The Omen and its many sequels. Which is relevant because there’s a genealogy at work here, and horror and fairy tales are never far apart on that family tree. (There were also scenes added by Robert Kaufman to add humor to the Golden Ticket frenzy.) Dahl disowned the film, thinking it sappy and sentimental—which is perhaps the strangest complaint of all because aside from a (slightly) sweeter end-point, the film doesn’t deviate from his basic plot much.

Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory stands tall over half-a-century after its release because it parodies the time period it was created in so completely that it renders the era into fantasy landscape: drab newsrooms with murmuring anchormen, sardonic computers who defy their inventors, grimy cop show side plots where distraught and beautiful housewives consider giving up their husbands for a case of Wonka bars, and an opening number that promises literal showers of gum drops and snappy tunes from the neighborhood candy-slinger. I was born well after the film’s release, and watching it at a remove becomes a different kind of immersive experience: You’ve stepped into a different world long before you arrive at the factory.

But once the tickets are awarded and the plot set in motion, we’re in the realm of Willy Wonka and his musical troop of Oompa-Loompas—and it all begins with an act of hypnotism. Fans of the film are likely aware that Gene Wilder wouldn’t accept the role unless he was allowed the entrance we see: Wonka limping out with a cane that he subsequently loses, before falling into a somersault and leaping up to applause. The child actors were not informed of this ploy to get genuine reactions, and Wilder wanted this moment to create a sense of distrust between the character and audience. But what’s arguably more important is that the entrance is so heightened that it’s easy to forget everything else going on. You’ve been captivated by the performance, and so you follow along.

And immediately following the hypnotism… we sign a contract.

Everyone knows you don’t sign contracts with the fey. You don’t make agreements, you pay attention to wording, and you certainly don’t give them your name in writing. And this is played off in the film as a jab at business dealings, with jokes about liability and accident clauses, but what’s more fascinating is that despite the reticence of the adults in the room, everyone ultimately agrees to the terms—and they can’t read the fine print.

In stories about the fey, humans are only as safe as their own traditions dictate. There are rules passed down from elders and community to keep their people safe: Don’t step into a ring of mushrooms. Leave a dish of cream at the door. Throw spilled salt over your shoulder. And of course, if you find yourself in fairyland, never ever eat or drink anything provided.

But Willy Wonka already has their names and the very first place he leads them to is The Chocolate Room, stacked floor to ceiling with edible landscape. He allows them to enter as he begins his next little hypnosis, in form of a song:

Come with me
And you’ll be
In a world of pure imagination…

It works on the audience even better than the tour winners. As the children and their parents gorge themselves on fairy food, Willy Wonka serenely kicks a few beach balls about and eats his teacup. All he had to do was be a little mysterious and entirely confusing, and ten people happily walked right in to his realm. The song is at once catchy and deeply affecting, the sort of tune that you come back to over and over. Songs are spells, of course.

And then, after signing their names and eating the food, it all begins to go… squiggly.

Augustus is first, sucked up from the chocolate river and propelled through a pipe. Before his mother can be taken off to find her son, we’re treated to the first Oompa-Loompa musical number. In the book, the preachy poems read as a checklist of everything Dahl finds wrong with “youths” today, and they go on endlessly to that effect. But the film gives these songs a parable structure that begins and ends the same, making the Oompa-Loompas themselves into Wonka’s own Greek chorus. There’s no emotion in their pronouncements, only observation and some acrobatics.

Next up is the river boat sequence, which manages more articulate horror than the genre often produces. And it’s relevant that this tends to be the scene that haunts people the most after viewing. All of Dahl’s complaints at the saccharine atmosphere seem comical when you consider that arguably the film’s most famous moment is Wonka humming an eerie poem that raises steadily in pitch and fury while grotesque imagery plays out on the tunnel walls and psychedelic color schemes whirl across the actor’s faces. That is what sticks in the viewer’s mind. And it sticks because it hacks at the deepest truth of the film: You should not feel safe here.

Wilder’s delivery throughout the film only speaks to this reading. Of course his comic timing can’t be matched, but he takes Wonka’s lines and delivers them as though he’s only barely interacting on this plane, and then only when he feels like it. Seltzer added a running gag that has Wonka constantly quoting from literature, which fits the schema perfectly—as though Wonka is trying to convince everyone of his incredibly human bonafides. He doesn’t understand these people, and he doesn’t much care to, but he would like them to possibly stay forever in a hell of their own making.

The children each succumb, falling like so many candy dominoes, and the fault for this does lie squarely at their parent’s feet… but not for the reasons that original story would have us believe. Each child is saddled with attributes that we associate with the modern world: mindless excess (Augustus), spotlight-seeking through obnoxious behavior (Violet), instant gratification (Veruca), and media inundation (Mike). How could any of these children be prepared for magic? The world has moved away from its protective superstitions—it only believes in capitalist might now. And Willy Wonka has a whole factory full of that.

What makes Charlie special in all of this is his kindness, certainly, but it’s also his reason for putting his name on that contract. As Grandpa Joe tells him: “Sign away, Charlie, we’ve got nothing to lose.” Charlie and his family can’t sink any further. They can’t have any less. They have no reason not to follow through and see where it leads.

And where it leads is a room full of secrets that turns Violet into a blueberry; a sneak sip of fizzy-lifting drink that almost get him and Grandpa Joe killed by the world’s most dramatic ceiling fan; a cadre of geese laying golden eggs that lead Veruca down the garbage chute; and Mike Teevee’s final performance as the world’s smallest boy sent directly to your television screens. Charlie only winds up the last kid standing because he picked the mildest form of disobedience… or perhaps because he was clear-eyed enough to avoid the fate that came with it.

Unlike the book and other adaptations, Wonka only insists verbally that the children will be fine as each one of them is hauled off in turn for their missteps; we never see any of them again, or their parents. Are we meant to take the candyman at his word? Believe that they all got home safe and sound? As we’ve been shown from his first steps on screen—he shouldn’t be trusted.

Perhaps the end is a touch sweetened because Gene Wilder is a lovable guy, even when he’s embodying otherworldly forces beyond our comprehension. But the final scenes of the film never struck me as particularly uplifting, aside from Charlie and his family being hauled out of poverty. What Wonka offers is merely the opportunity to do as he says: Charlie will inherit the factory, but only after he’s been molded in his creator’s shape. Otherwise, the secrets won’t be his.

So Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is magical and joyful and wacky and a perfect family film. But that’s not the reason I come back to it over every other version of this story that exists. I come back to it because it’s much screwier than all that.

In the end, I’m reminded of the final lyric in the opening number, “The Candy Man”:

The Candy Man can
‘Cause he mixes it with love
And makes the world taste good
And the world tastes good
‘Cause the Candy Man thinks it should…

Not because we deserve a nice world, or because he cares about us. Just because he thinks it should. There’s no kindness in that thought, no benevolence. Only the power to make what you want reality.

The post The Fey Candy Man: Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka Is Unlike Any Other appeared first on Reactor.

What.

Recap

In Soho, London in 1925, Charles Banerjee (Charlie de Melo) heads into a toy shop and buys a marionette from the man who owns the shop (Neil Patrick Harris). He’s bringing the doll back to John Logie Baird (John MacKay), the man who invented television, who is in the process of recording the very first image for it.

In the present, the world breaks out in chaos because everyone on Earth thinks that they’re right. The same man who owned the toy shop briefly dances with the Doctor, and U.N.I.T. shows up. Donna demands that they take her grandfather to safety, and they’re taken to HQ, where Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave) gives the Doctor a fierce hug; everyone on the planet is being affected and they suspect that it’s the result of a satellite network being complete, and everyone having access to screens. Kate gives an example of how this affects people by deactivating the blocker they’ve developed; she immediately becomes paranoid and vicious, and apologizes once the blocker is back in place. Melanie Bush (Bonnie Langford) is currently working for U.N.I.T. too, and she and the Doctor have a little reunion.

The team figure out that the spike in the human brain is a replica of the laugh from that doll on the very first TV image. The Doctor and Donna take the TARDIS and go back to the point when this image was filmed and find the toy shop, and the owner… who the Doctor recognizes at the Toymaker, a being he fought long ago in his first (remembered) incarnation. He tells Donna to go back to the TARDIS, but the Toymaker runs away and they run after him, winding up in his domain. The Doctor tells Donna that he’s not sure he can save her life this time, and that this is his fault—he allowed the Toymaker into their universe with the salt trick. Donna’s not worried, but wishes he would be more up front with her. They get separated; the Doctor runs into a human marionette and Donna is attacked by dolls. They find each other again and are forced to be an audience for the Toymaker, who tells the story of the Doctors last few companions (minus Thirteen’s group) and the Flux.

The Doctor challenges the Toymaker to a game for the universe, and loses. But since he won their previous game, he invokes “best two out of three” rules. The Toymaker agrees, but only if the next game is back in 2023. The Doctor and Donna escape his realm, get back into the TARDIS and head back to U.N.I.T., which has just destroyed the satellite that completed the global network. The Doctor has Donna create a code that can help the technology they’ve got scan for the Toymaker’s presence, hoping that they can make him leave the way he entered. Suddenly “Spice Up Your Life” starts playing and the Toymaker arrives, dancing, murdering, and assaulting the Doctor’s friends. He seems to vanish, but they find him on the launch pad with the galvanic beam they used to destroy the satellite. The Doctor insists that the Toymaker leave his friends alone because he’s the one who agreed to play the final game; he offers to travel the stars with the Toymaker and show him a universe of games. But the Toymaker refuses, and has decided that since he played the first two games with different Doctors, he should get a new Doctor for the last one—he shoots the Doctor with the beam.

Donna and Mel go to the Doctor to be with him with while he regenerates, but the process seems to complete… and he’s the same. He asks Donna and Mel to pull his arms—the regeneration feels different this time. They do as he asks, and the Fifteenth Doctor (Ncuti Gatwa) pops out of the Fourteenth’s body.

Fifteen explains that this is an instance of the rumored bi-generation process—there are two of them now, and they are both going to play the Toymaker’s game because he insisted on playing the Doctor. Fourteen asks for a game of catch: Whoever drops the ball loses. After a high-octane game, they manage to win, and Fourteen tells the Toymaker that he banishes him from existence. The Toymaker folds up to be put in his box, but promises that his legions will return. Fourteen can’t stop thinking about how many people died because of this, but Fifteen holds him, and says that he’s got him. Everything is okay. As they walk inside, a gold tooth (which the Toymaker earlier claimed to trap the Master in) is taken by a unknown hand.

Fourteen wants to know how things are going to work with two Doctors in the TARDIS, but Fifteen and Donna are ready for this talk; Fifteen points out that they’ve been handling their trauma backwards, but that he’s in better shape because the Doctor has been working on themself. Donna knows why this Doctor’s face came back—so he could come home. And what’s more, Fifteen points out that for winning the game, they get a prize: The Toymaker’s rules still apply in the wake of their victory, and he takes out a big wooden mallet and knocks the TARDIS into two. (Fifteen’s has a jukebox.) He tells the Doctor to go with Donna and be happy. They watch him take off in the TARDIS, to have his own adventures.

Some time later, the Doctor is with Donna’s family, having a garden party, and Mel has just stopped by. He’s telling the family a story about a previous adventure he had, and it slips out that he’s taken his niece (Rose) to Mars already, and also taken Mel on a quick trip to the past. Donna tells him that he doesn’t have to stay forever, and the Doctor looks wistful. But he tells her that he fought those battles for all that time—and finally knows what for. It was for this. And he’s never been so happy.

Commentary

Bi-generation. BI-generation?

I see what you did there, Mr Davies. I see it. I see what you did.

It’s still funny to me that they went through the trouble of bringing Neil Patrick Harris in to play the Toymaker, however… because his role in the episode is pretty unimportant. Fun, but unimportant. Aside from that Spice Girls dance break, which was exactly what I was hoping for, thank you.

There’s a lot of talking to the audience happening in this episode with commentary about technology and bigotry and post-truth thinking, and some of it works great, while a few bits of scolding feel a little too on-the-nose. Davies couldn’t resist giving Fourteen one of his usual speeches of “oh, but humans really can be this horrible and you are not off the hook for your behavior,” which is mostly amusing because it’s another base attribute that was bound to resurface in him. And there’s the necessary sequence where the villain takes the Doctor to task for all the people he loses, but I do find it mildly hilarious that the Toymaker goes through all the Moffat companions, then jumps right to the Flux when talking about Thirteen’s tenure… because if he’d talked about her companions, he’d be snipping the marionette strings while saying “Und zen she dropped zem off at home!” as though it had been some terrible fate.

There’s more deliberate replication of the old RTD-era tropes here, but it’s all so good. We now have two instances where a horrifying villain decided to do an incredibly gay dance break while David Tennant is helpless to stop it. Two instances where the gambit is “why don’t we travel together, evil friend, and I can help make you less evil,” only to be cruelly rebuffed. Yet another instance of a small item (containing the Master) being retrieved by someone with a fantastic manicure while maniacal laughter plays in the background. In a less deft writer’s hand, it would feel like you’d run out of ideas, but it’s clearly Davies assuring us: He’s back.

And now we’ve got Fifteen, who in the first fifteen minutes of his tenure has made it clear exactly what kind of Doctor he will be. No confusion, no upset, no angst—he is pure joy. He’s love. He’s practically ethereal? The image of him holding Fourteen, a replication of the face who was still reeling from PTSD and heartbreak, tucking him in close and promising that he’ll be okay…. It’s therapy made manifest. Find your younger self and give them the advice that you needed. Comfort them and show them that they are cared for. And Donna is right there on the other side to tell Fourteen the truth:

This face came back so he could come home. To his best friend, to his former companions, to family that he never knew he had.

Many of us have been mildly traumatized for the past thirteen years over Ten’s last words: “I don’t want to go.” Those final moments as an iteration who finally enjoyed being himself for the first time in a long time, and had his life cut short. In many ways, Ten was a Doctor who was made to settle down, no matter how much he loved to run—he was created for Rose Tyler, and once she was gone, he was always seeking out “the slow path,” even when he didn’t mean to. If any Doctor deserves to set up shop on Earth, reconnect with all his old traveling companions, and sit at garden parties, it’s him. If any Doctor deserves to hang out with Wilf under blankets and watch the stars through a telescope, it’s him. If any Doctor deserves to rest and appreciate all the mundanity of life, it was always him.

But I never, in my wildest dreams (or a million words of fanfiction), imagined that it would happen. And, pointedly, it has happened for David Tennant’s incarnation of the Doctor twice. He’s special, okay?

The fact that Fifteen is so canny about how their suffering has shaped them is massive for the character and future of the show. He lays it all out: The ones they’ve loved, the atrocities they’ve witnessed, and people they’ve lost. (The way they both said Adric. It broke me.) Historically, the Doctor either skirts the past or buries it—those are the rules. They’ve always been the rules, and even the people who were close and learned the most never had a fraction of the picture. But Fifteen has decided that they’ve finally moved beyond some things. He’s pragmatic about what he can do (“You can’t save everyone”? That’s growth, my dear), but also full of hope. There’s a levelness to him that we’ve never seen in the character, and I am ecstatic for more.

I have to point out that this is the only time when the Doctor has regenerated with people present who understand what’s happening, and are explicitly making themselves available in that process. I have to point it out because it has literally never happened in the 60 year history of this show. For the first time, he wasn’t alone or about to terrify someone with a change they never knew was coming. He had two dear friends who chose to stay with him and hold his hands. And if you don’t think that had an influence on who he bifurcated into… he literally pops out of himself to say “honey, you’re loved, now go eat a snack and take a nap.”

To say that this has a wild bearing on what the show can do now is an understatement. Hopefully Fourteen will take his retirement (aside from a few quick trips to show off now and again), but we don’t know if he can regenerate. Or what his lifespan looks like. And now we know that whenever U.N.I.T. needs help, they’ll be waiting for the Doctor to show up… but if he’s otherwise occupied, they do have an extra on retainer. And, of course, it gives the show the ability to have David Tennant and Catherine Tate show up whenever they darn well please. Which they should obviously use sparingly, but what an ace to have in your back pocket.

And for now… Fifteen is going to light up the stars.

Bits and Bobs

• John Logie Baird was indeed the inventor of television. That first image looks much creepier on the show, however, which I assume was the Toymaker’s influence.

• The Toymaker heralds from a 1966 Doctor Who serial of the same name… which is mostly lost. (Many older episodes of Doctor Who were not properly stored or saved by the BBC, and are being painfully reconstructed via animation and dodgy audio recordings. Every once in a while, someone unearths a recorded copy of a lost episode in their basement.) Only the last piece of the story is in the BBC archives.

• Again, this idea that Kate Stewart is just going to scoop up all the former companions, who are now all middle-aged women, and give them all of them great jobs with health insurance and vacation time. Continue. More. Now.

• They bring up the Archangel Network, which was the system of satellites the Master used to take power in season three. So yeah, Davies loves satellite networks. They’re bad, or maybe good, or maybe something.

• Mel Bush was companion to the Sixth and Seventh Doctors, so she knows all about regeneration. (Though she was unconscious when it happened during her time on the TARDIS.) When he asks how she got back, it’s because the Doctor didn’t leave Mel on Earth—she decided to head off with a galactic conman named Sabalom Glitz (basically Who’s version of Zaphod Beeblebrox), and nudged the Doctor into taking Ace on in her place. The description she gives of Glitz’s death is… yeah, that checks out. I’m just glad she got home safe.

• Davies making fun of his own weirdly specific obsession with the Doctor’s age during his run (he literally went from 900 to 904 over seasons 1-4, it was silly) by having the Doctor be like “I’m a billion years old!” to Donna now. He could be, after all. He doesn’t know anymore….

• I maybe shouted “kick the doll!” at the television when Donna got cornered by them, and I’m very glad she followed my advice and cowed those creepy babies.

• People will probably go on for a while about the fact that Fifteen spent his entire first appearance in his underwear (which is entirely fair). But did you catch it? The point is that he’s wearing pieces of Fourteen’s outfit. Their clothes separated. Which means that Fourteen is commando at the same time, friends.

See you on Christmas!

The post Doctor Who Takes Regeneration to a Whole New Level in “The Giggle” appeared first on Reactor.

Summary

As Tiffany works through the funeral, she hears that Granny has put her name forward for Miss Treason’s cottage, which has Annagramma very upset. Tiffany assures her that she doesn’t want the cottage, but she asks Miss Tick why they’re going to allow Annagramma to take the position when they know she’s a terrible fit for the area. Miss Tick doesn’t have an answer for her. The funeral finishes up and everyone heads home, leaving Tiffany with Miss Treason for the final night. She cleans the cottage, writes down everything she can think of about the area to help Annagramma, then goes to talk to Miss Treason. The witch gives Tiffany her broom, a dictionary and one other book (Tiffany selects the mythology book). She teaches Tiffany poker, and tells her to be mindful of her young man, then they fall asleep. When they wake in the morning, the town is on the lawn, there to praise Miss Treason and get last bits of advice. Tiffany takes her down into her grave (which the Feegle dug for her), and Miss Treason is taken by Death. Tiffany puts her boffos into the grave with her so no one knows her secrets, cleans the house up, and goes outside, running into the Wintersmith again. He insists that Tiffany is “her” and tries to grab hold of her.

Granny shows up to stop him, and asks for Tiffany’s necklace—it’s how the Wintersmith finds her. Tiffany hands it over, and Granny and Mrs. Earwig have a very chilly meeting as the cottage is handed over to Annagramma. The Wintersmith remembers that Tiffany said she needed a person made of human stuff and goes looking for things to build himself out of so that he can be right for her. Tiffany and Granny head to Lancre and Granny gives Tiffany the necklace to drop into the river, so it’ll be carried far from her. That night at Nanny Ogg’s, Tiffany has a dream that she’s on a ship heading to an iceberg version of herself. The Wintersmith tells her that he wishes to marry her. The Feegle arrive in her dream to help, but the ship does hit the iceberg. She wakes being given tea by one of Nanny’s daughter-in-laws, and finds that Horace has made a home with the Feegle. When Tiffany puts her feet on Nanny’s floorboards, they sprout and grow. Nanny gives her slippers, and she, Granny, and Miss Tick explain that Tiffany is taking on the attributes of the Summer Lady because she joined the dance. They think she’ll have to embody the role a little more fully and help send winter on his way when the seasons change.

Tiffany does the rounds with Nanny and comes back to a book the Feegle got her from the library, which is a romance novel. Tiffany has a hard time understanding why no one is doing any work, and why the heroine feels she needs to marry one of her two suitors. Roland continues to write letters to Tiffany as his aunts find his escape routes and try to wall him into his room. The Wintersmith keeps obtaining more and more advice about how to build a human form. Annagramma arrives at Nanny’s in a panic one evening: She can’t handle the steading. She wants the skulls back and she doesn’t know anything about medicine or childbirth or staying up all night with the dead. She asks Tiffany if she’ll come do those thing for her. Tiffany agrees to help her through the first few rough tasks, but that’s it. She thinks that Granny did this on purpose so people would learn that Mrs. Earwig is a bad teacher, which she doesn’t think is right. Nanny tells her not to assume and that Tiffany can do this as long as she’s still working for her. Tiffany aids Annagramma, who comes out looking alright despite not knowing anything. Tiffany heads back to Nanny Ogg, who tells her that she ought to treat the Wintersmith more imperiously, like a queen, if she wants him to back off.

Tiffany has a letter from Roland where he tells her that he went to a ball and danced with Lord Driver’s daughter and looked at her watercolors. She gets jealous hearing this, and goes downstairs to eat, but can’t get the cutlery drawer to open, which summons Anoia (Goddess of Things That Get Stuck in Drawers). Anoia tells Tiffany to send the Wintersmith packing, as men are always “raining on your lava” (she used to be a volcano goddess). Annagramma shows up again—she sent Mrs. Sumpter’s pig up a tree, and she hates all these people with their piddly little problems. Tiffany tells her off and also insists that she tells the truth; it turns out that Annagramma’s family is poor and doesn’t even have a cottage. Tiffany says that the other young witches will help her, but that she’s got to listen and be grateful. The coven doesn’t want to help, but they listen to Tiffany once Petulia agrees. Tiffany tells the Wintersmith to leave her be and stop making ice in her shape and name. After Hogswatch, a cornucopia lands. You (Granny’s kitten) gets lost inside it and they have to send the Feegle after her. Once they’ve returned, Tiffany learns how it works: You simply ask it for any kind of food or drink, and it provides it.

Commentary

Thought I was safe from crying for once in this set of books, but I forgot about Miss Treason’s send off.

There’s a great throughline here, that stretches all the way back to the earlier books, but particularly Witches Abroad, with the old woman who is being callously neglected by her community, and Granny Weatherwax setting that right. Miss Treason is mythological to her community, and she worked hard at that story because it made her impossible to ignore, but also protected her from harm. And she did it so well that these people loved her, even as they were afraid or confused by her. She was a fixture of their lives, and they all needed to see her go. To be there for her, and to be a part of the story as well.

People becoming myths is a central piece of this book, and it’s utilized in a number of fun ways. We’ve got Miss Treason, we’ve got Tiffany learning to be Summer, we’ve got the Wintersmith trying to become a human and further mythologize himself as a person, and we’ve got Annagramma… who thinks that she’s already achieved mythology because her mentor was all sight and no substance.

Tiffany believes that Granny is allowing Annagramma to fail to make a point about Mrs. Earwig, and Nanny rightly suggests that she check that impulse. The one thing that Tiffany will never be able to see in her own story is how the work of generations passes down—she’s too young for that yet. Granny needs Tiffany to take up her place in the witching community. That means Tiffany needs to see to her own generation, and that includes getting the rest of the young witches to pull Annagramma together because if they don’t, people will get hurt.

And that’s difficult to read because there are some people who truly can get away with never thinking of others before themselves. Pratchett is always adamant about including those people and showing how best to handle them—and it’s never telling them off and leaving them to flounder. Because the consequences of that are too great, and you are never above thinking of everyone in the blast radius of your choices.

Angered decency. His favorite attribute to give central characters. You can know that people are sometimes terrible, maybe even undeserving, but that doesn’t mean you can be petty, and let others take the brunt of their ignorance. Not if you can fix it.

I will say that I’ve missed Gytha Ogg terribly in recent books, and having her around again makes everything just a little bit more… comfy. Granny is the best, but you miss out on the cushions and the brandy and the general lewdness when Nanny’s not about. And there’s an auntie-ness that Nanny bring as well, which Granny obviously cannot add to the proceedings. It’s a profound shift, going from the wonderful eeriness of Miss Treason’s home into the bric-a-brac and thick mattresses and plentiful dinners of Nanny Ogg’s, like being swaddled in kitsch and warmth. Tiffany deserves that experience too.

Asides and little thoughts:

• I need Terry Pratchett to know that wherever he is, in whatever sort of beyond, I cannot ever pass from this life to anything else because he has informed me that pickles don’t make it. Sorry. Not going where I can’t have pickles. Why would he tell me that.

• The Wintersmith has purple-gray eyes. If you were ever involved in the fanfiction community, you know that one of the tendencies of “Mary Sue” writing was to always give the girl or woman super special features, with purple eyes being one of the most common attributes. It seems fitting that the Wintersmith, a mythological aspect who is trying to shape himself into the right sort of young man for Tiffany, would take a cue from that line of thinking.

• Tiffany, trying to go to sleep: “The trouble is, you can shut your eyes but you can’t shut your mind.” Yeah. Me too, sweetie. Me too.

Pratchettisms:

Like an oyster dealing with a piece of grit, Tiffany coated it with people and hard work.

“We make happy endings, child, day to day. But you see, for the witch there are no happy endings. There are just endings. And here we are…”

The house feels like it’s dying and I’m going outside.

Tiffany nodded. She wasn’t crying, which is not the same as, well, not crying.

Mrs. Ogg’s face broke into a huge grin that should have been locked up for the sake of public decency, and for some reason Tiffany felt a lot better.

Change the Story, even if you don’t mean to, and the Story changes you.

Nanny stood up and tried to look haughty, which is hard to do when you have a face like a happy apple.

“You cussed. Sooner or later, every curse is a prayer.”

People wanted the world to be a story, because stories had to sound right and make sense. People wanted the world to make sense.

Next week we finish the book!

The post Terry Pratchett Book Club: Wintersmith, Part II appeared first on Reactor.

Summary

There’s the usual Feegle glossary of terms, and then the story begins. Rob Anybody pokes his head up in the middle of a terrible snowstorm, knowing that the Wintersmith has come for their big wee hag. He goes down into the Feegle mound and says it’s time to fetch the “Hero” who hasn’t had many lessons, but will do his job well enough for her. Tiffany has been asked by her father, by her village, to save the lambs and her little brother from the snow (he went out to help the men dig and got lost). She commands them to build a fire and not let it go out. She balances things in her mind and takes the heat of the fire into her to let it burn a tunnel through the snow, unearthing lambs, finally finding her brother. This is her fault, because she danced with the Wintersmith: When the fire goes out, she sees him. We’re told that these events might not happen, but they began last autumn… Tiffany had gone to visit Granny Weatherwax, who showed her the trick of helping heat and cold to swap places, using your own body as the center point that lets everything pass through. Tiffany gave her a kitten, then headed back to Miss Treason’s, a blind and deaf witch she’d been staying with for a few months who is very adept at borrowing animals for senses.

Miss Treason tells Tiffany that tonight they are going to a dance, but won’t give any more information. Tiffany guides Miss Treason through the forest on her broom until they reach a clearing where there are men. Tiffany can hear a beat and they begin dancing, while Miss Treason tells her that she must be silent and not join in; Tiffany recognizes it as the Morris dance, done at the wrong time of year. In the spring, men come with white with bells on, dance through the village, and then summer arrives. But these men are dancing at the wrong time of year and they don’t have the Fool with them. Knowing seven are required to do the dance properly, Tiffany joins the men, and suddenly there’s another presence asking who she is. Far away, Miss Tick has just saved herself from being killed by a suspicious town on account of spreading about a book she’s written called ‘Witch Hunting for Dumb People,’ and has a thought about Tiffany. She makes a shamble and it explodes. The Feegle show up at Miss Treason’s house and she questions them until they admit that the kelda sent them because she’s been having terrible dreams about Tiffany. Tiffany wakes and learns that her dance made something real that should have been metaphor, and that the Wintersmith is now looking for her.

The Feegles give Tiffany a letter from Roland, which they’ve read, as they read all her correspondence to him (and her diary). When Miss Treason chastises Tiffany for her mistake last night, she heads outside and calls to the Wintersmith and he appears, with her horse necklace from Roland. Tiffany knows she shouldn’t take it from him, but she does anyway and it burns her with cold. The Feegles bring her back inside and Miss Treason scolds her again for thinking that the necklace is important to being a witch. Tiffany calls her out about “Boffos,” how a witch uses the art of expectation to get people to listen to them (like Treason’s own special skulls that are from Boffo’s novelty and joke shop). Tiffany goes into the dairy to stop Horace the living cheese from eating butter, then writes in her diary about what’s happened and reads Roland’s letter. After she’s gone to sleep the Feegles steal her diary to read it because Jeannie wants to know what she’s thinking of Roland; Rob thinks that if Tiffany wound up marrying Roland, it would stop him from plowing the Chalk to plant wheat since she’s Granny Aching’s kin, who once stopped the Baron from doing the same. But Billy Bigchin notices that the Wintersmith also seems to have Tiffany on his mind—the snowflakes look like her.

Miss Tick has taken the mailcoach all the way to Granny Weatherwax to figure out how they can help Tiffany, but Granny says the girl is on her own. Roland writes Tiffany another letter and tries to ignore his aunts, who are waiting for his father to die and keep stealing from them. The next day, the 113-year-old Miss Treason tells Tiffany that she’s going to die soon, and has Tiffany send out correspondence and plan the funeral for before she’s gone. No one in town seems to believe that Miss Treason will die, so Tiffany heads to her coven meeting. None of the girls noticed that the snow looked like her, to Tiffany’s disappointment, so she tells Petulia on their way back. Petulia decides that the Wintersmith is behaving like a boy, and that Tiffany should tell him to go away, if that’s the case. Granny and Miss Tick look in on the conversation and Granny sees that Petulia asked the important question: Has the Wintersmith ever even seen a girl? She thinks that Tiffany took the place of Summer in the dance and has confused things, making the Wintersmith more human. They discuss who will take Miss Treason’s place once she dies, and Granny thinks it should be Tiffany. Tiffany sees ice roses in the morning and shows Petulia. Then they prepare for the funeral and talk to all the villagers about how impressive Miss Treason was (though she won’t die until tomorrow).

Commentary

Now that Tiffany is reaching her teen years, the story shifts, and again, the period in which it’s written tells us a lot of what Pratchett is intending to riff on. While there’s very little in common in terms of setting or characters, I find it telling that we’re getting a sort of “love triangle” between Tiffany, Roland, and the Wintersmith at a point in time when those dynamics were just hitting their peak popularity. (Don’t forget, Twilight came out the year before this book.) But, of course, this triangle is far less about the work of finding a romantic partner—Tiffany is growing up, but she’s still a kid at this point—than it is about how it feels to find that you suddenly might care about romantic interest from other people.

Is it a little squiffy that one of those love interests is a fair bit older than her at this point in time? (Roland is four years older than her, making him about seventeen at the point that she’s thirteen.) Yes, but it’s also realistic for the environment that she’s grown up in—not an excuse full stop, but it bothers me less if it’s executed with care the way it is here. And the fact that it doesn’t really move beyond this point helps assuage the weirdness. They write nerdy letters to each other. Roland helps Tiffany expand her knowledge and also gives her an important tie to her home. They both need each other in some capacity, and knowing one another becomes a boon.

As to the romantic piece here, Pratchett balances that act perfectly in Tiffany’s interest being more about the newness of feeling than the desire for active romance in her life. She’s a little excited, awkward, even panicked about the idea of the Wintersmith’s attention. And I appreciate, too, that there’s a vein of the story that discusses the need for this to all take place because it helps smooth out the bits that feel too “convenient” from a narrative perspective, e.g. Miss Treason tells Tiffany that she can’t join the dance, but there’s no explanation as to why, which is a pet peeve of mine. It seems authority figures always want their charges to listen without needed information, which is a bad lesson on its face and obtuse to boot—no one owes you obedience just because you’re old and wise.

But within the confines of this tale, Granny explains that this is something Tiffany has to suss out for herself; making the mistake is, in fact, part of her development as a person. And that’s an important lesson, too, arguably far more important than knowing when to heed the warnings of elders. It has a cost, certainly, but that’s just living in the world. We cannot exist without affecting everything around us, and so the story doesn’t suggest that Tiffany’s mistakes are wrong for the toll they levy, but necessary to her becoming the person she’s meant to be.

And it’s relevant that all of this is occurring when she’s bound to start asking other questions about her life that she hasn’t yet entertained. To that point, we have the section below, where Tiffany is thinking about the lives of the children she’s grown up with, and how different her own life is becoming when compared to her peers:

They were going to do the jobs their fathers did, or raise children like their mothers did. And that was fine, Tiffany added hurriedly to herself. But they hadn’t decided. It was just happening to them, and they didn’t notice.

…I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to having this exact same flow of thoughts at (more than) one point in my life. It comes clear when you follow any sort of path that isn’t what your general community expects. And you always have that same rush to say “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” because there isn’t, of course. It’s the lack of thought that makes it confusing to people like Tiffany (and me).

We’ll get deeper into death and funerals and probably Boffos next week…

Asides and little thoughts:

• Tiffany wears blue or green because she thinks that the only reason witches wear black is because they always have, and that is the kind of thought process I can get behind. Nothing guarantees that I will flout a rule so readily as “well, that’s just what we’ve always done” without an actual reason attached.

• Granny considers Mrs. Earwig’s sort of witching to be “wizarding with a dress on,” which again gets into the gendered aspects of magic in his world and how it plays into identity, but it’s odd to have this brought up with no mention of Esk… which thankfully won’t be the case forever.

• There’s a bit of Labyrinth about this story, and Legend too, those ‘80s fantasies that play on the coming-of-age trials that girls face, and how fraught they can become when an otherworldly entity is paying you too much attention.

Pratchettisms:

It wasn’t a spell, except in her own head, but if you couldn’t make spells work in your own head, you couldn’t make them work at all.

In the middle of the seesaw is a place that never moves…

Tiffany was an excellent cheesemaker and it did keep them moist, but Tiffany distrusted black cheeses. They always looked as though they were plotting something.

It looked pretty authoritative, too, without too many long (and therefore untrustworthy) words, like “marmalade.”

If a cheese ever looked thoughtful, Horace looked thoughtful now.

They say that there can never be two snowflakes that are exactly alike, but has anyone checked lately?

It wasn’t her fault that people slipped on packed layers of her, or couldn’t open the door because she was piled up outside it, or got hit by handfuls of her thrown by small children.

“But she—“ Miss Tick began, because no teacher like to hear anyone else talk for very long.

Next week we’ll read Chapters 5-8!

The post Terry Pratchett Book Club: Wintersmith, Part I appeared first on Reactor.

Recap

Isaac Newton (Nathaniel Curtis) goes out and sits under an apple tree; one apple falls and hits him on the head. The TARDIS crashes into said tree immediately afterward and the Doctor and Donna emerge, realizing who they’ve accidentally run into. Donna insists on making a joke about how Isaac Newton could certainly understand “the gravity of the situation,” and the TARDIS dematerializes. Newton tries to recall the excellent word Donna used and comes up with “mavity.”

The next place the TARDIS materializes appears to be some sort of spaceship. The TARDIS is still exploding from the coffee that was spilled, and Donna asks the Doctor if it can be fixed. The Doctor plugs his sonic screwdriver into the lock and the TARDIS begins a sort of hard reset. Immediately after this, it dematerializes and strands them. Donna beings to have a panic attack, but the Doctor promises that he will get her home, and thinks that the TARDIS left them because the HADS (Hostile Action Displacement System) engaged. Basically whenever the TARDIS senses that it might be in imminent danger, it leaves until said danger is resolved. The Doctor had deactivated the system, but with the reset, it came back online. So as long as they can figure out what the “hostile action” in question is and neutralize it, it should come back and they’ll be able to leave.

The ship is large and empty and keeps shifting its shape and carries one robot that is moving very slowly. Occasionally there’s an alarm and words spoken, but the Doctor doesn’t know the language. Donna and the Doctor get to the bridge of the ship and find a seat for a commander but very little information: What they do know is that three years before, an airlock was opened and closed. When they look out there’s no stars—they’re at the edge of the known universe looking onto vast nothingness. The Doctor has Donna work in one room to try and get the ship to stop running on automatic. He leaves to work in another room across from her, then comes back and listens to Donna talk about her family. He keeps asking leading questions about all the people in her life, then mentions that his arms are too long.

In the other room, the Doctor is working and Donna comes in and begins asking him a lot of questions about Gallifrey… and mentions that her arms are too long. These are entities copying the Doctor and Donna’s bodies, and Donna hears the Doctor scream her name at the same moment that his duplicate begins to stretch apart at the arms. The Doctor and Donna reunite, and ask these beings why they are copying them and what their purpose is. The entities say that they come from outside their universe, suggest that they will eat the Doctor and Donna, and chase them down the spaceship corridor, but they grow too big and get stuck because they don’t have the hang of physical form yet. The Doctor and Donna try to get away in the hidden tunnels of the ship, but they get separated and run into the entities again.

The Doctor winds up believing that this copy is the real Donna because she tells him that she has his more recent memories from being the DoctorDonna and that she wants him to talk about the Flux and all the terrible things that have happened to him. She can’t hold the form for long enough, though, so the Doctor runs away and winds up breaking down, screaming and hitting the wall and sobbing. Donna tricks her copy into revealing itself and runs away. All four run about until they meet up again, but the Doctor figures out which Donna is the real one, then suggests that these entities can’t cross a line of salt without counting it, like fae or vampires. The trick only works for a while, and the Doctor copy tells them that they were drawn to the universe because all the hatred, pain, and war called to them, and they want to join in by taking form.

Donna and the Doctor make it back to the bridge, pursued by the entities, but Donna thinks to ask why they keep trying to scare them. The Doctor realizes this is a good point… and that the answer is that adrenaline makes them thinks more and faster, making them easier to copy. They try not to think to slow the entities down, but of course, the Doctor can’t do that for long. They find the body of the ship’s captain outside, long dead, and know that she killed herself—that was the use of the airlock three years ago. The Doctor figures out that the ship is on a slow countdown to destruction because the captain didn’t want these entities unleashed on their universe, and the slower the system goes, the harder it is for them figure it out. They speed up the countdown and race the entities to the robot about to push the button to destroy the ship. Because the countdown is nearly complete regardless, the TARDIS is no longer in danger and materializes to pick up the Doctor. He gets on board and goes to pick up Donna, but she’s mixed up with her copy. He tests them, asking why a joke they made earlier was funny, and picks the Donna who insists that the joke is simply funny because it is… but he picks the wrong Donna.

Thankfully, the Doctor realizes that the entity still has arms that are a fraction too long and kicks her out, pulling the real Donna on board moments before she dies in the explosion. The Doctor worries that he shouldn’t have invoked superstition with the salt gambit, that it feels like a mistake. They materialize in the same alley a little off from the day they left and find Wilf (Bernard Cribbins) waiting for them. The Doctor embraces his old friend, but chaos breaks out all around them: Wilf tells them that they have to do something because it’s the end of the world…

Commentary

He licked something and then pretended it was killing him to freak Donna out, the absolute bastard. I love him. I love them. Argh. This episode did so many of my favorite things.

They clearly got a big ol’ Disney-backed CGI budget to make the space more expansive (and the copies more frighteningly uncanny), but this is that good crunchy locked-room style mystery with extra creepiness for flavor. It’s just like “Midnight” in that respect and relies on similar dynamics throughout—namely using your actors to create the unease, and really letting it sit there. The computer graphics worked well, but the episode’s most upsetting moments were created by David Tennant and Catherine Tate looking just a hair off: a bit nasty, a little too vacant, just the wrong side of calculating, all dead in the eyes. Then there’s the strange contortions done by their body doubles.

The key is then combining that with both Donna and the Doctor being far too raw to handle this kind of runaround. Allowing the Doctor a moment where he thinks Donna might understand his more recent pains, and then viciously clawing that away from him—a breakdown was the minimum that demanded. (And no one breaks down like David Tennant, as these episodes are keen to remind us.) Donna is very clear-eyed about what failure means this time around because she has far more to lose than she used to. She fully walks herself through the steps of how her family would grieve her, and we do it with her in that moment.

Having said that, this episode is also full of Donna Noble brilliance—the way she tricks the copy by just babbling at him for ages until he forgets about the tie and she notices that it’s gone is exactly what I’ve been waiting for. The fact that the Doctor simultaneously screws up the same scenario because he’s so desperate to be seen and known is spot on. The Davies episodes never forget to make the crux of most drama (and problems) the ways that people are people, and it’s always true for his versions of the Doctor as much as all of the companions, in a manner that is always deeply satisfying to watch. All the joking and teasing, running right alongside the Doctor and Donna fighting over whose fault it is that they’re stranded, knowing that it won’t help. And it’s this exact people-y problem that almost causes Donna’s death: She overthinks her answer to the Doctor’s question because she’s scared, and the fact that it’s only a little piddly mathematical thing that gets the Doctor to notice he’s got the wrong person… oof. That’s what makes the episode truly scary, far more than contorting void invaders.

It seems remiss not to mention that age plays into this as well, in a way that feels so real and earned. This is true for the fact that our actors are both fifteen years older than when they last inhabited these roles together, but it’s true for both characters as well (in ways that are frankly unfathomable to a human brain), and it makes the drama play very, very differently than it ever has on Doctor Who. When Donna is scared and the Doctor is trying to shore her up through his own panic, there’s a depth to the emotion here that is borne of time, plain and simple. Real time that is measured in the experience of its actors, and the narrative of the show, and it hits on a much deeper level than I think the show has ever achieved.

It’s interesting to note that most of the previous Davies era’s more frightening concepts hinged on the idea of nothingness and what crawls in to replace it: “Midnight” features an entity that exists in a place where no other life can survive, and it creeps into the bodies of sentient beings and steals their voices; the Wire, which takes people’s faces and leaves them blank on the street; the Daleks emerging from the Void between realities, after residing in a ship that could survive that lack of matter and life; now these beings from beyond the universe itself, drawn in and shaped by our worst impulses and copying our persons down to every memory. It’s a more extreme fear of the dark, in a way, what lies beyond our understanding.

And the parallels to “Midnight” in particular come through in the plot being exacerbated by Fourteen… just being himself. On the planet Midnight, the Doctor winds up nearly getting killed because he can’t stop himself from interfering in the situation at hand and believing his own cleverness will fix things. He also nearly has his personhood stolen by a being capable of perfect imitation and replication. Practically any Doctor would have difficulty not trying to think their way out of a problem, even knowing that more thoughts gave their enemy an advantage. But Ten (and Fourteen) is one of the worst for that because he has far too much energy and desperate need to show off programmed into the base code.

The tenderness between the Doctor and Donna, this deep well of understanding, is only growing in the next episode of their reunion. The way that the Doctor keeps physically needing to touch Donna, to remind himself of her presence, to reassure her in fear, to ground himself in his own anxieties, it’s plastered all over the episode. It elevates their banter and their turmoil to a devastating pitch.

And then to end with the streets of London exploding and Wilf! Knowing that Bernard Cribbins lost his wife, held on just long enough to shoot these episodes, and then passed away… it’s hard not to feel like he wanted to say goodbye here. To give the Doctor another hug, get him to set things right, and move on to the next adventure. Get your tissues ready for next week.

Bits and Bobs

• The use of “Wild Blue Yonder” feels very much like a seed being planted for something later, either in the specials or the upcoming season: It’s an interesting aside within the episode, but it doesn’t really play into the themes of what’s happening. I’m hoping it pops up again in the next episode to tie something together—after all, it’s not often that the TARDIS randomly plays music on speaker. The salt thing is going to come back too, of course, and I can’t wait to see how it’s used.

• The HADS has shown up in several Doctor Who episodes, most often during Moffat’s tenure, but technically first showed up in a Second Doctor serial “The Krotons.”

• The “mavity” joke plays throughout the episode with the Doctor and Donna both occasionally saying “gravity” and then realizing their mistake, changing to “mavity.” To say that I would be extremely happy if the show had to use “mavity” forever is an understatement. This is what’s good about a ridiculous time travel show. It’s mavity now. It was always mavity. The Doctor and Donna keep making the mistake because some part of their time traveling brains can remember the original timeline where it wasn’t. Yes.

• So here’s a thought: The Doctor agrees with Donna that Isaac Newton is hot, then has a moment of surprise wondering if this is what he’s like now. Other incarnations of the Doctor have been either canonically or implicitly queer—I’d make arguments for Three, Five, and Eight, while Nine and Thirteen simply are—so it’s not as though this is a first for the character. And it’s not as though it doesn’t work for Tennant’s portrayal, which was mostly Rose-sexual throughout his original tenure, but always had wiggle room he never truly explored. But… it occurs to me that perhaps this is a clue. What if these moments (where the Doctor finds himself surprised at new traits, maybe even the elevated desire for touch) are the Fifteenth Doctor’s personality attempting to surface? We know that something has gone amiss, and we don’t know exactly how this next regeneration is going to emerge. Maybe this is Fifteen beating against Fourteen’s skull, trying to push his way out? I’m thinking about how this arc into our next Doctor might play, and I’m kinda galaxy-braining with the theories right now, so everyone should probably ignore me, I will be down this well all week.

Next week. The Toymaker is coming…

The post Doctor Who Lets Horror Take the Wheel in “Wild Blue Yonder” appeared first on Reactor.

Recap

In case you didn’t catch it, I’ll start with a brief recap of the Children in Need Special, “Destination: Skaro”: Davros (Julian Bleach) meets with an assistant named Mr. Castavillian (Mawaan Rizwan) to discuss his latest weapon to aid the Kaleds in their war against the Thals—an armored machine in which he plans to put their people once they’ve been genetically modified to that end. After being unimpressed with all of Castavillian’s possible names and ideas, Davros leaves the room for a moment. The TARDIS promptly crashes there—taking the weapon’s claw arm with it—and the Fourteenth Doctor (David Tennant) emerges. He immediately recognizes and names the Dalek, as well as its catch phrase, giving Castavillian plenty of good ideas. Realizing that he’s emerged at the Dalek inception point, he insists he was never there, but does replace the claw arm with the first thing he can find on the TARDIS: a plunger. Davros reenters after the Doctor is gone, sees the plunger, and decides that he loves it.

Onto the episode: After a brief reminder of New Who’s season four finale, the Doctor lands in London during the holiday season and immediately runs into Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) and her daughter Rose (Yasmin Finney). Trying his best to avoid contact, the Doctor ducks away as a spaceship appears to crash-land nearby. He runs into Donna’s husband Shaun Temple (Karl Collins), and pretends to be a friend of Nerys to explain all the weird personal questions he’s asking, the main one being why Shaun is driving a cab given that winning lottery ticket he secretly slipped them after their wedding. It turns out that Donna gave away most of the money, except what they needed to buy a house.

The Doctor heads to the crash site and meets Shirley Anne Bingham (Ruth Madeley), a scientist for U.N.I.T. who is excited to have her first encounter with the Doctor. He tells her that it feels as though fate is drawing him back to Donna Noble and explains that this is the first time that he’s regenerated back into someone he used to be—he worries that he doesn’t know himself anymore. Meanwhile, Rose bemoans her mother always missing all the alien stuff while Donna’s mother Sylvia (Jacqueline King) pretends not to notice it either. One of Rose’s friends brings her over to an additional crash site where an escape pod seems to have landed. Back behind the bins at home, Rose discovers a cute furry alien who calls itself the Meep (Miriam Margoyles), and warns her that it’s being hunted. She agrees to hide the Meep in her shed out back where she makes plush toys to sell abroad.

A team of U.N.I.T. soldiers try to break into the ship—which Shirley Anne believes parked in the steel factory rather than crashing into it—and are promptly brainwashed and go searching for the Meep. A group of aliens who look like bipedal moths called the Wrarth are also on the hunt. Donna goes to fetch Rose from the shed and finds the Meep, leading her to pull her daughter and the alien inside and ask why this is going on while Sylvia keeps trying to stop Donna from looking at the thing. The Doctor shows up on their doorstep and Sylvia tries to keep him out, but he figures Donna will be okay so long as she doesn’t remember him, and enters to try and figure out what is happening. The family is promptly attacked on both sides by the Wrarth and possessed U.N.I.T. soldiers, so the Doctor helps everyone upstairs and decides to escape through the attics of adjacent homes.

As the family flees in Shaun’s cab, the Wrarth fire on them, but nothing really happens to the cab. The Doctor parks in a lot and waits for the aliens to catch up, invoking the Shadow Proclamation and naming himself an arbiter in the proceedings. He points out that the Wrarth are using stun weapons and not trying to hurt anyone, and that the U.N.I.T. soldiers don’t seem to be working for them at all. He’s told that the Meep were a conquering species that almost succeeded in their horrible aims, and that this particular Meep was their ruler and the worst of them all. The Wrarth are trying to capture the Meep before it can do anymore damage. The Meep finally admits to all this and is planning to fire up their ship and escape using a “dagger drive”—which will destroy all of London if it goes off. The Meep is then retrieved by the brainwashed U.N.I.T. soldiers to be brought back to the ship. The Doctor and Donna’s family are taken hostage, they escape captivity thanks to Shirley Anne Bingham (and her packing wheelchair), and Donna insists that Shaun and her mother take Rose at least ten miles away to be safe… but she plans to stay with the Doctor.

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Exordia

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The Doctor is trying to shut off the drive, but he can’t work fast enough. He explains to Donna that she could help him fix it, but it would lead to her death. Donna doesn’t care because there are nine million lives at stake, including her daughter’s, so the Doctor says the necessary string of words to break the wall in Donna’s mind and bring back the metacrisis knowledge she possesses. Donna berates the Doctor for what he did (mostly because the bit of him that still resides in her is the reason she gave up the lottery money) while the two of them work to stop the drive as it’s firing. Donna dies in the Doctor’s arms and he’s about to be executed by the Meep’s soldiers—when Rose suddenly steps in to help and Donna wakes. The Doctor sees that the metacrisis became a legacy that Donna passed down to her daughter. Donna realizes that the knowledge of these events have been bleeding through in choices Rose has made—the shed that looks like the TARDIS, her chosen name, and her toys that look like aliens that the Doctor and Donna encountered together. Donna sees that they are binary but her daughter is not (and that the Doctor can be any of those things or none), and this has helped to balance the scales. Rose stops the Meep by ejecting it from the ship and London is saved.

The Meep is sentenced to prison for 10,000 years and threatens the Doctor: it plans to tell someone called “the boss” about his dual hearts. The Doctor tells Donna and Rose that they will still not survive the metacrisis energy levels, but they’re not worried—they understand the problem far better than a man ever could and simply release it. Rose feels like she’s finally fully herself. Later on, the Doctor and Donna ask if they can go visit Wilf together in the TARDIS (he’s in a community for the elderly now that he can no longer manage stairs), and Sylvia begrudgingly agrees. They both get aboard the redesigned TARDIS, which the Doctor tears around in a flurry of excitement. The console has a coffee-maker, so the Doctor gets Donna coffee and she suggests that he could stop by sometimes even if they’re not traveling together. Then she spills her coffee on the console, breaking everything and sending them… potentially anywhere in time and space.

Commentary

Look, there’s plenty to talk about, but I can’t start without saying… I missed them so damn much.

I also have to start by pointing out that reinstated showrunner Russell T. Davies was always taken to task by a certain contingent of Whovians (and the internet at large) for having an “agenda,” in a political sense, particularly when it came to queerness. And this episode seems very specifically designed to say oh, I’ll show you an agenda in sky writing, with letters at tall as skyscrapers.

So yeah, I also missed Davies a bunch.

This has all the hallmarks of a Davies episode, for good and ill: It’s high camp; it’s high emotion; it’s queer af; it’s got deus ex machinas up the wazoo; the villain is just as comical as they are scary (“Midnight” was pretty much the only exception to this); and London is in such imminent peril that it’s literally impossible for it to survive the attack that just occurred, but it’s completely fine.

Seriously, the dagger drive creates fractures and fault lines throughout the entire city, and in my head I thought these are going to close right up like they never existed as soon as they deactivate that drive, and that’s exactly what happened. Davies, my man. It makes no sense, but I have never minded when it’s you writing it.

I do need to give him a bit of a hard time for the way gender identity plays into the solution of the episode, however. The accidental gift that Davies gave himself in having “binary” being the word Donna got stuck on during the metacrisis meltdown in season four was a great gateway into the discussion, and I do love the interplay of the DoctorDonna being a binary while Rose Noble isn’t—mostly because it speaks to a better understanding of trans identity than most shows have. The thing is… I’m not sure if that’s by accident or design. Trans people are not all nonbinary due to being trans. Rose is a trans girl from the language used—Donna calls Rose her daughter, Rose uses she/her pronouns, no mention of genderfluidity is made—but it’s important to remember that plenty of trans people consider themselves nonbinary within their gender. There are nonbinary women and nonbinary men under the trans umbrella. It would have behooved them to be a little clearer in how they were using these words because most people still don’t have working definitions.

Having said that, I did appreciate the conversation between Donna and Sylvia about Rose because it was both incredibly well-written on its own and an excellent guideline for families with trans kids. Sylvia and Donna both express that they’re a little confused by all the changes, but they pointedly do so when Rose isn’t in the room; when she is in the room, there are only expressions of love and support. Moreover, Donna talks of the changes ultimately being positive, of how incredible it is to suddenly have this wonderful daughter seemingly out of nowhere… and then uses that example to try and get Sylvia to say something nice about her. It’s a great scene that doesn’t forget the family dynamics we’re already familiar with: that Sylvia was incredibly harsh toward her daughter for ages, and that Donna still has to prod her mother into complimenting her.

I also appreciate the continuing characteristic of the Doctor being entirely unfrazzled if corrected on how he speaks about sentient beings. When Rose points out that the Doctor is assuming the Meep’s pronouns, the Doctor is never offended—he pauses, reconsiders, and corrects himself without annoyance. And that’s important because, again, it’s a guideline: Maybe this isn’t a part of your daily life, the show is saying, but when you do encounter it, this is how to react with grace.

But then again, there’s a weirdness right there at the end with how Rose and Donna avoid having their heads exploded by Time Lord energy; when pressed, they both insist that the Doctor can’t understand how to fix this anymore because he’s a man, but they can as women. And what they know is that they can simply release the energy instead of making everything all fraught. And it’s just… goofy. Again, there’s that insistence in some realms of pop culture and fiction that feminism is just acknowledging that women are somehow better than men, and that’s what this moment reads as, instead of trying to point out ways in which they might be different due to experience.

They missed a trick by not giving a more specific explanation as to why Donna and Rose can figure out how to fix the metacrisis problem. It could have been tied to their gender, but it needed to not be a lazy “because we’re girls and we get it.” Moreover, it should have been something that the Doctor could understand once it was explained to him; he was a woman less than a day ago, it hasn’t just left him in a rush.

And then there’s also the question of how the Doctor views his own gender identity. It seems that the Doctor basically assumes the gender of whatever their body would be “assigned” based on its shape (which is what other Time Lords are shown to do as well), and I don’t hate that as a choice—the Doctor is an alien and Gallifreyan views on gender and bodies are liable to be different from a human’s. But I do wish the Doctor would talk about it a little? Especially in light of the changes that have just occurred.

So those are my quibbles, and they’re significant in their own way, but I also cannot care because Ten is my Doctor, and now Fourteen is also my Doctor because it’s just Ten having the benefit of being far older, much wiser, and more caught up in his emotions. The face he makes when he talks of how much he loves Donna—the shock at being the same person he was four regenerations ago, but still different because he never used to say things like that—is so important to how these anniversary episodes will unfold. We don’t have the full picture on why the Doctor did this, and there’s likely to be a sneakier explanation at work, but there doesn’t need to be.

The Doctor missed his best friend. Missed having a best friend.

And now he’s a raw ball of feelings in a plaid suit, back to being this bouncy, hyper-dramatic, aggrandizing fellow, who needs that balance back. The way that Donna begins slotting herself into that place well before the walls come down, the part of her that knows she’s been there before… that’s how you do a reunion. That’s how you revive characters and a dynamic you’ve lost. The two of them egging each other on, the joy they find at being the DoctorDonna, the identical expressions they make when standing side by side like two kids begging to go outside and play in the mud—there are so many wonderful Doctor-companion dynamics, but this one is truly top tier. It shines this bright because Catherine Tate and David Tennant love working together, and that enjoyment permeates every scene where they’re in the same room.

Add Miriam Margoyles as that classic brand of Davies villain, two cups cute with a teaspoon of pure evil, add some silly moth aliens who really just want to help, add family nonsense and holiday cheer, and you’ve got all the ingredients for anniversary specials that are here to give a hug to a certain generation of Who fan while preparing us for something entirely new. I’m glad we’re getting this moment, and I can’t wait to see what comes next.

Bits and Bobs

• That Children in Need special was also perfect. Again, high camp and adorable.

• I do miss Segun Akinola’s scoring for the show, but if he’s ready to move on, bringing Murray Gold back was exactly the right move. Listen to that theme go.

• Dave Gibbons (probably best known for his collaborations with Alan Moore on Watchmen and Superman) and Paul Mills (who created 2000 AD and also had a heavy hand in the development of Judge Dredd) are given story credit here because Beep the Meep is their creation, written for a 1980 Doctor Who comic strip that bears the same title as this episode. Not sure why the comic’s other writer, John Wagner, didn’t receive credit.

• So the Doctor shows Shaun the psychic paper, insisting that he’s “Grandmaster of The Knowledge” (being London cab driver Knowledge, which is a real thing, by the by), but Shaun tells him that the paper says “Grandmistress” which prompts the Doctor to scold the paper to keep up. But we know this isn’t the issue because Thirteen had the exact same problem on her regeneration in the other direction, and moreover, the paper is called the psychic paper because it’s psychic. Ergo, the paper doesn’t need to keep up, it’s the Doctor who’s having a hard time remembering that he’s a man again. And I just think it’s neat.

• Shoutout to Nerys, who is apparently still in Donna’s orbit and causing issues everywhere she goes. Everyone’s got a Nerys in their life.

• The number of shoutouts to the season four premiere “Partners in Crime” are great, with the Doctor looking through the mail slot being one of my favorites. (Also that E.T. reference with the Meep hiding amidst the toys.)

• Shirley Anne Bingham’s role in the episode is great, and while I’m always discomfited with U.N.I.T.’s militaristic leanings throughout the show’s history, I do appreciate their commitment to hiring misfit geniuses of varying neurodivergent and disabled stripes. And I also appreciate when it’s shown that you can work for an employer that values your expertise, and still fails to put ramps up to the spaceship you’re meant to study.

• The gorgeous shade of Donna pointing out that she’s going to hang out in a tiny box with another man, and Shaun Temple being like, my love, that man is not your type, I could just die.

• The new TARDIS interior is an interesting one—very old-school Who with the color and cleaner lines, but much, much larger in scope. Watching Fourteen run along the ramps was a shot of pure joy.

See you next week!

The post Doctor Who Celebrates 60th Anniversary by Reuniting One of Its Greatest Teams in “The Star Beast” appeared first on Reactor.

Which forces us to collectively ask… is the backstory of Coriolanus Snow something that the world really needed to reckon with? And it’s a question we can now ask twice, with the release of The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes in theaters.

[Minor spoilers for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes]

The film follows the path set before a young Coriolanus Snow (Tom Blythe), son of a once-rich family who is doing his best to keep up that appearance, a full sixty-four years ahead of the trilogy’s events. His hopes of winning a scholarship that his family desperately needs are dashed when the parameters for obtaining it are altered by Dean Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage) and Head Gamemaker Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis). Now students who desire the coveted Plinth Prize must participate as the first “mentors” in the Hunger Games and offer suggestions to increase viewership, as very few people in the Capitol seem keen to watch anymore.

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Highbottom is the former friend (as in, they had a terrible falling out) of Snow’s father, and as a result sticks him with what he assumes will be the worst tribute—the girl from District 12. That girl turns out to be Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler), who dazzles the public at her reaping by showing up in a colorful dress that belonged to her mother and singing a defiant song. Snow rightly sees this for the opportunity it is, and his ambition combined with Lucy Gray’s performance savvy makes it easy for Coriolanus to land her attention and stoke public interest in the games. This, combined with his suggestions to Dr. Gaul make the 10th Annual Hunger Games a spectacle that ensures their survival into the future, even as Snow begins to fall for his tribute and she for him.

The games only make up half of the film’s 157-minute runtime, a punishment seemingly inflicted on the audience for not having to sit through two films instead of one (which is what happened to the trilogy’s third installment Mockingjay, don’t forget). The rest of the film deals with Snow’s feelings for Lucy Gray, and the effect that relationship has on his person and his future. To the story’s credit, Coriolanus Snow never seems like a “good” guy, even at his most vulnerable moments; it’s clear from the beginning that young “Coryo” has compartmentalized everything uneasy in his life in order to allow himself freedom to do inhumane things. It helps, also, that the film chose not to keep such a tight perspective on Snow as the book does, allowing the audiences to sink into the perspective of Lucy Gray just as often when she’s the focus of a scene.

The actors chosen for these roles do most of the film’s work for it. Zegler commands the screen whenever she appears, dazzling with the sort of charisma the part demands. It’s an enjoyable turn away from soft and besotted Maria of West Side Story, and an impressive indication of Ziegler’s range as a performer. Blyth manages to play Snow in a manner that never trips over into melodrama, never overplays evil all the way across the line into caricature. The result (thankfully) doesn’t make Coriolanus Snow easier to relate to, but certainly does remind the audience that evil is often mundane and frighteningly human.

Having said this, Viola Davis’ Dr. Gaul never does manage to come off as anything quite so subtle. With only a few objectivist slogans for thoughts and a lab full of horrors, Gaul is the unequivocal devil on Snow’s shoulder. Davis seems to be enjoying the chance to play that sort of part, and all the more power to her. It’s only unfortunate that behind Panem’s greatest tyrant is another whose motives seem far less complex, in an exercise that is arguably about recognizing the humanity of even the most odious people.

But the film has another problem in its prequel leanings: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes takes an unfathomable amount of time setting up key points of relation to the originating trilogy, often in a manner so obvious that it winds up comical. There are mockingjays all over District 12, and Snow doesn’t seem to like them. Lucy Gray sings “The Hanging Tree” at several portentous moments in the film, and possibly also wrote it? Look at all the imagery and symbolism!

And then there’s a moment when Lucy Gray’s friend comes to her with a root that they want to stew for food. Snow asks what it is, and Lucy Gray gives him the official name… but tells him that she thinks it should be called “Katniss.” The camera fixes on Snow as his jaw seems to tighten, perhaps glimpsing a future that none of us can see. It’s corny, there’s truly no other word for it. If there’s meant to be a cross-generational handshake happening here—two girls from District 12 who unknowingly conspired across the ages to bring Coriolanus Snow down—it’s not clever enough to include so blatantly.

By the end, it’s hard to know what we’re meant to take away from this manner of tale. We’re given the underpinnings of Snow’s personal ethos, certainly, adopted from Dr. Gaul as the two of them form a mentor-mentee relationship that will bring the Capital into its excess-laden future. These two believe that all people at their cores are monstrous, that all of life is a Hunger Games arena. That they are the ones who win. And there are people in our own world who likely think similarly, of course. But what good does knowing that do us, or indeed, The Hunger Games trilogy? How does knowing what Coriolanus Snow thinks enrich our understanding of what we’ve already witnessed and read?

It doesn’t, really. And so the exercise only serves to bring about more of what the story so meticulously derides—with this prequel, movie theaters across the U.S. are having “Panem parties,” encouraging fans to dress up like denizens of the Capitol, ready to watch the Hunger Games once more. With that in mind, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes can only wind up feeling an awful lot like a marketing scheme to keep this “franchise” going a little bit longer. Impressive performances aside, it has nothing to offer us that we don’t already know.

Emmet Asher-Perrin isn’t quite sure how this would be enjoyable family holiday viewing, in any case. You can bug them on Twitter and Bluesky, and read more of their work here and elsewhere.

The post The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes Adds One More to the Annals of Unnecessary Prequels appeared first on Reactor.

[Minor spoilers for The Marvels]

We’re thrown into the action as Supremor Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton) gets her hands on the twin to the bangle that belongs to Kamala. She wants the pair in order to enact terrible revenge and restore her people; the Kree have not been doing well since Carol Danvers (Brie Larson) came back to Hala and destroyed the Supreme Intelligence following the events of the first Captain Marvel film. But their activities clue Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) in on something fishy, so he sends Carol to check on it. At another site, Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris) is also looking in to some anomalies around jump points in space, and when Monica touches the thing, something funky goes down—every time Monica, Carol, or Kamala (who’s at home in Jersey trying to avoid doing homework in favor of day-dreaming about meeting her hero, Captain Marvel) use their powers simultaneously, they swap places.

This causes a lot of fighting in space to drop right into the Khans’ living room as mother Muneeba (Zenobia Shroff), father Yusuf (Mohan Kapur), and brother Aamir (Saagar Shaikh) are forced to defend their house from Kree soldiers who accidentally zap over with superwomen they’ve never met before. Fury rightly decides that he’s going to need to bring the whole family in on this in order to secure Kamala’s participation in whatever is going on right now. Monica is less than thrilled because she hasn’t seen Carol since her aunt departed to space when she was a child, and is understandably pretty hurt about that.

The dynamic between Danvers, Rambeau, and Khan once they are united make the film an absolute joy to watch all the way down, allowing for heartfelt conversations, Kamala fan-girling all over the place and having to remember that heroes are people, and a dazzling team of women learning how to support one another in the midst of a fraught race against the clock. The montage where the group take time to learn how to swap places effectively is easily one of the best training montages a superhero film has put out, complete with juggling and endless rounds of double-dutch.

The only problem with this setup is one increasingly common to Marvel films these days: Dar-Benn’s rage is entirely warranted, and the film has to go to ridiculous lengths to cartoon-up her villainy in order to prevent the audience from sympathizing with her. (They succeed, which is an even greater shame, as amusing as it is to watch Ashton—who is engaged to Loki actor Tom Hiddleston—also getting to shout “Kneel!” at the masses and wield a hammer of her own.) It turns out that when Carol stopped the Supreme Intelligence from running Kree society, there was no backup, aid, or reconstruction plan—she simply pulled the plug and left. As a result, their homeworld of Hala is in shambles, and no attempt at deprogramming an entire culture run on misinformation and fear has been attempted. The Kree refer to Carol simply as “The Annihilator,” and there is nothing to suggest that she doesn’t live up to that moniker from their perspective.

The film seems to be gesturing at a commentary around the problem of destroying bad systems when there is nothing planned to take their place (and interestingly, Loki’s second season also made a point of circling this thought, albeit with far more actual conversation between characters), but we’re at a very pointed deficit here—because Carol hasn’t had a film since 2019, and has only shown up in the MCU to make glorified cameos otherwise. Through no fault of its own, The Marvels makes it very hard to sympathize with its central hero because the MCU hasn’t let us get to know her half so well as her male counterparts. If the studio were showing Thor or Iron Man levels of investment, we would feel more for Carol at the reveal that she’s become an entire culture’s boogie man and has been trying (and failing) to make up for it ever since. But the lack of check-ins all this time makes her out to be as distant as Monica has felt since Aunt Carol left.

We get plenty of reprieves despite that significant error on Marvel Studios’ part, most of them revolving around Kamala and her family. The choice to put said family front and center, hanging out with Nick Fury and making things awkward for him on the S.A.B.E.R. station because they’re civilians and he’s just deputized their teenaged daughter, is a setup for comedy gold that never fails. It’s worth noting that the film puts in a few very deliberate nods to the family’s Muslim faith with a clear aim to fight social stigma—toward the end of the film, Kamala’s brother begins to pray during a rough ride in space, Fury asks if that’s indeed what he’s doing, and when Aamir asks if he should stop, Fury tells him no because they need all the help they can get. He then proceeds to throw his own “Amen!” on top of it. The whole thing is charming as all get-out.

When the film leans on fun, everything seems right in the MCU, and it thankfully aims for that more often than not. There’s the aforementioned montage, Kamala’s fan-fiction and Monica’s awareness that the kid definitely writes it, a surprise solution with Goose and an army of flerken kittens, and even a trip to a world called Aladna… where people can only understand your words if they are strung on a melody, and Carol turns out to have a secret husband (played to unperturbed perfection by Park Seo-joon, and seriously where is the movie where that marriage went down, come on).

The Aladna sequence is one of the best in the film, and provides me with another more minor complaint—commit to the bit, Marvel. Once the denizens of the planet are revealed to sing instead of speak, I was so ready for a half-hour musical. It’s disappointing to only get a fun taste and then rocket away for another fight. In many ways, the whiplash can’t help but feel like tension between the creatives and the studio, like someone is standing over the production, tapping folks on the shoulder and pointing at their watch—we should be in battle by now.

Fine! Where’s my singing battle sequence? Commit.

Having said that, this film also contains the only legal use of the “Memory” from the musical Cats. And no, I don’t mean the term to denote literal legality, I mean legal as in, it gets my rabid stamp of approval because it is the only time in history when the song’s use has been warranted, well-executed, and so funny that I almost bruised a rib laughing. All other uses of the song should be banned, including its use in the musical itself. I suppose that would spoil the joke, however, so I guess I’ll have to allow for the continued use of the song elsewhere.

Hiccups aside, The Marvels is a delightful journey that’s high on laughs, space-faring adventure, and three women who deserve a lot more attention from the MCU. Is it also nice to watch Nick Fury get to have some fun after the absolute slog of Secret Invasion? You bet. Am I upset that no one ever mentions what is going to be done to fix up the Khans’ home after that alien attack? Extremely. (I know it’ll all get fixed up off-screen, but collateral damage! It’s never addressed in a way that’s meaningful. Having your home destroyed in a sudden blitz that you never knew to prepare for is traumatizing!) All of this to say, get to the theater and enjoy, because they don’t make enough of them like this.

Emmet Asher-Perrin really demands an extended musical section. You can bug them on Twitter and Bluesky, and read more of their work here and elsewhere.

The post The Marvels Is a Much-Needed Dose of Delight appeared first on Reactor.

So… the second season of Loki was what I’d exactly been waiting for, turns out.

After the finale of season one, we follow Loki (Tom Hiddleston) as he makes it back to the Time Variance Authority after watching another variant of himself (Sophia Di Martino) prepare to murder He Who Remains (Jonathan Majors)—the man who would be Kang. After making a suggestion that none of Loki’s friends from the TVA know who he is in that final scene, the second season thankfully dispenses with that curveball in short order. The confusion is the result of Loki having developed a brand new ability called “time-slipping,” which brings him to different moments in time at the TVA, a place that technically doesn’t have time, but let’s ignore that for now.

There’s a lot of that in the second season of Loki, to be fair: The plot is meant to be a cleverly stitched time travel puzzle, but there are plenty of holes in the picture it makes up, and plenty of deus ex machina employed to cover them. You could possibly argue that using deus ex machina in a story that revolves around a god who is very good at skirting rules and regulations is a feature, not a bug, but that’s for the viewer to decide. And, of course, there are some changes within Loki as a character that make this choice all the more interesting, which I’ll get into below.

Sylvie, the variant who killed He Who Remains thus unleashing endless versions of Kang into the multiverse, escapes to a branched timeline in 1982 Oklahoma while Loki has a realtime panic attack in front of Mobius and the TVA head staff, trying to convince them to take this new He Who Remains variant threat seriously. At the same time, former TVA judge Ravonna Renslayer (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) and admin AI Miss Minutes (Tara Strong) escape into the past and give the TVA handbook to very important young man—the first of those variants, who grows up to be a fellow called Victor Timely.

Back at the TVA, the loom that holds all of time is failing under the new branches that are evolving now that the TVA is no longer pruning them down to a single vein. To help with this and Loki’s time-slipping, Mobius recruits a technician named Ouroboros (Ke Huy Kuan), the guy who literally wrote the TVA handbook. O.B.—a character who pings you right in the childhood if you were a Goonies fan, as he often reads like a grown up version of Data—proceeds to figure out that they’re all going to die if they can’t fix the loom, which requires a He Who Remains variant or Miss Minutes to access… so the chase begins.

The second season knows what it’s got going for it, namely the rapport between Loki and Mobius, and also between their outrageously endearing costars like B-15 (Wunmi Mosaku) and Casey (Eugene Cordero) and O.B. Sylvie, too, is a bright spot of the season, constantly challenging Loki to be more honest and thoughtful about his shifting viewpoints on the universe and his place in it. She’s the person who finally forces him to admit that the entire reason he feels such a pressing need to save the TVA is because these people have become his friends, and he no longer knows who he would be without them.

There’s still a problem in how many of the show’s female characters get depicted, unfortunately. As a compounding of my previous complaint that Sylvie doesn’t get to have any fun at all as a Loki variant, there’s an issue mid-season where nearly all the women on the show come into conflict with the ends that Loki and Mobius are trying to achieve, and several fights that occur on that front. The result is both of our male protagonists repeatedly trying to explain to women that everything they’re attempting is wrong because it doesn’t align with their goals—and, of course, the audience is inclined to see things their way, being the primary vantage points of the show. Loki and Sylvie’s dynamic at least equalizes by the end of the season, with both of them having things to teach the other; which is as it should be as they’re essentially the same person with the benefit of different experiences. But it’s still upsetting that Sylvie isn’t considered important enough within the series to truly receive her own development. She is only ever used to counterbalance Loki’s perspectives.

There’s also an absolutely bananas love triangle that occurs between Victor Timely, Ravonna, and Miss Minutes. And no, I’m not saying bananas because it’s between two humans and a cartoon clock; that’s just funny. The bananas-ness of this choice is in (a) the trend of film and TV writers being unable to conceive of female-coded AI / robots without assigning them romantic inclinations toward the men in their lives, and (b) Renslayer’s entire demeanor flipping upside-down the instant that Timely is gallant toward her. This woman is too competent and too canny to potentially ruin her entire nefarious plan over a day’s worth of flirting. Either spend time developing that dynamic, or don’t bother. And, of course, there’s additional devastating awkwardness to all of this in Marvel’s unwillingness to make any choices around Jonathan Majors’ tenure as Kang, following allegations of domestic abuse that have been brought against the actor.

There are likely going to be accusations of queerbaiting against the show, and I can’t disagree from a critical perspective whatsoever… because we’ve oddly moved from Loki being smitten with Sylvie (and he still is a little, but he’s pulled himself together about it) to being utterly devoted to Mobius in a way that harkens backs to the Cap/Bucky dynamics of old. It’s still not good to queerbait, kids, but I’ll admit to being incredibly pleased that season two of Loki suddenly had me pulling for the God of Mischief to fall into the arms of Owen Wilson. I wasn’t expecting to go on that journey, but then they had a pie date, and rode a tandem bike, and Loki tried to impress the guy by being extremely extra in a James Bond-style footchase, and then smoothed his hair and straightened his jacket when going to speak to a branched-timeline version of Mobius who didn’t know him, so yeah, whoops, this is where I live now? Weird U-turn, but I’m down.

The final episode contains a lot of groundhog-day-esque comedy once Loki has learned to control his time-slipping problem and turn it into another power that would probably make every other superhero envious. (I’m guessing this is an ability that they’ll have to somehow rescind before ever introducing the character into another MCU story because… well, it’s too much power, and way too convenient a fix for any problem outside the one that’s occurring here.) But moreover, the episode addresses one of my key beefs with the first season of the show—namely that He Who Remains offered Loki and Sylvie two options at the end of time, and they both took those options to heart and never bothered to find different solutions, as their characterization demands. This time around, we see Loki once again presented with two options, and he finally gives the response that lives up to his name: I’ll find another way.

There’s another aspect of this season that tickles me personally, which is an unspoken interface with some of my favorite runs of Loki comics, runs where it’s made clear that Loki isn’t just a God of Mischief, but a God of Story. (This was absolutely intentional on the part of the series, it turns out—Loki has actually been redubbed the God of Story by Marvel Studios following the season’s finale.) In many ways, Loki is a metafictional character—not to the extreme extent that, say, Deadpool is, but still similarly situated. He is aware that he is pieces of many narratives, stretched out across time, that he is spoken of as a character far more than a person. To that end, part of his power is wrapped up in shaping story. And that’s what season two of the series allows him; awareness of the narrative, and the ability to rewrite it. But this time, he does it with an eye toward everything he cannot bear to lose.

What I’m saying is, I also didn’t expect this season to depict Loki birthing the multiverse with the power of love? But that’s pretty much exactly what goes down.

The final scenes of the season are about the newly minted God of Story reaching a new state within said godhood; stripped down to his archaic roots, having already spent untold centuries at his task, he finally ascends a throne that is meant for him—one bound up in service to others. “Because that’s what heroes do,” as his brother would say.

Thor would be so proud of this he might explode.

It feels final, and obviously never will be. (Loki and Thor must reunite, for a start, one would hope—Loki hasn’t even met his niece yet.) But this was the path I was hoping the series would take at the outset; far-reaching consequences, a learning journey, a whole lot of historical shenanigans, silly sci-fi mechanics, and the chance for a character who has always been lonely and displaced to create the home he needed. Another season might be fun if they can swing it, but if not, they’ve managed an ending worthy of the prince formerly known as the God of Mischief.

Emmet Asher-Perrin is deeply obsessed with the costuming choices on this show, but particularly that final helm. You can bug them on Twitter and Bluesky, and read more of their work here and elsewhere.

The post Season 2 of Loki Finally Gave Us a Story Worthy of the Prince Formerly Known as the God of Mischief appeared first on Reactor.

Summary

Vimes, Sir Reynold, and Sybil head into the Ramkin family attics and find Sybil’s replica of The Battle of Koom Valley. As they’re looking over it, Vimes realizes that the deep-down dwarfs believe that the painting is a map that will lead them to something important. He decides he’s going to Koom Valley and Sybil insists on coming along with Young Sam despite his protestations. Vimes tells Vetinari that he’s doing this with a crew of officers and Bashfullsson, and cannot be dissuaded. He secretly meets with Ridcully and asks if there’s anything the wizards can do to help his party get to Koom Valley faster since they’re a day behind the dwarfs. Ridcully agrees that he can do something to their coaches and that they obviously never had this conversation. Vimes wakes in the morning and Carrot informs him that the wizards have altered the carriages so that they weigh literally nothing, even with passengers. The horses have also been given some help with special harnesses. Detritus gets permission to take Brick along. The coaches set off, and when the harnesses for the horses kick into gear, the carriages lift off the ground and manage to hit sixty miles per hour.

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After going at that pace for a short burst, Vimes manages to stop the carriages and get them back to a normal speed, but Willikins points out that they could get to Koom Valley that day if they kept it up and that the dwarfs likely had brooms or some other fast mode of transit. They make it to twenty miles outside, but Sybil insists that they go the rest of the way normally so everyone can get rest in town and be fresh the following day. They stay with an old friend of Sybil’s named Bunty. She doesn’t consider trolls to be people of any sort, though Detritus takes this in stride. Angua and Sally are asked to bunk together and Sally leaves in the middle of the night. The next day the group head into the valley with the sketch of the painting, but Vimes is having a hard time matching up the landscape until he accidentally sits on the real painting. He finds a cave entrance and knows that this is where the cube was found. He also knows that there’s a tunnel below and decides to investigate before everyone else catches up to him, dropping into water below. He comes to on a dark beach in the cave and knows he must press on, despite the fact that he’d only come this far because of the voice in his head that told him to jump down into the cave.

Vimes is having a near death experience (which Death shows up for) as Sybil assures her friend that he will be home to read to Young Sam soon. The Gooseberry tells Vimes that he only has a few minutes to get back, and Vimes latches onto that to keep going. He comes upon a mine with dwarfs and is no longer himself, but a creature demanding of the dwarfs: Where’s my cow? Far away, Young Sam can hear him. He hones in on his target as the dwarfs scrabble to stop him and Sally arrives to help. Eventually, Vimes reaches his target… and stops. Inside Vimes, the Summoning Dark meets Vimes’ inner Watchman, and he tells the Summoning Dark to beat it. He comes to having been tackled by Angua, and surrounded by the Low King’s dwarfs. The deep-downers had been destroying this site where trolls and dwarfs had died side by side. Bashfullson explains that Vimes was possessed by the Summoning Dark, but he managed to beat it. Vimes goes to see his officers and tells the Low King’s captain that Detritus and Brick are to be better treated. The captain agrees to this when he sees the Summoning Dark symbol etched on Vimes as a scar. King Rhys arrives and learns that his men haven’t found the cube. Vimes has a hunch and tells Nobby to hand it over.

Rhys wants the cube, but balks when Vimes tells him to take it. He figures out the opening word (the dwarf word for “say” that sounds like “Awk!”), and the cube begins by speaking Things Tak Wrote… only the ending is different and suggests that dwarfs created the trolls and found them very good indeed. Then the voice of B’hrian Bloodaxe tells the tale: The cave was flooded and they won’t make it out, but dwarfs and trolls came here to make peace, and then someone shouted ambush and a fight broke out. They want the world to know that they brokered that treaty and dwarf and troll died side by side. Ardent is furious and insists it’s a hoax, and goes to fight Bashfullsson for lies; he’s quickly dispatched. Trolls have arrived to parley, and Rhys agrees to see them. Trolls and dwarfs work quickly to preserve the scene, then plan to seal it up. Vimes takes Sally aside and confronts her about being a spy for Rhys, but insists on keeping her. Sybil takes Vimes for their family portrait, finally: She has Otto take their picture. Carrot shows Vetinari the mines under the city, which now belong to Ankh-Morpork. Nobby decides to break up with Tawneee, Brick has a new watchman job, and Vimes reads his book to Young Sam.

Commentary

If I’m not mistaken, this is the first time Pratchett has created a mystical entity and admitted to what it was before the main character was properly introduced. Usually it’s all “the thing/being/creature did such-and-so” for every passage until the relevant person comes into direct contact with it. But in this instance, once Vetinari insists that Ridcully thinks that Summoning Dark is a real entity, it’s named in the next section from its vantage point. Almost as though either the Chancellor or the Patrician’s vote of confidence is enough to tell the reader, yeah, that’s definitely what it is, we’re going with that.

Sam Vimes is running on fumes as always, but this time he’s possessed by the Summoning Dark, and mad with grief at the thought of not being able to read to his son at six. The setup on that climax is admittedly flawless, and so much more interesting than your usual rampage sequence all because they’ve managed to fuel Vimes’ rage with something that truly does matter more than anything in the world—his love for his son.

Which is interesting because it means that you can’t really write this particular story until Vimes is a father. His relationship with Sybil wouldn’t have this hold; Sam Vimes loves his wife, but he’s very practical about that love. Young Sam is the one he’s pinned all his expectations onto. Sybil loves him in turn for all of his mess, but with his child, there’s an ideal that he needs to live up to.

It’s telling that for Vimes, the last two books have basically been about the same thing—they’re marking out that line where his morality lives and asking if a cop can stay above corruption. I’d argue that the need for this conversation springs directly from Vimes’ actions in The Fifth Elephant, and proceeds in a straight line. And the answer is roughly the same on both tales: most of the time. The difference is that this book makes that ability to watch himself a manner of superpower… which is cool from a storytelling perspective, but maybe less impressive from a realism standpoint. The idea of other people keeping an eye on Sam Vimes is still important, no matter what line he’s holding for himself. He needs Sybil and Carrot and Angua and Vetinari for that.

I do love that it’s not difficult for Vimes to write off the Summoning Dark at all. People believe what they want to, even—or maybe especially—when they’re being possessed by ancient supernatural entities.

The other part of the tale is zeroed in on how far people will go to perpetuate their prejudices and cultural givens. And again, it’s made a point of (more than once) how horribly Detritus (and Brick by extension) is treated and how much of that treatment he takes on the chin. The hunting trophies at the embassy in Bonk are sprung on everyone in The Fifth Elephant, but here we have a school pal of Sybil’s essentially treat Detritus like an animal. He’s the one who defuses the situation, and by doing so, prevents Vimes and Sybil from having to say anything on his behalf. In many ways this almost reads like both a self-own and sharp audience check on Pratchett’s part—we get this far along in the series and he turns around and points out that the reader probably has some notions about troll ability and intelligence based on the way he’s written them.

And with all that said and done, it’s time for another story. Possibly a long nap, too.

Asides and little thoughts:

• About Sybil’s family attics: “Maybe that was the reason for their wealth: they had bought things that were built to last, and now they seldom had to buy anything at all.” I’ve talked a bit about this before, but as an addendum to Vimes’ Boots Theory, this is completely accurate to how “old money” thinking works: If you’ve got quality and space to keep it, you are likely to always have what you need indefinitely. Unfortunately, “new money” seems to have largely embraced the capitalist consumerism message of “just buy more stuff and throw away the old stuff.”

• Look, I really love the phrase “mad as a spoon” because it inevitably forces me to consider what makes the spoon mad, and I wind up thinking things like “it’s having a bowl, isn’t it,” which is exactly the sort of thought I want to be having about phrases like “mad as a spoon.”

• There’s also a description of a rocking horse that’s “all teeth and mad glass eyes” and I know exactly the one he means.

Pratchettisms:

Difficult reading, too, because a lot of them were half-burned, and in any case Rascal’s handwriting was what might have been achieved by a spider on a trampoline during an earthquake.

And that was his life: one huge oblong of canvas. Methodia Rascal: born, painted famous picture, thought he was a chicken, died.

He heard a brief scream as the rear coach tore past and swerved into a field full of cauliflowers where, eventually, it squelched to a flatulent halt.

With that, Sam Vimes walked back to the milestone, sat down next to it, put his arms around it, and held on tight until he felt better.

His ribs were carrying the melody of pain, but knees, elbows, and head were all adding trills and arpeggios.

He shuffled on, aching and bleeding, while the dark curled its tail around him.

HAS IT NEVER STRUCK YOU THAT THE CONCEPT OF THE WRITTEN NARRATIVE IS SOMEWHAT STRANGE? said Death.

Vimes thought that was a bit too pat, but nature can be like that. Sometimes you got sunsets so pink that they had no style at all.

We’re gonna pause for the next two weeks, and then we’re back with Wintersmith! We’ll read Chapters 1-4.

The post Terry Pratchett Book Club: Thud! Part IV appeared first on Reactor.

Summary

Vetinari explains to Vimes that it’s important that this case get solved; if it isn’t soon, it’s likely that the Low King will be deposed and war will break out, spreading everywhere including Ankh-Morpork. The creature from earlier is having trouble latching onto the mind it’s chosen. Brick is let go from the Watch House and decides that someone is going to try to pin that dwarf killing on him, so he decides it’s time to go see Mr. Shine. Angua and Sally make it back to Pseudopolis Yard and she gives all the information on the dead dwarfs to Carrot, along with the symbol drawn in blood by one of them. Carrot doesn’t recognize it, but Mr. Shine arrives and knows it well: It’s the symbol of the Summoning Dark. He advises them to always keep the symbol in light, and delivers Brick back to them with the information he possesses. It takes some time to get anything coherent, but Brick does admit that he saw a dwarf hitting another dwarf over the head down in the mine. He gives Vimes the facts as he can remember them, and when Vimes asks about Mr. Shine, Detritus gets very angry with him for being easy on the dwarfs but hard on his people. A rock from Mr. Shine breaks open, giving his address.

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While the Watch dwarfs prepare to raid the mines and find the bodies, Vimes goes to see Mr. Shine, who is king of the trolls because he’s literally made of diamond. He runs a little cellar where trolls, dwarfs, and humans come to play Thud, and learn from one another how to think like their enemies. He wants Vimes to get to the bottom of this case too, and urges him to think hard. Detritus shows up to let him know that the war club of the trolls is being sent around, the Low King is rumored to be sending troops to Kool Valley, and Carrot found three of the dead bodies, definitely killed by other dwarfs. The dark dwarfs have fled, so Vimes tells them to send a message out on the clacks to let him know where they’re fleeing to. Vimes goes home to read to Young Sam. As he reads, he realizes that Helmclever had wanted him to get angry when they visited the mine. He hears a sound and goes to the cellar to find that the dwarfs dug into his home; Willikins killed one and stopped another, but a third makes it to Sam’s nursery and Vimes tears after the figure. Young Sam is safe, but another headed out back to Sybil’s dragon shed. He goes to her, and she uses the dragons to dispatch the next intruder. One of the dead dwarfs is green at the mouth and Willikins insists that he didn’t kill him.

Vimes brings the whole family and the dead bodies to Pseudopolis Yard, and asks Carrot what the dwarfs could be looking for that talks. Carrot brings up something called “cubes,” a device that dwarfs find in mining that contain sounds since the beginning of world, and can be reprogrammed to contain dwarfish speech and stories. Vimes thinks the dwarfs were looking for those under the city. Sally and Angua get cleaned up, and Sally convinces Angua to go out with her and Cheery and Tawneee despite her protestations. Vimes starts working through the info he’s got and wonders if the painter of The Battle of Koom Valley went mad because he had a cube. A. E. Pessimal comes in to ask a question; Vimes knows what it is, and says he’ll happily hire the man once he’s done his report for Vetinari. There are dwarfs who’ve come to see Vimes, leaders in the community, and they’ve brought a new sort of grag with them named Bashfull Bashfullsson. He wants to be present when Vimes questions Helmclever, and Vimes realizes that the impulse isn’t a bad one. He finds out that one of the dwarfs killed was Ironcrust’s son, and these dwarfs vouch for Bashfullson. Vimes asks the grag to teach him to play Thud as fast as he can.

Vimes sets up the game to play with Helmclever and asks questions as they go. He learns that they found a cube with the voice of B’hrian Bloodaxe, the dwarf king during Koom Valley. Hamcrusher had the miners killed because they had heard the cube speak lies about the battle. He tried to destroy the cube for those lies, so one of the grags—they’re not sure which—killed him in turn for the crime of trying to destroy words. They all came to the city because Helmclever went to study in the mountains and he brought the codex book with him. That gave Ardent the idea to search for the cube. The club used to fake a “troll” bashing in Hamcrusher’s head belonged to Helmclever… given to him by Mr. Shine for being so good at Thud. The deep-downers have the cube and the painting, and Vimes doesn’t have anyone fit to testify. The candles fall on the floor and when they get the light back, Helmclever has passed from fear. Bashfullson promises he will say that the Watch treated him fairly, and asks Vimes to take him to Koom Valley if (when) he decides to go. He also learns that Sybil copied the stolen painting as a young woman, and they’ve got the copy in their attic. Angua, Cheery, and Sally are called back in from their Girls Night.

Commentary

The dance is getting complicated with Vimes and Vetinari, is all I’m saying. Just the two bros having whole side conversations without saying words. Just a couple of guys keeping eagle eyes on each other to make certain they don’t become megalomaniacs. Just dudes being public servants at each other in increasingly labyrinthian ways that this time involve Vimes converting a Patrician’s man into a Watchman via one night of action. Now he’s got a Vetinari-grade clerk going through all his paperwork.

I hate it, is what I’m saying. It couldn’t go off better if they planned it. (It wouldn’t work, frankly.) And then Vetinari tells him to go get sleep because the future of the world is currently in his hands, and Vimes knows he’s right, so he just… does it. Vetinari gives Vimes the rundown of how the world sees him, how everyone talks of his incorruptibility and stalwart skill, and you know that when all of this gossiping got back to Vetinari the first time, his head was just a neon billboard flashing the words I DID THAT.

It becomes clear in this section that something is hanging on in Vimes’ brain, and though we can probably guess what that is, we haven’t got the full story yet. What’s clever is that the internal monologue is never so far off from Vimes battling his usual demons as to feel totally out-of-character. You can tell that’s something’s up, but it’s not overwrought. Well, okay, maybe in the places where you see the words kill and burn a lot.

The Da Vinci Code aspect of the book gets more serious at this point with the conspiracy aspect and the religious aspect and all the puzzles around art and symbols. The Discworld series gets much shrewder with parody as it goes on, and I’d argue that this is one of the best examples; Pratchett has taken the shape of something, but overplayed a completely new story onto it. You don’t need to have read or care about Dan Brown’s oeuvre to get it, but it does make things a tiny bit funnier when you do. And Pratchett’s use of those same themes is better, in fact.

The ways in which the prejudices play out in both directions on this are absolutely devastating throughout, but I think the section where Detritus gets angry with Vimes hits hardest. Because Vimes is seeing Koom Valley everywhere, but all I’m seeing is Detritus, who puts up with a lot of jokes at his own expense, who takes a lot on the chin when he shouldn’t, finally pointing out that Vimes is doing that thing the assimilating culture always does; he sees Detritus as a good officer first and a troll second. He erases that part of him so that Detritus fits better in his mind. It’s not just Koom Valley tension—it’s the difficulty of being in that position every day. Detritus finally points out the parts of him that are always there that everyone is very keen to ignore, draws a line, and says not right now. It means a lot that Vimes listens and apologizes.

Even with a specter in his head.

Asides and little thoughts:

• Sybil on their neighbors’ shrubbery being on fire while they’re on holiday: “Well, if they’re not ready for that sort of thing they shouldn’t be growing rhododendrons.” I could scream, she is perfect.

• Angua literally making a bondage joke to Sally about them bonding, just ugh! Let them date! This is the hill I’ll die on.

• And on another subject, let Nobby date! He just wants someone to hang out with who maybe won’t always throw fish at him. Angua and Sally both have an unfortunate tendency toward elitism due to being part of the fancy werewolf family and a vampire respectively, and their preoccupation with getting Tawneee into her “league” is kinda gross, particularly since the league is entirely based on their assessment of her looks.

Pratchettisms:

Let’s hear it for the mob, Vimes thought. Grab it by its sentimental heart.

Hell, I’m probably a spoon.

After the terror came that drunken feeling, when you were still alive and suddenly everything was funny.

“Indeed, sir? I apprised myself of its use, sir, and tested my understanding by firing it down the tunnel they had arrived by until it ran out of igniferous juice, sir. Just in case there were more. It is for this reason, I suspect, that the shrubbery of Number Five is on fire.”

Vimes detected just a soupçon of a smidgen of a reproach there.

He felt like a man crossing a river of stepping-stones. He was halfway across, but the next stone was just a bit too far and could only be reached with serious groinal stress.

A knife dropped into Vimes’s head. It slipped down his wind-pipe, sliced his heart, cut through his stomach, and disappeared. Where the rage had been, there was a chill.

Next week we finish the book!

The post Terry Pratchett Book Club: Thud! Part III appeared first on Reactor.

Summary

Sally gets her first hazing with garlic in her locker, but she is already prepared, and gets the officer back immediately (with a turnip full of chili seeds carved to look like garlic and eaten on a dare). Carrot calls her in to discuss her handling of the situation and recruit her to the Hamcrusher case. The imp in Vimes’s Gooseberry insists that it can help with his sums and Vimes winds up asking it to help by sorting through his paperwork and find out if dwarfs have been shifting much in all their digging underneath the city. Cheery tells Vimes that some trolls have come to see him, and they tell him that Chrysophrase wants to see him. When they threaten his family, Detritus hammers one of them on the head for having no manners. Vimes knows he needs to meet the troll regardless, and hearing about a few more resignations, he makes a speech to the officers about knowing where they stand and who they stand with. There is an ancient creature in the city, clinging to a mine. Vimes meets Chrysophrase in the Pork Futures Warehouse, and the troll tells him that a troll killed Hamcrusher, and that he wants Vimes on the case or the trolls will be very unhappy and harder to control. They’ll wait for the Watch to sort things out for now.

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Vimes asks who Mr. Shine is and gets told that it’s an old troll folk hero; he also gets a tip about some old lady making cakes on Turn Again Lane and a new troll drug called Slide, which is much worse than Slab. He tells Detritus to gather a crew and check out Turn Again Lane. He learns that it’s nearly six o’clock; he doesn’t have enough time to get home. He sends up a message via the clacks and Carrot shuts down two major thoroughfares at rush hour to get him to his front door: It’s time to read to Young Sam, and Vimes has promised never to be late for that. He wakes hours later and comes into the library where Sybil is with Carrot and Sally. They went down into the mine and found further evidence of a troll interloper, which strangely seemed to panic Ardent into believing the troll was still there. Angua picks up a scent, bothered by the presence of Sally, and asks them to open a door they claimed had water behind it. They do so and dwarfs come forward to burn the space with flamethrowers to be certain it’s “safe.” The scent makes Angua faint. Vimes is stunned to hear about the flamethrowers as they could easily be used as weapons, and wants it known that no one should be aboveground with them.

Vimes tries to pare down the problems, since they’re rapidly approaching a redux of Koom Valley with the evidence found. He asks about the Following Dark sign again, and Carrot explains that dwarfs draw signs as a sort of vote-by-grafitti for a mine’s general mood. They also believe that certain types of dark are alive, and influence dwarfs to write them out. The Following Dark is one of the worst of these—it’s a pervading sense of dread. The dwarfs and trolls are setting up for a riot in the city center. Carrot has already made the arrangements, but Vimes insists on being there because he can’t tell Vetinari that he was at home if something terrible breaks out. Sybil has already packed him food. Brick has fallen in with a gang of trolls and is hiding amidst them, not being sure what else to do. He gets back to the Watch House where everything is getting more frantic by the minute and the “Specials” squad has been rounded up—that’s special constables that they deputize in moments when there’s too much heat and not enough officers. Mr. Pessimal begins to bother Vimes again, so he’s put into the Specials roundup too. They set up in the center between the groups, Carrot and Cheery taking the dwarfs and Vimes and Detritus taking the trolls.

Angua is down in the mine, trying to figure out what happened, and she can smell Sally down there. She comes across three dwarf bodies, and Sally, who insists that the dwarfs found something that killed them. The two of them are naked—changing back from a group of bats and a werewolf does that (though not to vampire men, oddly)—and begins to argue about Carrot. Sally points out that they should charge admission given the nudity, and the fighting, and the mud all around them. They continue investigating and come across another body that wrote a very bad sign on the wall in blood. The riot has been avoided thanks to the Watch, but Vimes still has two broken ribs and an order to report to Vetinari. Angua and Sally make it to the surface, but Angua can smell Nobby nearby and is determined not to be seen naked by him. Nobby and Fred are at the Pink PussyCat Club watching Tawneee (real name Betty) dance, and hear Angua’s voice from below, directing them to get clothes immediately. Vetinari wants to know why the riot seems to have been avoided by suspiciously-appearing very strong alcohols, and Vimes declines to answer. The Patrician is also shocked to hear that his clerk sustained injuries fighting a troll… which he sustained in combat with a very confused Brick.

Commentary

This is one of the few Discworld books that plays with time in bits of flashback, the kind where a character relays what happened previously to another character, and I love how it’s used. Especially the one at the end of this section (which I should have pushed later), mainly due to Vetinari’s reaction about his clerk going for broke on a troll thirty times his size. We can talk about that next week.

But the trick to stop the riot is a damned clever one, frankly. And I do appreciate the suggestion that trickery is necessary in this instance because sometimes you simply can’t talk people down. (And sometimes you can and should work much harder to do so. But they’ve got limited means at the moment.) We’ve had points in these books where Carrot could stand between people and get them to listen, but that’s never going to work every time. Vimes actually managed a solution that, while morally gray as hell, still ultimately got a better result than the one they walked into Sator Square with.

There’s a lot here about changes bringing a certain level of anonymity that irks. Nevermind not knowing about the dwarfs mining below the city and trying to cover up murder—Vimes thinks about how he doesn’t really know the majority of the Watch now, specifically that he doesn’t know most of these people down to their bones, understand them as people: “It wasn’t really his Watch anymore. It was the city’s Watch. He just ran it.” And that’s what the social contract is meant to create, something for the entire city, but this brings up a difficult point; the larger a system gets, the easier it is for corruption to seep in because you can’t know every piece of it. Too many faces, too much paperwork.

We get a very clear juxtaposition with two uses of the phrase “a leopard couldn’t change its shorts,” once from Vimes thinking that Detritus is proof that a leopard can do so, while Angua is thinking of Sally as proof that they can’t. This isn’t the first time that Angua has had prejudices that she couches in how much the world downplays her difficulties. And, of course, many of the things she has understandable angst over are things that Sally would probably recognize too—the constant urge to revert to instinct, the expectation that they can and should be “tamed” to human cultural norms, the stereotyping and physical discomfort.

I do love that Pratchett manages to make a “women in a mud fight” joke that’s funny. But I’m also always aggravated by the story not going a more entertaining route on this Boy-Is-Mine tiff: Make them a throuple! Sally is clearly bi, and Angua frequently gives those vibes, too, really. And yes, the idea would freak Carrot out, which would probably be good for him when all is said and done. Plus you’d get extra comedy from how much it would confuse everyone in the Watch, Vimes especially.

Sorry, I just think that’s a much more entertaining way of ending a “step off my man” fight. And would be far from the weirdest thing to happen in these books.

But I come back to the leopard changing shorts bit because the themes throughout the book hit hard on the idea of whether or not people can change, and is ultimately working toward an even more important point: People are never what you think at face value. Vimes is surprised that Detritus has changed from what he remembers, but that version of Detritus was always in there; he just needed an opportunity to be different. Sally, too, isn’t what she appears to be, something that Vimes is already cottoning on to without knowing why. No one is ever all their silly stereotypes.

I’m also always struck by the whole section of Vimes racing home and reading to Young Sam. Not just the urgency in not making excuses as a father (ugh, sometimes he is truly just so good, for all that he’s a right bastard), the fear that everything in his life has been too good and therefore must get destroyed (a relatable feeling if ever there was one, when you suddenly have a streak of good fortune that you don’t feel worthy of), but also the sense of quiet and peace in that nursery. The idea that Sam Vimes can’t really baby talk to his own infant son because it doesn’t feel… profound enough to him. He’s made fatherhood into something sacred, and that tells you so much about him as a human being.

Asides and little thoughts:

• Sally von Humpeding’s name comes with more than one reference attached, including Engelbert Humperdinck (and possibly The Princess Bride’s awful prince), and her first name is likely a shoutout to Sally Bowles of Cabaret fame, given the similarity of description and a few other character markers.

• Vimes joking that they’re the “thin brown streak” is, of course, meant to be a variant on the “thin blue line,” preferred by American cops.

• Look, I’m not saying that the point is that Carrot, Sybil, and Vetinari have a scheme by which they all work in concert to get Vimes to just barely take care of himself by getting him home on time to see his son and also forcing him to have boss appointments (which require doing humans things like sleeping and bathing and eating beforehand), but that’s exactly what I’m saying. It’s a plot and they’re all in on it.

Pratchettisms:

Three words, smacking into the silence like lead.

The room empties of all except those still laboring over the knotty problem of where they should put the comma.

Currently—that is to say, for the past ten thousands years, it had found work as superstition.

He’s learned, then, not to use his lantern. Light only ruined your vision, it blinded you. You stared into the dark until it blinked. You stared it down.

…Well, you just better not step over the line, okay?

The trouble was, the trolls up in the plaza probably weren’t bad trolls, and the dwarfs down in the square probably weren’t bad dwarfs. People who probably weren’t bad could kill you.

The nose was also the only organ that can see backwards in time.

The smell of old cabbage, acne ointment, and nonmalignant skin disease became transmuted, in Corporal Nobbs, into a strange odor that lay across the nose like a saw blade on a harp. It wasn’t bad, as such, but it was like its host: strange, ubiquitous, and hellishly difficult to forget.

Coffee was only a way of stealing time that should by rights belong to your slightly older self.

Vetinari grabbed a helpful question from the gathering throng. “Why?”

Next week we read up to:

“When I say ‘the story of my life,’ obviously I don’t mean the whole story,” mumbled Cheery, apparently to herself, as she trailed behind them into a world blessedly without fun.

The post Terry Pratchett Book Club: Thud! Part II appeared first on Reactor.

Summary

There are historical texts and translations around early dwarf and troll cultures. And then a murder, witnessed by a troll. Sam Vimes is shaving himself and Willikins is reading out the important bits from the Times, one of them being the current “dwarfish situation” and the other being a piece about how the Watch is going to be interviewing a vampire. There has been a murder beneath the city and all the dwarfs who have come across the body agree that no one should speak of it, and also that it was committed by a troll. Vimes has a waiting mob at the Watch House to protest the potential appointment of a vampire while Otto is standing there to take pictures. Cheery has been promoted to sergeant and got Angua to bring the vampire interviewee in through the back, which has Vimes worried given the tension between vampires and werewolves. Angua is having difficulty with the vampire, one Sally von Humpeding, but shows her around. In the meantime, Vimes has to deal with a city inspector named Mr. A. E. Pessimal, who refuses to call him anything but “Your Grace.” Pessimal asks for an office and tells Vimes that he’ll need to interview officers. Fred has been moved over to custody officer at the Old Lemonade Factory and tells Vimes that he’s hearing things on the streets from the dwarfs, who seem tetchy, and has seen troll graffiti about someone called Mr. Shine.

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Under the Smokestrewn Sky

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Vimes reads up on Koom Valley, an old fight between dwarfs and trolls that made their mutual hatred “official.” Saturday is Koom Valley Day, and it’s more tense than usual since Grag Hamcrusher arrived a month ago and started preaching that dwarfs were superior and it was their duty to wipe trolls from the earth. Vimes breaks up a fight in the canteen between dwarf and troll officers and tells everyone to get to their jobs and not mess about. He has to go interview Sally, then, which gets off on the wrong foot when he mentions it to Angua, not noticing that Sally is behind her. Fred and Nobby are walking along elsewhere, and Fred mentions that he met Nobby’s current girlfriend… at a local strip club. Fred thinks this isn’t appropriate, but Nobby is quite taken with Tawneee. The curator of the Royal Museum of Art stops them in the street to let them know that a famous painting—The Battle of Koom Valley—has been stolen. They find that it’s been cut out of its frame, and learn about the painter, who worked on the piece for over fifteen years while he was poor and constantly moving about and maybe going a bit mad. People believe that there’s a secret hidden in the painting, but no one can agree what the secret is, and there’s a book for those interested in the mystery: The Koom Valley Codex.

Vimes does his interview with Sally, which doesn’t go well, but he decides to hire her anyway on probation. As they’re finishing up, Carrot bursts in to tell him that someone’s killed Grag Hamcrusher. Vimes learns that the dwarfs were planning on keeping all this a secret and that Carrot only found out because one of the dwarf officers is keen on being promoted. Vimes knows that this is sensitive, but he wants to drop by to ask after Hamcrusher and at least try to confirm if the murder is true. The deep-down dwarfs are wary of Carrot and Cheery, but Vimes insists on bringing Detritus in his crew regardless. On the way, he’s reminded by his new Dis-Organizer that he’s meant to sit for a family portrait, and has to send an officer to give Sybil his regrets (again). They arrive in the street and Angua can feel a thudding below, shaking the area. Vimes tells the guards at Hamcrusher’s house that he wants to see the dwarf and is told he’s not seeing anyone; knowing that he’s dead, Vimes asks the guards to ask someone in authority what should be done next—or he plans to bring Dorfl in to break the door down. They try to wait him out, but finally have to let him in with Angua. Eventually, they are greeted by a dwarf called Helmclever, who is the “daylight face” of this group.

Vimes finds that he has a copy of The Koom Valley Codex and demands that Helmclever let him see Hamcrusher’s body. Someone new emerges named Ardent, and Vimes and Angua are both brought to his office. He admits that Hamcrusher was murdered and insists that they are handling the issue. He also insists that a troll committed the crime because a troll’s club was found by the body. Vimes tells him that this is absurd and demands to see the other grags. Ardent insists that they won’t speak to him, that his joke to the Low King in Uberwald about being a blackboard monitor is a crime to true dwarfs—Vimes erased words. Vimes tells Ardent that if he won’t allow it, they’ll essentially be declaring war against the city, so Ardent agrees to take him. As they’re heading down, Vimes gashes his hand on a nail or rivet. Far off, a troll named Brick who is frequently high on Scrape vaguely remembers wandering into a hole and it turning out to be a dwarf place. When Vimes emerges from the mines (having gotten access to the crime scene for Carrot), a bystander throws a brick at dwarf officer Ringfounder; Detritus catches the brick-throwing dwarf and they arrest him. Heading back to the Watch House, Otto is there and ready to get a picture of Detritus holding the dwarf in the air. Carrot tells Vimes that the symbol he saw Helmcleaver draw in coffee is a reference to “The Following Dark,” which is… not good.

Commentary

This story is deceptively layered, when you get right down to it. It’s about prejudices and racism (or the allegorical fantasy equivalents), but it’s also about Sam Vimes’ own issues with control and how a belief in justice might be practiced in manners that are decidedly unjust.

What I’m saying is, it’s incredibly pointed that all of this is happening while the Watch is undergoing a city inspection, that Vimes thinks that said inspection should never be a thing, and that it’s coming on the heels of Vetinari having seen Vimes cross a line where Carcer was concerned in that cemetery in Night Watch. Basically, the Patrician is silently stating in no uncertain terms that Vimes’s claims as the person who watches the Watchmen are no longer sufficient, given the amount of power (and money) they wield. He’s right, even if the audit will turn up more than a fair share of silly concerns. He’s also right that Vimes cannot make his one diehard prejudice a policy within his sector, and that hiring a vampire is important.

But because these stories set no store by black-and-white thinking, the problem of Hamcrusher’s murder is incredibly wooly in all sorts of ugly ways. Large cities frequently have to deal with populations of people who want to create their own mini societies within the confines of those metropolises. The usual bottom line in those scenarios is that if you want to live somewhere with different laws than you’re accustomed to, you have to abide by them. That doesn’t stop some groups from trying to skirt those laws any more than than the general population often does (because that factor often gets left out of the conversation—plenty of folks flout laws, for all manner of reasons).

What Vimes is coming up against—what’s making him angry, and that’s a key factor in this—is that the deep-down dwarfs believe that their own home laws should apply in his home, and that they are acting constantly without any care for the other citizens around them. And while his anger is understandable, particularly where that last bit is concerned, it is still something that should be kept firmly out of his job. He knows that. But knowing it and enacting it are two different things.

Vimes immediately resorts to intimidation in this scenario. And yes, it’s because there has been a murder and he’s right that the dwarfs shouldn’t be allowed to hush it up from everyone else. They certainly shouldn’t be allowed to blame another species on weak circumstantial evidence to stoke racial tensions higher in the city. And it’s also relevant that Vimes tends toward an altogether fairer code than nearly anyone around him—it’s so, so pointed that Carrot is the one who suggests separating trolls and dwarfs on patrols, and that he’s a person who is often considered more good than goodness allows, and that this line of thinking is still entirely wrongheaded. Vimes knows that, too, and never considers following the suggestion because he understands that Carrot’s desire to keep people comfortable at all cost is preventing him from making good recommendations.

But Vimes still sits down on Hamcrusher’s stoop and threatens his people.

He does it in service of justice and he ultimately gets what he’s aiming for and what’s needed—the city finds out for sure that Hamcrusher is dead and he gets Watch access to the crime scene so they can hopefully solve the crime for real. But he still got all of that by amiably chatting with the guards and letting them know that if they didn’t cooperate, he would storm the premises with extreme prejudice using Constanble Dorfl. The use of coercion and intimidation to receive cooperation—even for something as heinous as murder—can only ever be wrong. Claiming to keep the peace by threatening to destroy it on a smaller scale doesn’t math out.

What the deep-down dwarfs are doing is also wrong, though; the way they treat anyone identifying as female as lesser, digging beneath the city without any consideration for the people above (who they barely believe are real to begin with—which is also wrong, no matter your cultural views), blaming a troll for Hamcrusher’s murder. But while the saying “two wrongs don’t make a right” is trite, it’s still getting at an ultimately true point: Trying to fix someone’s wrongs by committing your own is a quick and easy way to begin justifying all manner of atrocities. It’s better not to start.

As a side note, it only just now occurred to me how painstakingly Pratchett describes darkness, almost as an antidote to movie candlelight; we’ve all watched in films and television how one tiny candle can illuminate untold caverns of darkness. It’s sort of similar to how movie fires let you see everything in a room that should be nothing but smoke. Whenever dwarfen spaces are described in these books, whenever you’re in true darkness, the narrative is clear that no tiny amount of light is going to penetrate anything. That picking out details will be impossible and everything will be rendered in the strangest tones of gray and shadow.

Asides and little thoughts:

• “He knew in his heart that spinning upside down around a pole wearing a costume you could floss with definitely was not Art, and being painted lying on a bed wearing nothing but a smile and a small bunch of grapes was good solid Art, but putting your finger on why this was the case was a bit tricky.” Good old Fred, coming in with the classic “I don’t know how to define pornography, I just know it when I see it” argument.

• Obviously all the references to people coming in to measure the painting and puzzle out what it means are in reference to The Da Vinci Code, which had been published a couple years ahead of Thud! and was massively (and somewhat annoyingly) popular at the time.

• Wow, the technology section here being just a gorgeous lesson in obsolescence: Vimes’ next Dis-Organizer is called the “Gooseberry,” now the most hilariously dated Blackberry joke ever made. Bluenose messaging works, however, because Bluetooth is more prevalent than ever. And then there’s iHUM, which… iPods vanished about a decade after this book came out, though iTunes still exists. Wild.

Pratchettisms:

Mr. Pessimal folded himself onto the chair in front of Vimes’s desk and opened the clasps of his briefcase with two little snaps of doom.

Vimes considered the admissibility of Fred Colon’s water as Exhibit A.

Now the melting pot was full of lumps again.

“That is certainly one of the theories,’ he said, speaking carefully, as people tended to after hearing the Colon-Nobbs Brains Trust crossing purposes.

Vimes sighed. He hated games. They made the world look too simple.

On the ceiling above them, vurms congregated, feasting on spittle and rage.

“You talk to bad dreams on their behalf?”

Next time we’ll read up to:

For Brick, everything went dar—

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