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Posts Tagged ‘Reviews’

Familiar Names

Posted in Favorites, Miscellaneous, tagged , , on October 16, 2026| 2 Comments »

I’ve written on a number of occasions about how one of the pleasures Grace and I derived from watching classic TV shows was recognizing actors we knew from Star Trek or other classic shows such as The Twilight Zone; back in February I wrote (of The Fugitive): “in this show I’m also recognizing musical cues in every episode, because the show drew on the CBS music library and featured many of the pieces Bernard Herrmann and others wrote for The Twilight Zone.”  But in one of my current shows I’ve gone even beyond that to recognizing various names in various roles in nearly every episode.  The show is Have Gun – Will Travel, a highly character-driven show about a gentlemanly mercenary in the 1870s who rejects jobs he finds morally objectionable, very much like a modern knight-errant (a symbolism clearly broadcast by the character’s nom de guerre, “Paladin”).  Since the show aired on CBS from 1957-1963 I was not surprised to discover that the show’s opening title and most of its incidental music for the first three seasons were composed by Bernard Herrmann, nor that many of its guest cast appeared on the contemporary CBS show The Twilight Zone.  The two shows also shared a number of directors, including Buzz Kulik, Ida Lupino, Lamont Johnson, and Richard Donner.  But what I really wasn’t ready for was the number of writers whose names I recognized; given that Have Gun – Will Travel is a western (albeit an unusual one that often feels more like a private-eye series), I didn’t really expect to see so many names I knew from the fantasy and sci-fi series I loved, including Shimon Wincelberg (AKA S. Bar-David), Jack Laird (later the producer of Night Gallery), Gene L. Coon, Charles Beaumont, and Richard Matheson.  But the name that surprised me most was that of the author of 30 of the series’ best episodes: Gene Roddenberry, a gent I’m sure needs no introduction; it was interesting to note that many of the themes of those stories later resurfaced in Star Trek.

I bought this set for Grace around 2018 (if memory serves) for a really good price at the late, lamented Big Lots, because I knew it was one of her childhood favorites (she even had a dog named after one of the recurring characters); however, she watched it during the period when I was still spending most of my time in Seattle, and I only started watching it myself because I happened to see some really good reviews of it online.  So another pleasure I derive from the show is a feeling of closeness to her, though I dearly wish we could have seen it together before we lost that opportunity forever.

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The Day the Earth Stood Still

Posted in Miscellaneous, Philosophy, Tyranny, tagged , , , on October 2, 2026| Leave a Comment »

I recently re-watched The Day the Earth Stood Still, one of my favorite movies since I first saw it roughly 50 years ago.  As I wrote about it 15 years ago,

This is one of the first serious science fiction films, and since the minimal special effects take a back seat to old-fashioned concepts like “story”, “character development” and especially “acting”, it’s still better than just about everything which has come along in the genre since.  Michael Rennie’s portrayal of the alien diplomat Klaatu set the bar for humanoid aliens for decades.

But this was the first time I saw it under the influence of THC, thus allowing me access to a new level of appreciation of how good it is.  The skillful direction of Robert Wise (The Haunting, The Sound of Music, and Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and the striking and innovative score composed by Bernard Herrmann (Citizen Kane, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and Psycho) create a dark, paranoid, and suspenseful mood which marks the film from the outset as a serious, thoughtful film which has virtually nothing in common with the silly, low-budget sci-fi movies which were typical of the genre at that time, and the near-perfect casting of the principals (Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, and Sam Jaffe) did justice to an intelligent script which never panders to popular attitudes nor talks down to its audience.  Despite the fact that he comes from another world, Rennie’s Klaatu is completely human; he is ignorant of Earthly culture, but his reactions – frustration at Earth people’s irrationality, genuine affection for Helen Benson and her son, a warm smile when he discovers what a music box does – allow the audience to understand that he is no monster from outer space, but a man overwhelmed by the gravity of his mission.  And one of the emotions he displays, fear of the consequences should he fail, unlocks a more subtle meaning in the film than its overt anti-war message.  And that message is just as important to modern audiences, 75 years after the movie was made, as the more obvious one.

In reviews, analyses, or discussions of the film I’ve read over many years, Klaatu’s warning to Earth is often mischaracterized as a threat, but that is an error resulting from not listening carefully enough to the dialogue.  The word “threat” would imply that Klaatu, or at least the government he represents, has control over the potential doom hanging over the Earth.  But he absolutely does not; his speech in the final scene is not, “Do what we say or else,” but rather, “Here is a situation that exists, and we felt Earth ought to be warned about it.”  There is heavily-underlined foreshadowing in the scene where Klaatu and Helen realize the military has their taxi surrounded:

  • Klaatu: I’m worried about Gort. I’m afraid of what he might do if anything should happen to me.
  • Helen: Gort? But he’s a robot. Without you, what could he do?
  • Klaatu: There’s no limit to what he could do. He could destroy the Earth.

But the danger is fully spelled out in Klaatu’s final speech:

We have an organization for the mutual protection of all planets and for the complete elimination of aggression…For our policemen, we created a race of robots. Their function is to patrol the planets in spaceships like this one and preserve the peace. In matters of aggression, we have given them absolute power over us. This power cannot be revoked. At the first sign of violence, they act automatically against the aggressor. The penalty for provoking their action is too terrible to risk.

Let me emphasize that: the interplanetary confederation has put all weapons under the control of robots like Gort, and there is no way to revoke that power.  The situation is not candy-coated or presented as Utopian; a few lines later Klaatu says, “We do not pretend to have achieved perfection, but we do have a system, and it works. I came here to give you these facts.”  On the most obvious level, the film presents a warning about the costs of barbarism.  But on a deeper level, the film asks, “Was it wise for these other human beings to give absolute power to machines whose response to aggression of any kind is almost entirely unpredictable?”  There is no “right” answer, not for Klaatu, nor for the Earth people within the story, nor for us in the audience.  There is only a choice, and the decision to cede control over one’s security to an inhuman, unstoppable power, however terrible the alternative, is not without cost.   

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Links #833

Posted in Current Events, Links, Miscellaneous, Music, Obituary, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on June 22, 2026| Leave a Comment »

There were two clients who basically were paying for ChatGPT…to argue against itself.  –  Rob Freund

My friend Chester Brown, the well-known comic book artist, plays Merlin in this video from Sook-Yin Lee‘s new album.  The links above the video were provided by Jesse Walker and Dan Savage; IncarcerNation; The Onion; Mike Masnick; Ryan Marino; and IncarcerNation again (x2).

From the Archives

I find paywalls distasteful, and so many people find this blog valuable as a resource I just can’t bring myself to install one.  Furthermore, I find ad delivery services (whose content I have no say over) even more distasteful.  But as I’m now semi-retired from sex work, I can’t self-sponsor this blog by myself any longer.  So if you value my writing enough that you would pay to see it if it were paywalled, please consider subscribing; there are four different levels to fit all budgets.  Or if that doesn’t work for you, please consider showing your generosity with a one-time donation; you can Paypal to maggiemcneill@earthlink.net or else email me at the same address to make other arrangements.  Thanks so much!

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The Huge Hand

Posted in Fiction, Miscellaneous, Philosophy, tagged , , , , on April 17, 2026| 1 Comment »

Two months ago I published “Smoke Screen“, in which I reviewed a specific first-season episode of The Fugitive and had this to say about the series in general:

For those unfamiliar with the premise, Dr. Richard Kimble is wrongly convicted for the murder of his wife, but on his way to death row by train, “Fate moves its huge hand” and a derailment allows him to escape.  For four years, Dr. Kimble, engagingly portrayed by David Janssen, moved around the country, trying to hide from the relentless Lt. Gerard (Barry Morse), the Inspector Javert-like cop obsessed with his recapture, while himself hunting the real murderer, a one-armed man he saw fleeing his house just before discovering his wife’s body…

As I watched the rest of the series over the course of those two months, I was struck by the degree to which that “huge hand” influenced Dr. Kimble’s life over the seven years from his wife’s murder (September 17th, 1960) to his eventual acquittal after the discovery of both the one-armed man and a reluctant witness (August 29th, 1967).  It’s easy to joke about how the writers of a television show are gods who control the lives of the characters, and how certain characters become “butt-monkeys“, the ones typically made the victims of what the TV Tropes website calls “put them through hell” plotlines.  But within the fictive universe inhabited by the characters, this is typically regarded as the result of blind chance or bad luck rather than the result of divine intervention, and we in the audience willingly suspend our disbelief of the improbability of anyone having so many adventures and misfortunes.  In the case of The Fugitive, however, the writers appear to be subverting this trope, deliberately signaling to the audience that Fate or God is indeed manipulating Kimble’s life to fulfill some destiny or divine plan.  From the opening narration of the first episode (see video below), we are clearly shown or even told in dialogue that there is something more than mere chance at work.  In several dozen episodes there are sequences in which he escapes capture by mere moments, or misses a chance to escape misfortune by an equally narrow margin.  And in the majority of episodes, Kimble’s apparently-random wanderings bring him into the lives of people who need him, either as a physician or just as a caring human being.

In the first-season episode “Angels Travel on Lonely Roads” the person is Sister Veronica, a Catholic nun, who is absolutely convinced that God arranged their meeting for their mutual benefit; in the fourth-season episode “The Breaking of the Habit” they meet again, and a priest at Sister Veronica’s school is equally convinced.  In the earlier episode, the rational Dr. Kimble is inclined to dismiss being characterized as the tool of Providence and says as much, but after years of miraculous escapes and even being forced to save the life of his nemesis, Lt. Gerard, no less than four times, he is less skeptical about destiny.  In another fourth-season episode, “Joshua’s Kingdom“, Kimble meets Joshua Simmons, an “only prayer can heal” religious fanatic whose underage daughter’s baby is close to death from a dangerous illness.  After Kimble saves the child, Simmons says, “It can’t be God’s will.  Not with doctors and medicine.”  And Kimble replies, “How do you know I wasn’t sent here?  Why did I come to this house, why did I come to this town?  Do you know?”  At the time of his first meeting with Sister Veronica, those words would have been mere rhetoric, but by the time he utters them they are heartfelt, and their obvious sincerity convinces Simmons.

It is, of course, not necessary to accept this framing to enjoy the show, though it certainly provides an in-universe explanation for how Dr. Kimble manages to avoid recapture for so long.  But considering how traumatized he would be after two years of wrongful imprisonment and another five years as a fugitive, perhaps it provides some spiritual solace and hope of emotional recovery for a good, decent, highly-principled character the viewer has come to respect and care about.

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The Mark of Throwback Thursday

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on April 9, 2026| Leave a Comment »

The concept of “free sex” is largely a male fantasy.  –  “Waiting for Lightning”

In the online world, as in the real one, you don’t get something for nothing.  –
“Something for Nothing”

Even the finest thespian can’t conjure Hamlet out of lackluster dialogue draped carelessly over a checklist.  –  “In Flux”

[Those] who declare CGI “art”, or even declare it superior to real human-created art, are soulless clowns whose opinions should be rejected by anyone who cares about beauty, life, and humanity.  –  “The Philistine Majority“

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Smoke Screen

Posted in Fiction, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , on February 9, 2026| 1 Comment »

I’m currently re-watching The Fugitive, one of the high points of 20th-century television drama.  Like many of the shows I enjoy, I was too young to remember the show in its initial run (1963-67), but when our local PBS station, WYES, picked it up in syndication in the mid-’80s, I watched it every Sunday night and enjoyed it thoroughly; though most of the shows I watched then, as now, were science fiction or fantasy, “the characters who interested me most were always outsiders, weirdos, and outlaws such as vigilantes, monster-hunters, and fugitives“.  For those unfamiliar with the premise, Dr. Richard Kimble is wrongly convicted for the murder of his wife, but on his way to death row by train, “Fate moves its huge hand” and a derailment allows him to escape.  For four years, Dr. Kimble, engagingly portrayed by David Janssen, moved around the country, trying to hide from the relentless Lt. Gerard (Barry Morse), the Inspector Javert-like cop obsessed with his recapture, while himself hunting the real murderer, a one-armed man he saw fleeing his house just before discovering his wife’s body.  The show was the first one on US television to pay close attention to continuity, and the first to feature a concluding episode:  that episode, in which Kimble finally catches the one-armed man and proves his innocence, was the highest-rated television episode of all time for decades.

One of the things I enjoy about watching classic TV shows is playing “Spot the Actor“; in this show I’m also recognizing musical cues in every episode, because the show drew on the CBS music library and featured many of the pieces Bernard Herrmann and others wrote for The Twilight Zone.  But one of the most striking things for me is seeing just how much attitudes have changed in the past 60 years.  Overall, there’s the fact that for four years, one of the highest-rated series in a country now in love with cop glorification shows was one in which the cops were the bad guys in every single episode, and the hero regularly assaulted them and escaped from their clutches, often with the help of people he’d met who saw his innate goodness and nobility (especially because that nobility often got him into trouble when he felt compelled to stick his neck out to help people instead of just not getting involved).

An episode I saw last week, however, was even more striking.  In “Smoke Screen“, Kimble is working as a field hand in California (because obviously he can’t do any job requiring papers or references) and his work crew is asked to volunteer to help fight a wildfire.  One of the laborers he has befriended is undocumented, and he and his pregnant wife are terrified of being caught and deported before the birth of their baby, whom they want born as a US citizen.  The woman goes into labor, and though there is a problem requiring an emergency C-section, they can’t get her to a hospital because of the fires.  So Kimble, ever the humanitarian, is forced to reveal to the camp nurse that he is a doctor and can save mother and child; when the cops come snooping, the nurse, the father and another laborer who was a veterinarian in Mexico make up a story to cover for him.  And all of this is portrayed as positive.  Compare this with the current toxic zeitgeist:  a fugitive from the law helps undocumented migrants to deliver what nativist authoritarians now disgustingly dehumanize as an “anchor baby”, and everyone goes away satisfied.  Look, I fully recognize that there were just as many racists, xenophobes, and badge-lickers in the Sixties as there are now.  But it’s nice to recognize that in extremely popular entertainment of that time, those were typically being portrayed as the villains they are instead of lionized and given positive attention, money, and political power.

 

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Pages from Throwback Thursday

Posted in Favorites, History, Miscellaneous, Perception, The Dark Side, Tyranny, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 16, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Paradoxically, the anti-sex mob are those most obsessed by sex; they see it even where normal people do not.  –  “Obsession and Bedevilment”

Modern people are deeply in denial about how common sex work has been throughout human history.  –  “The Invention of Incels”

Though cops are still conducting their entrapment schemes and pretending they’re something more than an excuse for moral degenerates to rape and rob women and ruin men’s lives, the public has largely lost interest in the “sex trafficking” hysteria which drove them, and they’re limping along on a mixture of inertia, sadism, and the federal government’s profligate spending until such time as the sociopaths in office can think of a way to interject more mindless carceral violence into their war on the internet.  –  “Newsworthy”

It’s one of the ironclad rules of media journalism that all “100 best” lists are bad.  –  “By Non-fans, For Non-fans“

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Diary #779

Posted in Diary, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , , on June 3, 2025| Leave a Comment »

It’s been a few years since my last new book, but after four years in the making, Who in Review is finally here!  The process started in March of 2021, when Grace and I decided to watch every single televised Doctor Who story from 1963 to the present, and I reviewed each one on Twitter (along with reviews of every episode of Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures) as we went, running all year and into 2022 before it was done.  Then in April of last year I started copying the whole thread to Bluesky while also compiling the reviews into a book, which required considerable reformatting and modification, plus adding two appendices which couldn’t have worked in the microblogging format.  I finished that early in October, but Grace was diagnosed with cancer just a few days later, leaving me no time for proofreading until this past April.  I found a lot more errors in the proof than is typical for me; I reckon that’s probably due to the change from microblogging format, which left a lot of extremely long sentences strung together with comma splices, plus other, weirder errors.  But at least it’s done, and on Sunday I ordered a box of copies to sell as autographed copies in my own store; they’re supposed to arrive next week.  In the meantime, here’s the link to buy the paperback on Amazon; if you want an autographed copy, you’ll have to wait until my own copies come in (when you see the image for the bookstore in the right-hand column change to the cover image displayed here, they’re available).  I’m also working on the Kindle version; it’ll probably be done later this month.  I’ll keep you posted!  But those of you who just want a regular, unsigned paper copy needn’t wait.  And with any luck, this book may attract new readers and supporters to my existing body of work.

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Paying For It: The Premiere

Posted in Biography, Perception, Philosophy, tagged , , , , , , on May 23, 2025| 1 Comment »

Long-time readers need no introduction to Chester Brown, the well-known Canadian graphic novelist who came out as a regular patron of sex workers in Paying For It, his autobiographical 2011 graphic novel; Chester is a friend and a regular reader of this blog who occasionally shows up in the comments (and the blog itself!) and did the covers for both Ladies of the Night and The Forms of Things Unknown, and has agreed to do the cover for Lost Angels (which I’m currently working on) as well.  As I announced last August, Canadian actress and director Sook-Yin Lee has adapted Paying For It into a film, and it made its long-awaited US premiere at the Seattle International Film Festival last Saturday!  Chester was kind enough to send me a complimentary ticket (for some reason the producers did not opt to send him to Seattle), and I was excited both to see the film and to meet Sook-Yin in person, since Chester has spoken so highly of her.  Apparently, he also spoke highly of me to her, because when I went up to introduce myself after the showing, she immediately recognized me before I could say more than her name.  We didn’t get to talk long, but I’m hoping it won’t be our last meeting.  I’m also happy to tell you that I enjoyed the film very much; I think Sook-Yin did an excellent job of adapting Chester’s documentary style into a cinematic one, with additional material depicting the romantic ups and down of “Sonny”, the character based on her, as a way of translating Chester’s expository text to the screen and allowing the viewer to make their own judgments about the subject.  The visual style of the film references Chester’s artistic style as closely as possible, including the use of his own lettering font and sketches of the characters in the end credits, and I found the whole funny, sweet, and very moving.  Judging by the positive reaction of the audience, none of whom had read the book but me and one other, I don’t think that’s because I’m biased; I’m unsure where and how the film will be shown next, but I’ll keep y’all posted and I’d definitely recommend seeing it when you get the opportunity.    P.S. – no, that’s not a cane I’m holding, but my red umbrella; the weather was quite rainy and I had to park on the street, and Sook-Yin suggested the picture after I was ready to walk outside.  Since Chester’s artist’s eye caught that detail, I figured I’d mention it should anyone else wonder.

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Diary #777

Posted in Diary, Fiction, tagged , , , on May 20, 2025| 2 Comments »

I finished the rough draft of my seventh book, Who in Review, early last autumn, but Grace was diagnosed with cancer just a few days later so I was much too busy caring for her to have any free time to do the proofreading.  After Frank & Olivia’s visit I was able to motivate myself to start the proofreading process, then last week I got the physical proof in and have been doing the third and final pass.  I proofread my books three times: once as a Word file, then as a “virtual proof”, and finally as a physical proof.  Typically, I only find two or three errors at most in that third pass, but this time I’ve already hit nearly a dozen in just the first few chapters; I reckon it’s because, unlike my previous books, the contents of this one came from an epic-length Twitter thread rather than this blog, and that change in format was bound to generate more errors than usual with fewer opportunities to catch them in the pre-manuscript stage.  But in any case, it’s almost done and should be available by the end of this month.  In case you missed previous mentions of the project, this book contains my reviews of every single televised Doctor Who story for the first two incarnations of the series, Classic Who (26 seasons from 1963-1989) and New Who (13 series from 2005-2022), plus some speculation, a chronology of the Whoniverse, and more.  Judging from the amount of positive feedback I received from the first version of the thread on Twitter in 2021, and the revision on Bluesky last year (actually ending only a couple of weeks ago), you won’t want to miss this one if you’re a Doctor Who fan.  And with any luck, this will draw attention to my earlier books from folks outside my established readership.

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