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Posts Tagged ‘Reviews’

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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The X-Files, Continued

Posted in Miscellaneous, Perception, tagged , , , , , on March 10, 2025| 1 Comment »

To appreciate The X-Files as an intelligent, well-informed person requires a strong sense of irony and an equally-strong capacity for willing suspension of disbelief, because in the X-Files universe nearly every myth, folk belief, superstition, pseudoscientific premise, conspiracy theory, and science-fiction plot has at least a basis in fact.  While in real life Agent Dana Scully would be the sane, grounded one, and her partner, Agent Fox Mulder, would be a paranoid, unhinged crackpot (read the first half of this review, if you haven’t yet), in the topsy-turvy, looking-glass world inhabited by these characters, their viewpoints are much more equally balanced.  Mulder’s willingness to believe in anything and everything doesn’t always prove useful, and indeed the writers often have fun with it, especially in later seasons.  But when balanced by Scully’s scientific skepticism, the two can often uncover the solution to the mysteries they probe (unless, of course, the writers have decided that they can’t).  In most cases, this is typical of shows in which the heroes go up against supernatural or sci-fi menaces; after all, neither Kolchak: The Night Stalker nor Buffy the Vampire Slayer would’ve been nearly as interesting had every threat been revealed as a fraud, a la Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?  But by adding many of the 20th century’s most popular conspiracy theories into the mixture, the show begins to bear a much closer resemblance to the Illuminatus! trilogy than to any of its other inspirations.

This is not a criticism, though in its first two seasons, written and broadcast toward the end of the Satanic Panic, dangerous nonsense like recovered memories and Satanic ritual sex abuse are treated seriously at a time when those beliefs were not only not considered total hokum by the Establishment, but were actually being used by cops and prosecutors to destroy lives.  I found those episodes difficult to enjoy, though by the third season the Satanic Panic was being treated far more dismissively, and Scully even has a few speeches about it being an evidence-free crock of shit (unfortunately, actress Gillian Anderson lacks her character’s disciplined skepticism).  And while some of the other conspiracy theories the show used as plot devices may have adherents who make trouble for others, they were usually treated in such an over-the-top fashion (eg, the Smoking Man being the true assassin of JFK, RFK, and MLK) they couldn’t be taken seriously by any audience member who wasn’t already entirely convinced of their veracity.

As is so often the case, the show took a few seasons to really hit its stride; while I found the first season and most of the second entertaining enough, It wasn’t until the third season that I found the majority of episodes truly engaging and entertaining.  The show’s creator originally intended to produce only five seasons and then transition to a series of movies, but only the first one was made because the still-adolescent Fox network had no intention of retiring its most highly-rated show just yet, and so wrangled the creators into four more seasons.  The sixth was still quite good; one excellent two-parter was obviously adapted from the script for the never-made second movie, and there were a number of the same type of experimental episodes which were becoming fashionable in other imaginative shows of the time (including Deep Space Nine, Stargate SG-1, and the aforementioned Buffy).  But by the seventh the show was noticeably aging, and the eighth and ninth seasons largely seemed to be looking for a reason to still exist; I know that two more seasons were produced in the Teens, but frankly they just looked embarrassing, and neither Grace nor I was interested.

All in all, I found the show a worthwhile use of my relaxation time, but I don’t think it’s likely that I’ll ever re-watch it.  And if I had tried to watch on a weekly broadcast TV schedule rather than a DVD set of known length I could watch on my own schedule, I suspect I would’ve lost interest long before it was over, unless I was watching with a loved one who was more excited about it than I was.

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The X-Files

Posted in Miscellaneous, tagged , , on February 21, 2025| Leave a Comment »

I didn’t watch The X-Files when it first aired.  I don’t think I heard about it during its first season, and its second was during my Year of Disaster; I did happen to catch a couple of episodes during the third season, but they rubbed me the wrong way, so I never watched any more.  But Grace wanted to re-watch it with me, so I bought her all nine seasons for Christmas of ’23, and it was the last show we got to watch together; today I’d like to share my thoughts and impressions.

As you already know if you’ve read any of my previous TV show reviews, characters are the most important part of a show for me; I may enjoy a show with undeveloped characters, but it’s never going to be one of my favorites.  In that respect, The X-Files was very uneven; while the central characters, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, were well-developed, most of the other characters weren’t.  The chemistry between the two was, I think, the best thing about the show, and I don’t just mean the slow-burn sexual tension.  The way in which fascination became friendship, which developed into loyalty, then love, was believable and engaging, especially in the middle seasons where that love developed into something stronger and deeper than that shared by most married couples, and yet did not turn physical until after David Duchovny (Mulder) left the series at the end of season 7.  Individually, both characters were extremely flawed; Mulder’s idealism too often washed over into fanaticism, and all too often Scully confused skepticism with dogmatism.  But as dance partners they were phenomenal, and their interaction lit up the screen (counterbalancing the directors’ obsession with filming half of every episode in the dark).

Beside the two principals, however, the other characters in the show looked more like props or scenery than people.  Few of the regular characters were other than flat, and what little development was given them was often incomplete, unsupported or unexplained.  The chief villain, the infamous Smoking Man, was more complex and interesting than any of the characters who either assisted or obstructed (sometimes both) our heroes at the FBI, and the two agents who became the main characters in the last two seasons were poor replacements indeed for the Dynamic Duo.  There were a few episodes with well-developed supporting characters, but for the most part the people the agents interacted with, friend or foe alike, were fairly stock characters with very little to distinguish them from similar characters in other episodes.  Of the recurring supporting characters, my favorites were the staff of The Lone Gunman; though their personalities remained fairly static across nine seasons, I saw them more as mythic characters than realistic ones.  They were the Three Musketeers to Mulder’s D’Artagnan, the faithful sidekicks without whom he could never have succeeded, who were nonetheless satisfied to remain in the background while he got the credit (or blame).  Indeed, though they have individual names, talents, and personalities, they are always depicted as a trio, rarely even being shown physically far from one another; their fates are interlocked, and even the names of the three actors playing the parts are always displayed together as a block in the credits.

Other than most characters remaining undeveloped, the biggest gripe I have about the show’s characterizations is one which is probably inevitable in any show featuring FBI agents: cop glorification.  Though a good fraction of the cops in the show are depicted as assholes and a good fraction of the FBI agents as two-faced schemers, there were also lots of Brave Hero cops, and while Mulder seems to have viewed his status as a means to his own ends, Scully definitely comes across like a cop far too often for my liking, and the way she loves yelling “FEDERAL AGENT!” while pointing a gun at people never ceased to be disconcerting.

Look for the conclusion of this review, in which I discuss other aspects of the show, two weeks from Monday.

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Unblocked

Posted in Fiction, Miscellaneous, tagged , , , on July 15, 2024| 1 Comment »

For six years, from the summer of 2010 to the summer of 2016, my creative output was like a geyser; I had no trouble producing hundreds of new essays a year, including a new short story every month.  But then life intervened, and sapped my creative energy so that it became harder to think of new nonfiction and much harder to think of new fiction; even semi-retirement did not bring back that old energy.  But then in January of last year I started a new solo D&D game for Grace, and it seemed to free up some long-idle creative gears which had rusted through disuse.  Of course, my brain being what it is, I had to look over a bunch of old materials and decide that they all needed to be revised, updated, or added to; for the first time since I started this blog, I started taking a little time for myself every week to work on my game world; that was what inspired me to write this essay a year ago. But I’ve finally finished most of what I’ve needed to finish, and I’m working on turning my enormous Doctor Who review project into a book as I’ve planned for three years.  Then a couple of weeks ago, on the second day of summer, a new story came to me; by the time y’all read this I may have even started writing it.  And though most of y’all will have to wait until the long-delayed publication of Lost Angels to see it, my subscribers can read it now (as soon as I’m done with it, that is) as a “thank you” for all your unflagging support.  So if you’re a subscriber or frequent gift-sender, and would like to read the story, shoot me an email and I’ll get a PDF copy out to you; it might even inspire me to stop procrastinating and get it done!

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