I should say up-front that I have terrible reflexes.

No, like, really awful. I’ve cunningly avoided games like Dark Souls in the past because I knew they would cause me pain and sadness. I didn’t realise going in that all Expedition 33’s combat would be what I think of as quick-time events, in the form of parrying (tricky) and dodging (slightly easier). Beautifully animated quicktime events! But ultimately, reflex-focussed combat.

So perhaps if I was good at it, my opinion would be more favourable. I can’t rule this out.

I’ve never played a JRPG before. I’m a big fan of Bioware and Projekt Red’s RPGs. “How much difference can a “J” make?”, I wondered. As far as I understand it, the J in JRPG, as well as meaning “Japanese”, also negates the “R”. In terms of role-playing, you get to make one choice in Expedition 33. That’s significantly below the going rate I’m used to, but I believe it’s normal in a JRPG. This made me grumpy, too.

Gosh, this is just going to be a list of reasons I was grumpy playing this game, isn’t it? I’m sorry.

I found it genuinely jarring when a character I thought was me started to do something quite extreme without... I don’t know... checking with me first. That’s when I realised that I wasn’t really role-playing as Gustav, and my only choices would be deciding in what order I should select the dialogue options. And, I suppose, choosing to have dialogue in the first place (I do wonder what kind of psychopath wouldn’t try to work through all the dialogue in a game). That the game then turns around and asks you to make a decision at the very end, I found somewhat galling. Oh, now you ask me, Expedition 33. It’s like I was working on a project with a complete control freak, and at the end they throw me a bone to make it feel like we both contributed.

The story and setting of this game is genuinely intriguing. For the first 20 hours of the game, I was playing for the story, in spite of everything else. I had all sorts of theories that did not turn out to be quite right. I felt like I was reading a fantastic novel where I kept having to pass a skill test to turn the page. This was vaguely annoying. It also made me sad when I realised that basically the only mechanic in the game was combat. Having a nice moment with a friend? Let’s have a fight. Meet a merchant and want to get them to show you their best items? Time for a fight. Wandering a village of friendly people? They want to fight you, anyway. Having a deep and touching moment with an alternative version of yourself at the top of a giant monument to your fundamental character failings? It’s clobbering time.

For pure variety, I was delighted to find a handful of fetch quests dotted around in the early game, which made for a nice change of pace.

I was relieved to find that it is possible to play this game while being shit at parrying and dodging... when deeper in the game, I found a few bonuses that allow you to benefit from taking damage, which was all I needed to get through most of the game. I refused to drop the difficulty down from standard, because I am a stubborn idiot. In Act 2, I was really having fun. There are beautiful settings and good dialogue in this bit. I cared about the characters. I was hankering for more plot development. I didn’t suck quite as much. I could explore the world, which made me feel like I had a bit more agency.

And then, came Act 3. I’m going to try to get as far as I can without spoilers, here, but at some point, you will need to look away if you’ve not played it (and care about being spoiled).

I was told by my friends that for balance reasons, I should pursue the main story first, rather than the standard role-playing game approach of finishing all side-quests first.^[1] This felt weird, but I went with it because even the smallest wandering around elsewhere showed me I was not ready for anything else. I was disappointed to find, after the ending, that playing the rest of Act 3 happens BEFORE you complete the ending. So ultimately, if you follow everyone’s advice, you’ll:

• Finish the game,
• Load a save game from just before you finished the game,
• Wander around in a strange limbo before the end of the game happened, with your party all blissfully unaware of what’s about to happen.

More importantly, you may start acting all pre-cog, and find yourself despising members of your party for things they haven’t done yet. This is a weird feeling.

Crucially, this means that the story is, in a way, over before you play most of Act 3. I was nervous about this too, because often once I’ve finished a game's story, the addictive pull that tugs me through the game is snapped once the ending happens. I don’t know if I’ll ever play the rest of Act 3. Without that pull, and without the feeling that I’m actually progressing the story, it’s a lot harder to care.

The game is beautiful, the voice acting is good, the music is amazing. A lot of the characters have their own musical theme, which is lovely, except that annoyingly, they often include the name of the character in the song, so it kind of feels like Jimmy walks into the scene and someone sings (in mesmerising French) “It’s Jimmy, it’s Jimmy, this is the bit with Jimmy in it”, which feels a little cheesy. I can’t speak French well enough to be sure that they are or aren’t actually saying this.

But I’m kind of surprised that with such a massively compromised Act 3, everyone loves this game so much. And I don’t understand why Act 3 couldn’t have been fixed so that you could play it in the correct order. This seems like such an embarrassing own-goal. I would have found the Act 3 side quests a lot more compelling if I didn’t know what had already-going-to-have happened in my past/their future.

So... it’s a good, but frustrating game, with an unsatisfying ending on many levels. If you like JRPGs and dodging things, you will probably enjoy it a lot more than I did.

1. Unless you have reason to believe that your personal assistant is about to be blended in the universe’s most horrific nutri-bullet. I’m sorry, Kelly Chambers, I really am. ↩︎

Dammit, I was doing so well there for a bit. Here I am again, trying to catch up before I get even further behind.

Someone said ‘Rogue’ was a good example of Who written by people who grew up with “new” Who, and I think that’s right. Also, side-note, how on earth are we now up to 20 years of “new” who? Why am I still calling it “new”? I’m so old.

Rant: I’m not exactly sure how the Doctor persuaded Rogue that he wasn’t an evil shapeshifter by showing him that he had... a lot of faces. I feel like something was missing here that would both make sense, and perhaps also raise the Doctor/Rogue connection a bit higher than the level it hit for me, which was... we’re both very hot, interesting, and in the same episode, so obviously, we’re in love now.

Maybe I’m just less taken with Jonathan Groff because I’m still kind of mad with him for not being Hugo Weaving.^[1]

Rave: This was a lot of fun. I like a bit of joyful Who, and reservations aside, this was that. And Ruby got to be clever, which was a bonus.

1. I am aware that I should know about him from other things, but shamefully, I have not seen those things. ↩︎

I remember in the old times, in the early days of Game of Thrones, when you got to watch a show that was thrilling, and clever. It had the right level of historical inspiration without being awkwardly bound to real history.

I’ve told everyone who will listen that Shōgun is like Thrones back then... but I think I’m short-changing Shōgun with that comparison. It’s almost certainly better than that.

Why am I even bothering to write this, when the show’s greatness is self evident from the myriad awards it has won and critical reception it has received? It’s not entirely clear to me. But I’m not going to bother pointing out all the fantastic things about it, not even Anna Sawai, despite her just being heart-achingly compelling. Let’s just take that as read.

Instead I’m going to say, Shōgun feels like science fiction, in the best way possible.

I assume in part, this is because all my favourite science fiction stories were inspired by this history. Multiple dominant empires vying for control of their domain. A mysterious new civilisation being discovered for the first time. Clashes of both cultures and technologies. People finding themselves unexpectedly changed by new perspectives.

So if that sounds like the sort of stuff you’d like to watch if it involved spaceships and alien planets... don’t go shunning Shōgun.^[1]

1. I swear, the whole post wasn’t just to lead into a shit pun. ↩︎

We’re comfortably in the very good middle of the season here. Davies and the guest writers are doing really interesting stuff. Everyone’s happy.

Rave: Ncuti is just amazing at the end of the story. After the monster at the end of the book is revealed to be... racism, the Doctor gets to rant against the stupidity of it all, in a way that I found far more satisfying than the 13th Doctor’s “jeez, sexism is annoying” comments back in ‘The Witchfinders’.

It’s a tricky balance to hit, both in writing and performance, to express an alien’s frustration and rage at human stupidity while also not undermining the challenges that people in the real world have with this shit. Cleverer people than me have come down on both sides. To me, I thought the Doctor’s perspective was quite clearly an alien, looking down at the stupid humans and just not believing their self-defeating stupidity. But then, I’m a white guy who didn’t actually clue into the whole cast being white until it was pointed out, so my opinion is possibly not that interesting.

Rant: The plot... just doesn’t come together for me. The vibes are all there, but:

• The explanation for the monsters is just a guess, and not a particularly convincing one (disappointing as the design of them is so cool)
• The alphabet revelation falls pretty flat, because it doesn’t have a corresponding wrong-headed piece of logic to hang on (like the S.S. Madame de Pompadour in ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’)
• Everyone on the Homeworld being dead, again, just doesn’t tie into anything; it raises the emotional stakes for Lindy but again, doesn’t explain anything.
• Wouldn’t the dots know everyone’s last name already, including famous people? And even if they didn’t, why would they care if a human told them someone had a different name? Surely they wouldn’t just take their word for it? And if they were able to look it up, why didn’t they know it in the first place?
  • Actually, as I write that, I remember what it’s like talking to an LLM... and I wonder if maybe my perception of what it’ll be like to be stalked by homicidal robots in the future is just completely off-base.

Does any of that matter? Maybe not, but just imagine the same story but with Moffat doing a pass to actually join up those dots (and bubbles), and how satisfying that would be.

Am I becoming a Moffat fanboy? Maybe.

Constraints make for interesting results. Ncuti Gatwa still had to finish Sex Education (which he was amazing in) and so Millie Gibson handles one episode all by herself, with Davies in full “Midnight” mode.

Rave: Just beautifully judged spookiness throughout the story. If I’m picking one bit (and I am supposed to, by the laws of this format), then I should pick the scene in the pub, but I will pick the scene with Kate Lethbridge-Stewart,^[1] because I think this is the moment that I realised she’d become as reassuring a presence as her father... just before they pulled the rug from under me and had her and UNIT subject to Ruby’s curse.

Rant: I don’t really have anything particularly to rant about this time... I enjoyed trying to work out what happened, and to me, the trickiest part of that is figuring out why the Doctor kicking the circle makes Ruby special. Why does Ruby get her special 73-yard friend, if she didn’t interact with the circle? Does the curse latch onto your best friend? Has Ruby been shunted into some kind of bottle timeline because she’s a time traveller? Does the Doctor not exist during this episode? Surely not, because Kate also remembers him. Is he just trapped in the TARDIS?

Ah yes, the TARDIS. As we find out later on... the TARDIS’s perception filter operates at 73 yards. This kind of implies that Ruby’s special friend is connected to the TARDIS. So perhaps... the Doctor is the subject of the curse, and the TARDIS acts to give Ruby the power to help him? I quite enjoy all this, really, so it’s only a rant in the sense that you could totally read the above in the style of a raving lunatic and it would work quite well.

1. Apparently this is the first time she’s introduced herself as Lethbridge-Stewart, according to Doctor Who Magazine. ↩︎

This story reminded me that while I love almost all Doctor Who in one way or another... I really love Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who.

Rant: I love the general idea of everything, and the aggressive criticism of the military industrial complex... but the “we’re fighting ourselves” thing seemed obvious to me from the start, and I would’ve liked some more misdirection, or justification that the people on the planet weren’t just complete idiots.

Rave: The Doctor. Gatwa’s been great in everything so far, but this is the episode that really sells me on him unwaveringly. When Ruby is shot, and falls, his reaction is so visceral yet controlled, it’s like a gut punch to watch. That little noise he makes... brilliant. Having him immediately open the TARDIS doors,^[1] hear a scream, and run without thinking is just a great way to get him into the pickle in the first place too; simple but perfect. And the singing, and the contradictions, and the anger... this is a perfectly written and played Doctor.

1. It’s been a while since I got excited about a special effect in Doctor Who, but using the LED screen to show the interior of the TARDIS behind the doors as a practical effect is pretty amazing, and looked great. ↩︎

So, this is definitely a Sunday post, it just happens to be on Tuesday. Don’t be fooled.

I watched American Fiction on the weekend. I liked it a lot – it drew emotionally engaging characters efficiently (I was really drawn into the friendship of Monk and his sister Lisa, even though it’s really only set up in a handful of scenes), as well as pursuing what felt like excellent satire (the specifics of which were mostly over my head).

And it was quite funny. I find it hard to really properly laugh in a movie unless the characters draw you in, and these did. Especially Jeffrey Wright’s Monk – Wright is always great to watch, but he’s especially good here getting to be snide, irritated and irritating. It has a few very meta-textual moments that might alienate some but I thought were great, especially a moment where he’s writing his book in a very interactive way. The rest of the cast is great, too, with Sterling K. Brown stealing many scenes. Recommended.

I also finished reading A Gentleman in Moscow. Which was delightful but ultimately felt a little weightless to me. I think I was expecting life’s challenges to be a little more... challenging, but the peril to the Count is ultimately quite mild. That said, I might be judging against my own expectations here. There are plenty of sudden, off-camera gut punches that make the world feel like it’s not a complete fairy tale. It just feels very “Sunday night on the ABC with the whole family”, which is no bad thing, really.

I’ve looked at the reviews around the place, and as far as I can see, if you read the book first, you’re very down on Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, and if you didn’t, you think it’s a masterpiece.^[1]

I read the book earlier this year, and really enjoyed it. The book allows you to see the unfolding cracks in a loving-but-flawed family as they’re slowly torn apart by the malign influence of the hotel. There’s a lot of tension as you hope that maybe some of them will make it out alive, and make it out as themselves.

The film... doesn’t seem particularly interested in that second point, or really, in Jack as a viewpoint character at all. Reading the book, you’re desperate to see Jack resist the hotel. In the film... meh, you just want Wendy and Danny to get out alive. Jack’s an asshole from the start (Nicholson’s performance makes him desperately unlikeable, which I assume was the intention). It’s very pretty though.^[2] Tricycle-cam is great, especially when the different surfaces of the hotel trigger different noises — I was surprised how effective that sequence was in putting you in the mind of Danny.

Duvall’s Wendy convincingly plays a person who is completely freaked out by their partner trying to murder them. For me, I found the performance overly realistic for a movie about an evil hotel; seeing someone with genuine human reactions in the middle of a horror movie was jarring for me. Perhaps I’m just too used to watching genre TV and film, where usually, no one is nearly as troubled by the insanity around them as you’d genuinely expect.

But I won’t go on about it because as far as I can see, I’m unlikely to add anything new. I was glad they went for a hedge maze instead of attempting malevolent lawn ornaments with 70’s special effects technology, though.

1. If you wrote the book, you like the movie even less. ↩︎
2. I had two choices in Australia for watching the film. Netflix has the shorter version in HD, Apple had the longer version to rent for $4.99 in 4K. You can probably guess which version I went for, and I was glad I did because it looked amazing. However, Kubrick allegedly liked the pacing of the shorter version better. As a book-reader, I’d have missed some of the things they cut. ↩︎

I was recommended What the Duck the other week and so far, I’m really enjoying it. It’s hard to go past an episode about how snakes have two clitorides.^[1] Ann Jones is a pleasure to listen to, though I think I’ll need to slow down my normal 1.7x podcast listening speed for this one, because she already moves very quickly and the editing is very tight.

Speaking of podcasts, the podcast ad market seems to still be in a bit of a lull, and it’s hard to ignore all my favourite podcasts crying out for members. I’m already on the take, but I’m sorely tempted to get on board with ATP membership too, if only to truly be able to understand the true nature of John’s window management methodology.

I saw Poor Things at home the other day, and really enjoyed it. It’s my first experience with Yorgos Lanthimos, and the weird aesthetic really worked for me (though I can see how it would be off-putting). Emma Stone’s Bella was an amazing character to watch become herself, and I think it threaded the needle okay with what it was trying to say, compared with how the story could be received... but it’s totally understandable that some people have taken against it.

I can’t decide if Mark Ruffalo was amazing or ridiculous. Perhaps both.

I’m currently reading A Gentleman in Moscow, which apparently everyone else read ages ago. I’m a quarter of the way in, and finally it seems to be progressing from a series of adorable vignettes into an actual story. I’m probably just impatient. There’s a moment with wine bottles relatively early in the book which I found deeply upsetting, which is when I felt the book starting to actually get its hooks in, but I don’t know if it hits home that way for everyone.

See you next Sunday. You know, because I post one of these every Sunday, like I have forever.

The Next Generation season two is a revelation. Not in the sense that it’s unimaginably better than season one — it is, but just a bit. No, it’s a revelation because I never knew that Dr Pulaski existed.

She's actually a pretty decent character, arguably more interesting than Dr Crusher, who's entertaining more for Gates McFadden's portrayal than the writing. I quite enjoy her android racism, as she stumbles into a ship of totally woke 24th century people, who are super-cool with Data.

It’s great to have Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan too — she sneaks just a little bit of mystery into the show, and not in the painful, cheesy way that American shows often attempt enigmatic characters. I’m looking at you, Galen from Crusade, though I’m fairly sure no one else gives you a second thought.

I mentioned last season my dismay at Brent Spiner’s attempt at Sherlock Holmes, which sadly returns in ‘Elementary, Dear Data’, a title that does not bode well. Mercifully (yet also a little unsatisfyingly) this is all brought to a halt when the story decides it’s suddenly all about Picard and Moriarty, and robs Data of the chance to actually prove himself. It also touches on the ethics of the development of artificial intelligences... but frankly I couldn't take it seriously, because I can't see Daniel Davis as anyone but Niles from The Nanny.

I don’t want to seem like I’m anti-Data, so allow me to single out ‘The Measure of a Man’ as perhaps my favourite episode so far. The Next Generation can often lean into preachy stiltedness, but this story has a solid emotional core that keeps it from terminal dullness, avoids schmaltz, and reminds us all that Data and Tasha Yar totally had a thing going on. The connection between the crew and Data is a beautiful thing, only slightly undermined when yet again, an arsehole pretends to be Data in ‘The Schizoid Man’, and yet again, they fail to spot it’s not their friend.

I did enjoy 'Q Who' though unlike most of these stories, I'd watched it before, as I used to seek out Q and Borg-related episodes from the video store as a child. If I had come to it cold, I think I would have been surprised by how well it handled the predicament, compared to TNG's common trap of making moral dilemmas over-preachy and under-dramatic.

And just touching on the episodes that I wasn’t particularly moved by:

• ‘The Child’ — this was… quite weird.
• ‘Where Silence has Lease’ — coincidentally, if you squint with your ears, Nagilum sounds kind of like “Mulligrub”.
• ‘The Outrageous Okona’ has a title that makes me want to hate it, but in the end, it’s just really unspectacular.
• ‘Loud as a Whisper’ — not terrible
• ‘Unnatural Selection’ — I was convinced that this was going to be the episode where Pulaski died to let Crusher come back. It’s not, but when you believe that might happen, it’s actually quite tense and engaging.
• ‘A Matter of Honor’ — Lots of fun, and Brian Thompson is good in everything.
• ‘The Dauphin’ — What a silly, silly costume.
• ‘Contagion’ — Pretty solid and tense.
• ‘The Royale’ — Oh, do we have a hotel set? that’s nice. Some cute visuals, but there’s no dramatic tension to speak of.
• ‘Time Squared’ — Some solid time travel.
• ‘The Icarus Factor’ — It’s very hard to take the Rikers seriously in those ridiculous outfits.
• ‘Pen Pals’ — Meh, but sweet.
• ‘Samaritan Snare’ — This feels vaguely ethically dodgy. Gomez is one of what I realise later will be many fun engineer characters that turn up for a few episodes and then disappear to Mandyville.
• ‘Up the Long Ladder’ - Irish
• ‘Manhunt’ — My god, the Dixon Hill episodes are tedious. At least Lwaxana makes it slightly less boring, as Majel Barrett sneaks in some vulnerability.
• ‘The Emissary’ — K’Ehleyr is way above your league, Worf, you're a fool to let her go.
• ‘Peak Performance’ — More meh.

And finally... we have ‘Shades of Grey’. As a long-time explorer of old Doctor Who, I’m no stranger to the idea that you might run out of money at the end of the year. But to deal with it by sticking two characters in a room while another is lying unconscious, and do a poorly-linked clip show, is a little shocking. That’s the season finale, the culmination of the generally improved season two, ending with Marina Sirtis emoting the living hell out of a wafer-thin plot, and Dr Pulaski spending all her time staring into techno-goggles. I was unsurprised to accidentally learn that it’s actually the worst-regarded episode in the history of Star Trek.

That's not true. I was pretty surprised it still wasn't an episode of Voyager.