The Handmaid’s Tale is a TV show presented on the Hulu streaming service, based on the 1984 Margaret Atwood novel of the same name, which was previously reviewed here, about a near-future dystopia in which the USA has become an extremely oppressive theocracy in which women are second-class citizens, especially the handmaids who are little more than breeding stock. Season two aired on Netflix in 2018 (season 1 was reviewed here).
The protagonist is June (Elisabeth Moss), a handmaid in the new nation of Gilead, a dystopian vision of a violent fundamentalist Christian regime in the near future. Women have no rights, can own no property, and the handmaids in particular are basically only treated as breeding stock, meant to get pregnant by the commanders of the society in a monthly ceremony with their wives. She is known officially as “Offred” because she is considered the property of Fred Waterford (Joseph Fiennes), to conceive for his wife Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski).
The end of season 1 ended in the same place as the book it was based on, with June being hauled away with no explanation in a van, with no idea if she is going to be freed or killed or something else entirely. She is smuggled away from her household and hidden somewhere else, with the help of Nick (Max Minghella), her household’s driver and her secret lover , but her fate is still far from certain.
This season explores areas of the world of Gilead and the surrounding world in ways that are never directly explored in the book or season 1, seeing what life is like in other countries (especially Canada) as well as other parts of Gilead itself, like the colonies that are the destination of the doomed, and finding out more about the roles of different people in the world and how they are rewarded and trapped in their roles as well.
Season 2 was an excellent addition to the series, continuing to expand on the world and the characters (and I’m in the middle of watching season 3!).
The Handmaid’s Tale is a TV show presented on the Hulu streaming service, based on the 1984 Margaret Atwood novel of the same name, which was previously reviewed here, about a near-future dystopia in which the USA has become an extremely oppressive theocracy in which women are second-class citizens, especially the handmaids who are little more than breeding stock. Season one aired on Netflix in 2017.
In the near-future world of the story, a worldwide infertility epidemic is affecting the whole world, and the United States has been overthrown by a violent fundamentalist Christian regime and renamed Gilead. The leaders of Gilead think that the world’s problems are a punishment from God for their wickedness, and have taken over to enforce their own view of morality on their citizens.
One of the largest of these changes is the introduction of handmaids, fertile women who are assigned to commanders whose wives have not borne children, to be raped every month when they are ovulating with the intent of bearing a child that will then be taken by the commander as his own child.
The protagonist of the book is June (Elisabeth Moss), who is a handmaid officially known as “Offred” (as in “of Fred” because Fred is the first name of the commander she is assigned to(Joseph Fiennes)), who had a husband and a young child before the rise of Gilead and she was made a handmaid because of past infidelity. She is trying to survive despite the extreme circumstances, and she is trying to make her place in this new world with potential friends like the commander’s driver Nick (Max Minghella) and maybe make a difference to someone and if she is very very lucky, make a mistake.
Besides the monthly “ceremony” when she is ovulating, she also has to deal with the passive-aggressive tendencies of the commander’s wife Serena (Yvonne Strahovski), and the overbearing leadership of Aunt Lydia who oversees all of the local handmaids.
For those who have read the book, the first season pretty much matches the timeline and major events as the book, also ending in pretty much the same place. It has been a couple years since I’ve read the book but the parts that I remembered matched the book quite closely.
The writing, the casting, the music, the production, everything about this show is done very well. It is not a show for the lighthearted, and is as relevant (or more relevant) than the story was when the book was originally published in the mid-80s–it is all too easy to believe some of the dystopic religio-political beliefs in Gilead taking root in some current trends. The Handmaid’s Tale is a good story, but even more so than other dystopias it is a warning about where we might end up if we don’t resist changes that would take us to that dystopia.
Highly recommended, if you feel you can handle something so dark.
The Road is a post-apocalyptic survival novel by Cormac McCarthy, published in 2006 by Alfred A. Knopf (which also inspired a 2009 movie adaptation by the same name).
A man and his son travel across the wasteland that had been the United States of America after a major (but largely unexplained in the text) catastrophe that left almost everything dead. They are following a road traveling toward the south where they believe they will find sanctuary. Subsisting on scrounged food supplies from pantries of empty homes, and avoiding other survivors who might wish them harm, they don’t know if they will find enough food to make it to their destination, or how they will survive the coming winter, or whether the sanctuary they are hoping for actually exists.
This novel, as you might expect, is bleak as hell. They and other survivors they come across are all people who’ve managed to survive for years and years after the end of almost all life on the planet, and so have made tough decisions to survive. While the man and his son have stuck to certain moral choices, many of those who still survive have not, and running into others is frequently a dangerous encounter. I found the book very compelling, despite the characters not being named, and the very sparse (and often repetitive) dialog in the book was a strong element of that, there’s not much to talk about, and much of it is the man answering the same questions or try to tell the boy what he needs to hear, and about how their relationship changes over the course of the book. The boy has never known a pre-apocalyptic world, so his father’s stories about the time before are like a fairy tale, compelling but imaginary. A solid post-apocalyptic book telling a deeply compelling and emotional story about trying to survive and trying to help your surviving family however you can, while still trying to make moral choices.
(When I picked the book up, I could have sworn it was a very old book that was published before I was born that everyone talks about, but it turns out I had it mixed up in my mind with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, a completely unrelated book, apart from them both being about road trips in some sense)
The Time Traveler’s Wife is a 2003 time travel romance book written by Audrey Neffenegger, about a man afflicted with a condition that causes him to time-travel more-or-less randomly and the woman he marries. The book was very popular and inspired a 2009 movie adaptation of the same name, previously reviewed here.
Henry has experienced the time-traveling condition since he was a child. When he travels, only his body is transported, so he does not take along his clothes, wallet, or any other possessions. He learned from a very early age to be ruthlessly pragmatic as a way to survive, because if you get dumped with no clothes and no resources into random locations you’re always against steep odds of getting arrested or starving or whatever else. He has a more or less central timeline that is the trunk from which all of his time travel branches, so he has some normal continuity, but at seemingly random intervals he will travel for seemingly random amounts of time to seemingly random places.
He spends much of his life just trying to survive and get by, until he runs into Clare in his main timeline (when he is in his 30s and she in her 20s) and she tells him that she’s known him since she was a grade schooler and that they’re going to get married in the future. He hasn’t experienced this yet, but early in her life he gave her a list of the times when he would appear in the grove outside her family’s house so that she could remember to bring food and clothes out to him.
Their romance after that is very complicated, as at any given point they are in different parts of their relationship, just as with this initial meeting where she has known him for most of her life and he’s just met her. He then proceeds to meet her as a child and eventually meet her when it was the first time for her. It’s a story of marriage, the obstacles to finding happiness together and what we do to fight for it, and in many ways is about being in different parts of a relationship at the same time, which I think can be true of real relationships that have no time travel involved.
As with the best speculative stories, this one explores real territory with a speculative lens for emphasis. The characters are very different but compelling (with a plus that I didn’t have to watch Eric Bana’s acting for the book, but the minus that I didn’t get to watch Rachel McAdams’s acting). I thought the book as a whole was reasonably well done.
One of the big hangups I had about the book, not being able to tell where in the timeline this fit in, was resolved in the book by section headings that gave the date and the age of both characters. Time is always somewhat confusing at the best of times, but this made it a lot easier to just go with it than I found the book to be.
I also thought it was interesting how Neffenegger chose to follow the continuity thematically rather than necessarily chronologically for either character in particular. For a series of chapters it may follow Clare chronologically through a particular set of years to explore themes of her childhood, then follow him chronologically from his point of a view for a while to show how he ended up there, then switch to something else. Because of the caption headings this was reasonably seamless and I probably only really thought about it because I was thinking about the writing process.
The big thing that makes the book harder to recommend is that for much of the first quarter or so of the book, 30-something Henry is interacting with grade-schooler Clare and I found that whole section of the book deeply creepy and troubling. By that time, he already knows that he will marry her someday when she’s older, and he depends on her for food and clothing on these visits where he would otherwise have to steal and forage like his other time travel jumps. So, it makes sense from a character motivation perspective. But at the same time, it’s hard to avoid the interpretation that he is grooming her during this period. If you removed the time travel element and you had a thirty-something man hanging around a grade-schooler without her parent’s knowledge while mentally preparing himself to marry her, that would be a story about a predator. There are reasons to think that’s not where this was going, but I found it really hard to shake myself off of that interpretation, so throughout this whole section I really just wanted it to be over and get to the part where they’re both consenting adults (even thought that was also somewhat colored by her having been groomed by him for so long that she’s bound to have feelings for him). I’m not sure that was supposed to be creepy or disturbing, but for me it absolutely was, and it makes the book hard to recommend as a result, though overall I thought it was pretty good.
American Gods is a contemporary fantasy/mythology novel by Neil Gaiman, published in 2001. I’ve heard the book highly recommended by many readers, and in 2017 Starz started airing a TV series adaptation, so I decided I needed to find out what it was all about.
The protagonist of the book, Shadow, is released from prison three days early when his wife Laura and best friend die in a car accident, and he learns had been having an affair with each other. He had gotten through his time in prison largely by looking forward to reuniting with her, and his job prospects after his release had depended on his best friend’s business.
Bereaved and bereft of all of his hopes for the future, with no good prospects for worth and nothing to look forward to, he is offered employment by a strange man who calls himself Mr. Wednesday. Mr. Wednesday is a con man, and takes on Shadow as a bodyguard. Shadow is skeptical at first, but in the face of his options finding work as a recent ex-con, he takes the job.
Soon he is drawn into a strange war between ancient and new mythologies. The gods of the old world, a version of them transported here by the belief of immigrants who traveled here to the United States, are weak and dying from the waning beliefs of the people who brought them here. Meanwhile, new gods are rising up, not of the traditional sort, gods of technology and change. A cold war has been building for quite some time, and it’s about to come to a head.
I had trouble getting into this book. Much of the book is spent with Shadow spending time in random hotels or apartments by himself, waiting for Mr. Wednesday to come back again. And while much of the purpose of the seemingly unimportant events of these “waiting around” times becomes clear later, it didn’t make it quicker or more interesting to read at the time. In addition, it’s almost two hundred pages into the book before the mythology plot comes to the forefront–until that point it’s just Shadow hanging about with odd people with quesitonable motivations. The mythology plot is what drew me to the book, so it was frustrating to wait so long to really get into it.
I found Shadow hard to relate to in particular, which made it especially difficult to keep going with the book. I empathized with the depths of his despair when he was released early because of tragedy but many of the decisions he makes in the book make no sense whatsoever to me. Taking the job with Mr. Wednesday, I get in itself, because he was very short on options at the time for being able to make a living in his post-conviction life. But throughout much of the rest of it, he would make a decision that would just leave me scratching my head, and this is for major decisions that the entire plot is built on, so I couldn’t just ignore the oddity, the entire book depended on them.
There were some elements near the very end that helped justify some of the long periods of not much happening, which helped some in retrospect.
This book was not for me. I’d like to talk with some of the people who recommended it so highly and see what it was they got out of the book, because I am curious to hear another perspective. I might consider trying out the TV show at some point because I feel like the premise is very promising, maybe I’ll enjoy a different adaptation of the story.
Chuck was an action spy action/drama/comedy show, starring Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi), who started as a down-on-his-luck geek working at the BuyMore fixing computers, when he ended up with a supercomputer with government secrets downloaded into his brain, as he has been used as an intelligence asset. And later in the series he got an upgrade to the software that also gave him various physical skills like martial arts. Season 5 was only 13 episodes and aired from October 2011 through January 2012.
The end of Season 4 and the beginning of Season 5 return to the shows roots, but with a twist, as Chuck, Sarah (Yvonne Strahovski), and Casey (Adam Baldwin) use money they’ve earned to buy the Buy More and continue to use it as a base for their freelance spy organization Carmichael Industries. But, at the end of the last season, a set of programmable sunglasses that was meant to upload a new copy of the Interact computer into Chuck’s brain was instead worn by Morgan (Joshua Gomez), so Morgan now has the knowledge of a government supercomputer and extra physical capabilities of the Intersect, so he is the new focal point of their organization and Chuck is now acting as his handler (like Sarah used to do for him in the early seasons).
This final season of the show was a roller-coaster ride, where they tried new things that they hadn’t done in any of the previous seasons (Morgan as the Intersect being just the first!) and I got the impression while watching that the writers were told to build in multiple big finales throughout these episodes in case they got cancelled earlier than that (and maybe there were more finales written for later that never aired). As a result, on top of the individual episode arcs, and the overall season arc, there were also couple-of-episodes arcs throughout the season, and things that seemed like they had the shape of an overall season arc would very suddenly end.
I was sad to see the show end, and there are things about the final season that I wish had been done differently, but it was good to finally see how they wrapped up the show’s portrayal of the Chuck and Sarah story.
If you’ve watched previous stories, you really should watch it, to see how it all turns out.
Eerie, Indiana was a 19-episode episodic young adult SF/Fantasy show that aired on NBC in the 1991-1992 television season. It was followed in spring 1998 with a 15-episode spinoff Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension on Fox Kids (which I’ll touch on briefly but is not the focus of this review). I watched it recently for free on the Roku Channel which I could access without any streaming subscriptions on my Roku streaming device.
Marshall Teller (Omri Katz) and his family recently moved from New Jersey to the odd small town of Eerie, Indiana. Maybe because of his outsider perspective, he seems to be almost the only one to notice that Eerie has a lot of weird things happening that no one can explain and most people don’t even seem to notice, and he declares that it’s the center of weirdness for the whole universe. Because no one believes him, he is determined to investigate and document every weird thing he finds. He makes best friends with a younger boy named Simon (Justin Shenkarow) and in each episode they investigate some new weird thing they’ve come across. There is some continuity that grows as the series goes on, especially in the development of secondary characters, but it is largely episodic, each episode stands relatively well on its own.
The very first episode sets the tone for the level of weirdness. In that episode, Marshall’s mother (Mary-Margaret Humes) buys some Tupperware-like food preservation containers that can keep food fresh for an extraordinary period of time. But as the episode goes on, Marshall and Simon learn that there are also person-sized containers that the saleswoman uses every night on her family and they haven’t aged in decades. It’s that kind of weirdness with a fun sense of humor that made the show what it was.
I particularly like the secondary cast member, known at first as “the boy with white hair” (Jason Marsden), a troublemaking but charismatic older boy living on his own. My greatest disappointment that the show didn’t run longer is that I was interested to see where his storyline would go, it seemed like they had some ideas in the works for him.
This family show is fun for all ages–some of the dialog and plotlines and delivery of linesare a bit simple at times, probably aimed for a younger audience in general, but the weird and novel premises like the one above make it surprising and fun for everyone.
In 1998, Fox ran a 15-episode spinoff series called Eerie, Indiana: The Other Dimension which as the title suggests is in an alternate universe from the original series. There is a small and poorly-executed link with the original series in the form of a distorted video message from the original Marshall and Simon explaining the situation, but of course since the original actors for Marshall and Simon are too old at this point they just reused some footage from the original and distorted it enough so that they could record new voices over it. In this other dimension, instead of Marshall Teller, the lead is Mitchell Taylor (Bill Switzer), and instead of Simon Holmes the other kid is Stanley Hope (Daniel Clark). And Mitchell’s family and everyone is all sort of the same as Marshall’s but sort of not. I found this made the reboot very hard to get into because I kept comparing the original to this one and finding it lacking. I think the show would’ve had a better chance if it had either brought back the original cast and just had them older, or if they had just completely started from scratch with completely new characters, this sort of half-continuation made it hard to watch and we gave up after a couple episodes.
So, I would recommend the original 19-episode series for fans of the weird, but probably not the 15-episode reboot.
Stranger Things is a speculative horror/mystery show with an ensemble cast. Following the success of Season 1 on Netflix, 9-episode Season 2 launched in October 2017, and the third season is scheduled for July 2019. I reviewed Season 1 here.
Season 2 takes place more than a year after the events of season 1 and in the meantime things have apparently returned to (mostly) normal after Will Byer’s (Noah Schnapp) odd disappearance and reappearance–only a handful of people know the truth, that the local government agency disguised as the power company opened a hole to another dimension (the “Upside Down”) that let a vicious dimension-hopping monster (the “Demigorgon”) into our dimension, who abducted Will into its own dimension, and killed several others before it was killed itself with the telekinetic powers of a girl called Eleven (Millie Bobbie Brown) who was herself a result of experiments by the power company.
As seen in the prologue of the last episode of Season 1, Will is not free of the Upside Down yet. He is no longer physically there, but he has been having periodic episodes where he seems to move back and forth between our world and the Upside Down. His mother Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) and their friend Police Chief John Hopper (David Harbour) have been taking Will to therapists employed by the power company to treat what they think is post-traumatic stress disorder, but the visions seem so real it’s hard to tell if they could have some reality to them. Will’s friends Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), and Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) want to help him however they can but they don’t know what’s wrong.
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the boys, their friend Eleven is still alive and living in secret with Chief Hopper, kept a secret to keep her safe from the Power Company.
The second season was very good, if not good as the high bar set by season 1 (second book, season, in a series is always the hardest because you don’t have the novelty and mystery of the first), there is much of the same mystery and action and emotion that made the first season great, but with a new adversary to face off against. I highly recommend it, and I’m looking forward to watching season 3!
Stranger Things is a speculative horror/mystery show with an ensemble cast, whose 8-episode first season launched in 2016, and the third season is upcoming in July 2019.
The show begins in the year 1983, with four friends playing a game of Dungeons and Dragons at Mike’s (Finn Wolfhard) house. When it’s time to go home, the other three boy’s Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas Sinclair (Caleb McLaughlin), and Will Byers (Noah Schnapp) head for home on their bikes in the dark. The next day everyone realizes that Will is missing. About the same time, another kid, a girl with buzz-cut hair (Millie Bobby Brown) that no one has ever seen before, appears around town. The boys and others search for Will and as they investigate they find more and more signs that this is no ordinary disappearance, but someone seems determined to convince them that it is. Will’s mother Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder), distraught over the disappearance of her son, tries to convince Police Chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour) of some of the hard-to-believe details of the case.
It’s hard to describe much more of the plot of the series without giving away major plot things that will be more fun to experience yourself. I only saw this recently on DVD as the new season approaches, and it was SO MUCH fun to binge watch. The writing and cast are great, the special effects are solid, I love to root for the kids, and against the villains, though I think the young girl is my favorite character.
It’s no wonder this show has been such a hit, I would highly recommend it, and I’m looking forward to the new season.
Chuck was an action spy action/drama/comedy show, starring Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi), who started as a down-on-his-luck geek working at the BuyMore fixing computers, when he ended up with a supercomputer with government secrets downloaded into his brain, as he has been used as an intelligence asset. And later in the series he got an upgrade to the software that also gave him various physical skills like martial arts. Season 4 aired from September 2010 to May 2011.
In this season, Chuck and his partners Sarah (Yvonne Strahovski) and Casey (Adam Baldwin) face a new adversary in Alexei Volkoff (Timothy Dalton), a criminal mastermind who is still working with Chuck’s mother who he hasn’t seen since he was a child. Everything changes while remaining the same as the CIA takes over the Buy More and converts it into an official base, and builds out new areas that even Chuck and his partners don’t have access to.
While Season Three had started out shaky but got stronger, Season Four is reasonably solid throughout, new situations, expanding on Chuck’s physical abilities, and taking new steps in the relationship between Chuck and Sarah. The Buy More continues to offer the comic relief while also tying into the CIA plots, while also changing as the managerial structure changes and now Morgan (Joshua Gomez) is in on Chuck’s secret so manages to involve himself more and more. At the same, it’s hard not to miss the early seasons of the show where Chuck was clever but flighty and not physically adept. But the show has changed into something different, even if the first couple of season were special in their own way.
