Video Game Review: Wolverine by Insomniac Games

Not quite the best there is, but more than good enough

Dr. Nathaniel Essex is trapped in a heavily guarded compound by rival scientist, Bolivar Trask. Against his better judgement, Logan comes out of retirement to help rescue the man who once rescued him. But exploring Trask’s compound reveals some deeply disturbing scenes: mutants dissected and experimented on, mutilated and discarded. Can Logan save his old friend while also avenging those so brutally exterminated? Perhaps… but is it for the best?

Wolverine has been quite the discussion piece on many a gaming forum and social media site as of late, the game receiving notoriously bad press before even releasing into the world. As with most media, I did my best to avoid the news beforehand so I could give as unbiased an opinion as possible. These games cost seventy to eighty dollars nowadays, and there is only so much time and money each person has, and I want to respect that. After playing the game, completing it to one hundred percent (story beaten, all collectibles found and unlocked, all challenges completed up to Adamantium level), I then followed up by reading into the discourse about the game. I can confidently say that, while I believe there is plenty of merit to some of the Wolverine criticisms, most of it is just noise and nonsense.

Wolverine looks fantastic. Sure, there are some imperfections with the art style here and there, but most of the time I was wowed by the visual effects, the animations, and the consistent quality on display. This is still Insomniac, and they know how to make a game look damned good. From the creases in Logan’s face to the tears and rips in his suit after a fight, to the gore all around, the game is incredibly detailed. Every so often I found something of lower quality that would stick out, but I had to search for it, or be off the wrong track searching somewhere out of bounds before I encountered a low-quality LoD that had yet to load properly. Overall, however, Wolverine is a very linear single adventure, and the game’s detail reflects that from almost every animation to all the characters and environments.

Alongside stellar animations, the voice performances accompanying them are top tier. Liam McIntyre is an engrossing Logan; his snarls and rage-fueled shouts contrast his tenderness and encompass the character’s range with passion. Nicole Pacent’s Mystique and Krizia Bajos as Jean Grey offer great performances as well. Troy Baker is always a star, though it is odd to see his exact likeness in a game. I know movies have been doing it forever, with the audience having to be hypnotized by an actor’s performance before suspending disbelief enough to accept an established actor as a character on screen. In a game, I am still not used to it. This, however, is a personal thing. Most people who play Wolverine probably won’t know what Troy Baker looks like, and to others, it may not matter.

Wolverine’s writing is decent. The story is easy to follow, even if it stumbles or doesn’t always hit the mark with all its big moments. The game tries to do a bit too much, with characters feeling like they’re included for the sake of being included (it’s a superhero game; we must have another villain!) with weak story cohesion. We got a bit of that in Spider-Man 2, but it’s more noticeable here in a shorter, linear narrative-based game. A lot of the tropes and clichés that follow a superhero game are present here, and while some of it works, sometimes they feel out of place. There is a grittiness to Wolverine and his storyline that shouldn’t get the more jovial Spider-Man treatment. I know they’re all comic books, but some of those comic book-isms just felt out of place. This can be a criticism of the superhero genre, however, and not just Insomniac’s effort here.

The story jumps around, exploring locations the world over, from Canada to Japan, each place richly detailed. The narrative sometimes feels too quick, with various moments feeling unearned. Not necessarily just emotional beats, but story beats as well. Wolverine could have used more padding on the story front. The moments that do hit, however, are great and remind of Insomniac’s excellence. The sometimes breakneck speed of the narrative makes me wonder how the leaks affected development. That said, I enjoyed the overall story that Insomniac tried to tell here. Logan’s personal struggles shone. With his near-immortality—living lives long forgotten, his inability to get close to people, and his fight with his inner nature, the game nails Wolverine as a character, hitting on the different aspects of what makes Logan who he is.

But what about the gameplay, you ask? It’s great! I played on normal, and while I wouldn’t have minded even more difficulty, I think the main difficulty setting has enough balance to please the average gamer. The gameplay is brutal and visceral, with each fight ending in gore-covered claws (which Logan insouciantly flicks away after a fight). While they have the option to turn gore off, the default setting is just what a Wolverine fan should want.

The gameplay focuses on building a rage meter during each engagement. Rage isn’t carried over between fights; any residual after a fight is instead used to fuel special moves that are on a cooldown. The fighting has a rhythm, much like Batman and Spider-Man, but instead of a notifier over Wolverine’s head, the player has to watch each enemy to get a good parry in. Parrying, stunning, and managing Wolverine’s location are key to succeeding in some of the more challenging fights. It’s easy to get surrounded and pummeled by un-blockable moves, though there are a few special abilities that can get the player out of a jam. Once the fighting ramps up and Logan hits his rage, the combat notches up to another level, the gameplay getting even more gore-filled and instantly satisfying. In this mode, you become the Wolverine, tearing into enemy flesh with greater ease and commanding the battlefield like a true superhero. Leaping around from target to target like a feral beast is satisfying, and so is the buildup to filling the rage meter. I wouldn’t have minded more depth to the combat, but for a game of this length, it stays fun the entire run, and that’s key.

Wolverine features challenges through Nightmare Doors, which are scattered throughout the world. These challenges vary from surviving hordes of enemies to reaching a goal within a certain amount of time. While I enjoyed these little distractions, I found the final payout to be a bit of a disappointment. I don’t think the game should have offered an alternate ending by any means, but perhaps a more influential bit of backstory would have been a better reward than what was on offer. That said, the actual challenges were a good time, and I thoroughly enjoyed the ones that made me survive as many enemies as possible. The game felt best when I was killing things.

Exploration is straightforward, sometimes too direct, not giving players too much freedom to discover things for themselves, because a lot is placed right in front of them, but this helps to set the pace and keep the story moving along. The player characters will also vocally nudge the player in the right direction if they take too long, which can sometimes get annoying. One of my pet peeves is leaving an area open to exploration, only to be told to go back to the mission area when you approach it. It can be quite the immersion breaker, and Wolverine is guilty of this.

When all is said and done, though, Wolverine is a very good game that feels great to play. It’s no masterpiece, but it doesn’t need to be. If this is the intro to Insomniac’s X-Men, they’ve got my attention. If they can deepen the combat experience while maintaining better story pacing (either through a longer linear game or by opening it up a bit into more of a hub world), I can see their future X-Men games reaching the heights of their Spider-Man franchise. As is, this game does what it means to and does it well enough, but is that enough? It is for me. But for someone with less disposable income, ask yourself if a very good (not quite great) linear narrative game that runs approximately fifteen hours with little replay value is worth the price. I’m happy with my purchase and the quality on display, but if you are not specifically a fan of Wolverine and/or Marvel, there are better, deeper action experiences you can get at a fraction of the price. If you are a Wolverine fan, then get to killing, bub; the world’s mutants need your help.

The Math

Objective Assessment: 7.5/10.

Bonus: +1 for frenetic, visceral combat. +1 for high end visuals and animations.

Penalties: −1 for narrative pacing. −1 for some linear handholding.

Nerd Coefficient: 7.5/10.

Posted by: Joe DelFranco - Fiction writer and lover of most things video games. On most days you can find him writing at his favorite spot in the little state of Rhode Island.

New post series: Déjà Boo

Join as we head once more into the breach to face the spooky movies that terrorized us as children

Spooky season is upon us, and this year we’re launching a new series of reviews sure to frighten and delight. Following on the heels of 2024’s First Scare, where members of the flock dove into films of the horror canon they’d somehow managed to avoid thus far, Déjà Boo will send us back to revisit the movies that scared us as kids.

For some, this will mean movies that have since become comfort watches, as growing up often enables you to put things in perspective and recognize that boogeymen and monsters are creatures of the imagination more than anything. Grownup life has a way of bringing other, more mundane frights to the forefront—things like cancer, job loss, and broken hearts.

For others, though, it will be the opposite. Sometimes, scary moments experienced at an impressionable age can get installed in the software of your soul, forever leaving a trace of fear and squirminess that even decades as a rational adult can’t shake.

My family was very much a movie family, and growing up, I had a rich education of sci-fi classics, ‘80s action, and the regular rotation of HBO contemporary hits. When Halloween came around, we enjoyed the usual seasonal favorites and spooky comedies, but classic horror wasn’t really on the menu. Think Monster Squad, My Best Friend Is A Vampire, and Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. Those cult gems were more my speed.

I didn’t even partake of the Universal Monster series until well into my 30s. I did, however, spend a lot of time at the local video store, Video South, on Wilmington Island in Savannah, Georgia. My first real exposure to the terrifying world of horror cinema came through perusing the scary movie section at said store. There was no way on Earth that any such film would make it to the checkout clerk, but walking around and taking in the spine-chilling covers was a spooky treat in itself.

Those gruesome VHS covers were how I began microdosing horror as a kid, as I walked alphabetically down the aisle through the spine-chilling art of Basketcase, Dead Alive, Hellraiser, and Puppet Master. Back then, I couldn’t imagine a world where anyone would enjoy being horrified, let alone myself.

Fast-forward 30 years and here I am, the kind of person who goes to new release scary movies by myself and then casually analyzes the spooks and jump scares. I do not get scared, I do not leave the theater checking for ghosties, and I don’t have nightmares (well, not about slashers). Yet still I crave them and the ghastly vibes they provide.

Strangely, I can still remember the memories of actually being scared as a kid, and they are vivid and real. They’ve somehow outlasted all of the truly spooky moments from hundreds of movies since. I’m hoping that other members of the flock can articulate these types of moments in their own formative films, as well.

I’m going to kick off my viewing with 1987’s The Gate, about a group of kids who have to battle demons after a fallen tree unseals a hellmouth in their backyard. There are images and scenes in this one that have stuck with me for decades, and I’m excited to go back and see how hard they hit as a 43-year-old.

Also on my list are Poltergeist III, Killer Klowns from Outer Space, Child's Play, and The Witches(which isn’t really scary but good lord did it scar me). I know a fellow flock member is doing Event Horizon, which is up there in foundational sci-fi horror that made the HBO rounds in the ‘90s.

One thing I’m eager to see is if other aspects of these movies will stand out to me now that I’m too mature to get scared by brief glimpses of body horror or unnerving scary movie-theme musical earworms. That’s the beauty of time and perspective on childhood memories, though.

At the very least, diving back into the classics will be a fantastic time to hang out with baby Haley in the best month of the year.

POSTED BY: Haley Zapal, NoaF contributor and lawyer-turned-copywriter living in Atlanta, Georgia. A co-host of Hugo Award-winning podcast Hugo, Girl!, she posts on Instagram as @cestlahaley. She loves nautical fiction, growing corn and giving them pun names like Timothee Chalamaize, and thinking about fried chicken.

Book Review: They Called Her Rebel, by Jacob Dallas-Main

For justice thunders condemnation / A better world's in birth!

Sometimes we wake up mad as hell and decide we aren’t going to take it anymore, but then plod along with our days under neoliberal capitalism and do the same thing we do every weekday, pining for the two days we get off, while feeling our despair at the state of the world exacerbate as we are faced with new horrors both within and beyond our comprehension. But now and then we ask ourselves in irascible voices—can’t we just get rid of the damn thing and start again?

That instinct, that latent discontent that the world feeds as we try to survive, is the core of Jacob Dallas-Main’s fantasy novel They Called Her Rebel, published by Roundfire Books in 2025. It bills itself as “a fantasy novel about late-stage capitalism, people power, and queer love,” and it delivers on all of those.

Your protagonist is a young, working class woman who spends her days toiling away for an insurance company, living in a dorm, and spending credits only on approved goods. But during a major facilities accident, she and her closest friend end up saving the life of a rich heiress with anti-establishment intentions. From there they are whisked into the world of a covert resistance cell seeking to overthrow the corrupt empire that oppresses its own subjects and the world at large.

What I particularly appreciated in the book’s depiction of the revolutionary cell is its heterogeneity. Leftist infighting is a common internet joke, and not without reason, but that so often happens because it is the inevitable consequence of people from so many different walks of life working together for a better world. There are rich and poor, like the wealthy heiress and the main character, whose worldviews and philosophies and attitudes towards the nature of social change are so vastly different, as you’d expect from such radically opposed upbringings. One is genteel, with some respect for decorum, and the latter has only seen such niceties as the velvet glove around the iron fist. I was reminded of a book I once read about the anti-Apartheid resistance in South Africa, with the stark difference between what white and Black South Africans could realistically get away with under such a system.

You may remember that I mentioned that the book’s subtitle mentioned “queer romance,” and I cannot imagine it is terribly surprising to the reader of this review that the aforementioned romance is between the main character and the heiress. In terms of pacing, I found it odd; hinted at, vaguely, in the first third, given a fairly detailed chapter in the second, and left mostly in the background in the final. I will say, though, that Dallas-Main wrote that important chapter, their first date, the great collision of their worldviews, in a very sweet and believable way. The two of them are clearly at odds in so many ways, but you also get why they are falling for each other. There is a pervasive awkwardness there that exists when people who have become used to acting on behalf of others must then seriously talk about themselves, and credit to Dallas-Main for grokking that.

Another aspect of the book that I found to be very interesting, but may give some others pause: the depiction of violence. This is a book written in a radical tradition that does not view nonviolent action as the be-all and end-all of resistance. This is a book whose philosophy has a place for violent direct action directed at an oppressive state; the second act of the book is about the planned assassination of the head of the state religion (which, of course, does not go exactly as planned), something that will probably rankle those of a more liberal or centrist disposition. Readers may find it shocking to contemplate propaganda deed as an alternative to leaflets, but these are the discussions that have historically happened among these groups, and no matter what he believes, I appreciate that Dallas-Main was willing to really discuss this complexity. In our world, we had nonviolent civil rights marches of the like led by Martin Luther King Jr., but we also had the smaller rural marches where peace was asserted through guns. In this manner, this novel reminded me a lot of Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which asks the question “why hasn’t there been large-scale terrorism in light of capitalism’s omnicide of nature?” and then goes on to discuss the peculiar framing of the research that contends that nonviolent resistance is more effective, and how he doesn’t find it particularly convincing.

Another thing I found compelling about this book was the combination of classic fantasy elements with a setting that otherwise feels agonizingly current. You have elves and dwarves and other fantasy races coexisting with a form of capitalism terrifyingly close to our own; in that regard, it’s something like Fonda Lee’s Jade City brought forward a few decades. The religion here is something like modern toxic white evangelicalism under a more centralized hierarchy, something like the Russian Orthodox Church under Vladimir Putin. There is mass media that we would recognize, and a social structure that is distinctively bourgeois. The protagonist’s job in the first third of the book could be right out of David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs. Like many great works of speculative fiction, this is a funhouse mirror of our world, where the differences serve to emphasize the reality behind it.

This book’s emotional core, beyond its character arcs, is ultimately a form of wish fulfillment that I don’t really see a whole lot in openly leftist fiction. Leftist speculative fiction is generally very heady, very much based on not merely dismantling the old world but also with building another. Kim Stanley Robinson has done a lot of this, like his gargantuan Mars Trilogy, or his New York 2140, the book that ultimately made me a socialist. Robinson is the vanguard of that headier sort; there is also a more romantic sort, the type that focuses on the joy of community and the strength of human interconnection. I would count in this category works such as Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway and Eman Abdelhadi’s and E. M. O’Brien’s Everything for Everyone.

They Called Her Rebel is neither of those, partially because it is a fantasy novel, and therefore in a genre traditionally more concerned with whimsy than with theorizing. The core emotional pull of this book is not the possibility of designing a better system, or living a life without the isolation and alienation of contemporary capitalism, but rather a life in the warmth of community. To the contrary, this is a novel that is selling a fantasy of revenge. This story is about being given the chance to strike a meaningful blow against neoliberal capitalism and its attendant miseries, a mode of resistance that cannot be co-opted. The book has plenty of violence, including scenes of outright warfare against the government, and they are all told thrillingly, but it isn’t exactly an intellectual stimulation there. It’s the emotion that made so many Americans cheer Luigi Mangione as a hero. On the one hand, part of me worries that this sort of catharsis may lead to hasty thinking, but on the other hand, I have to respect the fact that Dallas-Main has chosen a side, the side of messy, uncompromising zeal, and asks you to live with what that would truly mean.

I do wonder, though, if he undoes his thematic premise just a tad with the fact that the plot is kicked off by a rich reformer. Capitalism traditionally tries to defang mass movements by hyperfocusing on single individuals, as well as crediting change to the elites that responded to mass movements rather than mass movements themselves. It is the presence of this rich woman who allows the core cast (herself included) to meet, but on the other hand, it is the main character’s choice to help her that really starts the plot rolling. Taken another way, this first third is about how any spark can light a pile of kindling, and it can come from the unlikeliest of places. I enjoyed this novel enough to give Dallas-Main some grace.

They Called Her Rebel is an anguished roar against the state of the world, a novel that is doing something akin to Bertolt Brecht’s distancing effect, but with setting rather than character. The focus of most fantasy novels is to get lost in another world with characters that you have come to cherish. Dallas-Main very much wants you to identify with your protagonist, but wants you to go farther than simply immersing yourself in the world. Much as Brecht wanted his plays to start riots, Dallas-Main wants you to take a hard look at your circumstances and find the hope that you can change it. All fiction, speculative fiction very much included, is a way of making sense of the world in varying degrees of metaphor. Dallas-Main here channels what Karl Marx said: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

Reference: Dallas-Main, Jacob. They Called Her Rebel [Roundfire Books, 2025].

POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

I'm Filipino-American. Here's what 'Forgotten Island' Means to Me

PHILIPPINES MENTIONED! And there's a lot to say

For much of my life, if you asked me what Americans thought of Filipinos, most of the time my answer would be ‘they don’t’. I am biased in that I have lived my entire life in the Virginia suburbs of Washington DC; Californians or Hawaiians may have a different experience. I have taken to explaining it to friends as “we’re not good-at-math Asians. We’re boat people Asians, or nurse Asians, or guerrilla fighter Asians, or mail-order-bride Asians”. My sister has put it more succinctly: “we’re not the marketable Asians”.

Did you know? When I’ve looked for Filipino history in local libraries, I’ve found far too many accounts of white Americans in the islands during World War II to the detriment of anything else.

For the longest time, the idea that I would feel seen by watching a movie was alien, something I dismissed as adolescent whining. I am autistic, half-white, Filipino-American, and have never visited the Philippines to my regret. I am simply unused to anyone ever being really relatable to me, let alone any work of art. When the commentariat was celebrating Raya and the Last Dragon as a groundbreaking example of Southeast Asian representation, I was left cold, partially because that film draws from mainland Southeast Asia rather than insular Southeast Asia, of which the Philippines is the part most dissimilar to others. There is still something within me that thinks searching for art to see yourself in is narcissistic and navel-gazing; is not one of the greatest things about art the ability to understand other people, if only for the briefest of moments?

Did you know? My mother once answered my question about why there are no Filipino celebrities with “we are not attention whores”.

Some months ago, I was in the movie theater waiting to watch Supergirl and sitting through the mandatory barrage of trailers. One of them was for Forgotten Island, which seemed to be another CGI kids movie of the type that has been ubiquitous since Toy Story. Two friends find a portal to a lost island full of adventure - typical stuff, I thought. But then I noticed the pastel-colored jeep that they drove in. I then noticed the portal they stepped through: the sun of the Philippine flag. My heart leapt: there were pinoys in a mainstream movie! I confess it did tug on a heartstring, being someone who grew up with a pull-back toy jeepney and who embarrassed himself by scaring his classmates in a suburban Virginia preschool with ‘bulaga!,’ which is what Filipino ghosts say.

Did you know? ‘Pinoy’ is a term used by Filipinos to refer to themselves (the feminine form is 'pinay').

Most Americans, I gather, have only the vaguest inkling that America ruled the Philippines with an iron fist for forty-odd years. They may remember Corregidor or the fall of Manila (but not that Manila ranks with Warsaw and Stalingrad as one of the most totally destroyed cities of the war). They may remember Douglas MacArthur stepping out into the water on his way to wrest control of the island from the Japanese. They do not know that the word ‘boondock’ is originally ‘bundok,’ a Tagalog word meaning ‘mountain.’ They do not know that ‘Bataan’ is properly pronounced with three syllables. They may recall Imelda Marcos’ massive collection of shoes. Sometimes, they will recall the Bojinka Plot, a failed terrorist attack by the men who would later demolish the Twin Towers. Very occasionally, they will snicker about the way that the Moro Islamic Liberation Front is abbreviated. The vast majority of the time, we are simply not on the American radar at all.

Did you know? For every American that died in the Philippines in World War II, a hundred Filipinos died.

On the flip side of that equation, Filipinos spent a lot of time - perhaps too much time - thinking about America. The old canard in intelligentsia and diaspora discussions is the Philippines’ supposed ‘colonial mentality.’ Filipinos prize white skin, love American popular culture and American food, and on some level use the United States as the yardstick to which the Philippines is compared, and inevitably found wanting.

Did you know? When I was born, my Filipino great-grandfather, a former resistance fighter against the Japanese, applauded the fact that I was half-white, saying that it was “improving the race”.

The single great anxiety underlying the Filipino intellectual is the fear that our nation is fundamentally fake. The old saying is that the Philippines spent “four hundred years in a convent, and forty years in Hollywood” (the version my mother taught me swapped out ‘Hollywood’ for ‘a whorehouse;’ I learned of the ‘Hollywood’ version in Stanley Karnow’s book In Our Image: the American Empire in the Philippines); apparently a version with ‘three hundred years’ and ‘fifty years’ is older, and may have been a coining by Carmen Guerrero Nakpil. The very name of the country is from that of a Spanish king. The sun symbol on the flag, which becomes a portal in Forgotten Island, was taken from the Sun of May, a revolutionary symbol of South American independence that now adorns the flags of Argentina and Uruguay. The triangle on the flag is Masonic, as were the early fighters for independence. The national anthem of the country was originally sung in Spanish. Most Filipinos have Spanish names, and many also have American names, often with the addition of an extra letter ‘h.’ The country, as a historically contingent nation state, is a colonial creation; there are no inherent reasons for a Caviteño or a Moro to be countrymen, any more than there are for a Punjabi and a Mirpuri to be Pakistanis, or a Catalan and a Basque to be Spaniards. We think of nations as eternal, static things that exist independently of others, but that has never been true (and people have known that for a while).

Did you know? When my mother was growing up in the Philippines in the late sixties, her mother told her to not play outside too long, or she'd become dark "like an Igorot."

In other words, Filipinos worry that if you could strip from the country all the remnants of foreign interference - the Japanese, the Americans, the Spanish, the Muslim merchants who brought Islam, the Chinese traders who were in the country for centuries - you would find absolutely nothing at the core.  

Did you know? Noli Mi Tangere, the book widely considered the national epic of the Philippines, was originally written in Spanish.

Now, at long last, after the sheer amount of context that I feel obliged to give, we can discuss the film. There are two protagonists, rebellious Jo and studious Raissa, who meet as children in detention and bond over their love of Filipino folklore. You get a montage of the two of them growing up together over the course of the 1990s Philippines, enthralled by the stories from Jo’s mother. The two of them swear to one day find the titular forgotten island, Nakali, home of the evil Manananggal. For them, mythology is an escape from the travails of adolescence. But, as adolescence inevitably does, it ends. Jo believes that she and Raissa will get to live together as Raissa studies at a local university, but then everything is forced to change when Raissa confesses to Jo that she is going to study at Caltech, in California, and so their sisterhood is faced with a rupture of distance and a rupture of shared intent. They are driven further apart by Raissa’s family who disapproves of their daughter spending so much time with a girl they consider a lout, and just as it appears the rupture may be permanent, a sand dollar washes up on shore and creates a portal opens up in front of them, on the beach where they parked their jeepney, in the shape of the sun of the Philippine flag. This is it: the way to Nakali.

Did you know? The Philippine flag is flown upside down, with the red stripe on top, during wartime.

They wake up in Nakali having forgotten the events of the last twelve hours, meet colorful local characters, and stumble around trying to figure out what happened. They meet a local boy who can turn into a wolf who claims that they spent the last night partying together. He takes them to Manang, who claims that she can bring them home if they are willing to sacrifice to her their memories. The two refuse, and set off to find the sand dollar that created the portal that brought them here. By this point, the film’s thematic core is made clear.

The sin of modern Filipino culture is forgetting. We have seen this painfully clear recently in that country; in 2022 the nation elected Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the tyrant who brutalized the country from the sixties to the eighties. Like a distressing number of countries in the past fifteen-odd years, the Philippines has forgotten the value of democracy. Many Filipinos still uncritically try to emulate the United States, forgetting what this country has done there. Some Filipinos try to cozy up to China, forgetting the militarism in the South China Sea and the perils of surrendering national sovereignty. Christian Filipinos like to forget that Islam was in the archipelago before Christianity.

Did you know? Ferdinand Marcos Sr. and his wife Imelda hold the Guinness World Record for most money ever stolen from a government.

In our film, Raissa is a Filipina who is outward-looking, seeing America as her future, wondering if she’ll ever come back to the third-world country she grew up in. Jo fears that Raissa could forget about her home, the value of its culture, and perhaps worst of all, her. Jo represents the Philippines' wariness towards the outside world, the fear that it could overwhelm anything distinctive about us. The two of them are each a distinct current within the modern Filipino nation, the part that cringes when it beholds America, the one that is insular (no pun intended), one that wants to remain ‘authentically’ Filipino (whatever that means) on Jo's part, and the part that looks fascinatedly on the outside world on Raissa's part.

But, it is worth noting, both of them love American culture. Jo, the one who fears that America offers her best friend a loss of identity, still blasts American pop music and eagerly watches American movies. This is is a contradiction that goes down to the deepest anxieties of our people.

Did you know? The Philippines once elected a former action star to the presidency. He is still alive and likes posing with weapons on social media. He was removed after mass protests for taking money from illegal gambling rings. He is my third cousin once removed.

There is a lot of pop music in the soundtrack of this film. Most of it is American, many of it recognizable to Americans with no links to the Philippines. It is the soundtrack of a Filipino childhood, as Jo and Raissa watch American movies and sing American songs on their quest to find Nakali. Notably, for the first half of the movie, all of the songs they sing are in English, even as they go further into Nakali trying to find the magic sand dollar. This changes, finally, when they are led to the island’s great marketplace, with many different creatures from Filipino mythology hawking their wares. You are given here a montage of the various new things they encounter set to this song, a song from the first Filipino hip-hop album (released in 1990) proudly extolling Filipino identity, covered by today’s biggest P-pop group.

Did you know? Multiple Filipinos have been murdered over bad renditions of Frank Sinatra’s My Way in karaoke bars.

This market montage is a very particular fantasy of a Philippines unaffected by foreign influence. The market is a Philippines without the Japanese who threw our babies into the air and skewered them with bayonets, without the Americans who framed a trench of corpses of women and children like a hunting trophy, without the Spanish who ruled by the Church, and, perhaps the most provocatively, without the merchants from points west that converted much of the archipelago to Islam (to this day, the large southern island of Mindanao is a third Muslim. They are known as Moros, and in some ways they have never been entirely under the rule of anyone who has ever ruled the Philippines, including the modern Philippine state. A comprehensive peace settlement was not reached until 2017). It is a vision of a Philippines that is solely its own.

Did you know? During the American invasion of the Philippines, General Jacob Smith ordered his forces to kill everyone on the island of Samar over the age of ten? His forces stole bells from the churches of Balangiga, which were only returned in 2018. General Jacob Smith is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

But therein lies the great contradiction of the Philippines, a nation named after a Spanish king, and from there the ultimate reason that this sequence can only be a fantasy. The song that proudly proclaims its heritage is in an idiom that comes from African-Americans with significant influence from Jamaica, brought to the Philippines through American bases. It is sung by a group who made by an industry that has followed South Korea's model. It is sung in a language whose ancestral homeland is generally believed to be Taiwan. It is a fantasy of a country who loves spam, which is American, and corned beef, which is Irish by way of America. Spoken Tagalog, the nation’s lingua franca and indigenous to Luzon, is replete with Spanish and English words. They have, and the film has, run into the great unsettling truth of any attempt to systematize understanding of the Philippines: it has suffered the brutality of colonialism, but without colonialism, it would simply not be the Philippines. There is no way a Philippines that does not have foreign influence could possibly be the Philippines, and Jo, the sceptic of foreign influence who nevertheless loves American music, is eventually shown the error of her ways.

Did you know? The Filipino love of spam was once explained by Americans by lying that we used to be cannibals. Not understanding the valences of this, whenever our mother fed us spam as children, my sister and I would happily proclaim "we're cannibals! we're cannibals!"

(closing on the market sequence - there is a gut-bustingly funny parental in-joke that is only comprehensible if you are Filipino. Among the rapid montage of the delights of the market, you see your protagonists slowly removing a cylindrical cover from a human figure. This is Barrel Man, icon of tourist junk shops throughout the country, is a running national joke, and regularly scandalizes and delights tourists who happen to visit. Nobody is quite sure where he came from, but one theory is that he was created by the Ifugao people of mountainous north-central Luzon, who historically walked about nearly-naked, to mock their prudish American occupiers.  The shot cuts away just before they find what is underneath the barrel, namely a large phallus on a spring. Given the rating, the film could never show the ramifications of this particular discovery, but it implies a scene like the infamous leg lamp scene in A Christmas Story, or the scene in Goodbye Lenin! where the young East Berliners, right after the fall of the Berlin Wall, discover a baffling new application for whipped cream in a West Berlin adult film shop. I found this joke hysterical and I want others to feel the hilarity. And yes, in more recent times there are variants of Barrel Man as a woman with comedically large breasts likewise mounted on springs, revealed via the same manner as her male counterpart)

Did you know? When my great-grandmother moved to the United States, she was mortally offended by Americans asking if she had ever been to the American bases in the Philippines, because she assumed they were calling her a whore. My grandfather had to explain to her that they were only thinking of the few places in the country they had actually heard of.

It is only fitting, then, that this story of the Philippines in the world was created by an American studio, who became famous via a raucous comedic retelling of European folklore, and animated with strong influence from Japanese anime (some have pointed out how this is the Filipino presence in animation coming full circle, as Filipino studios have often done the grunt work for Japanese and American animation). Its two lead voice actors are Filipina-American, one of whom is half Black, as is one of its directors. We have joined the ranks of cultures that the American animation industry, and not only Dreamworks (nor only Disney), have showcased in their professed love of multiculturalism.

Did you know? When the Americans invaded the Philippines, they called Filipinos the n-word.

But in being an American film telling a fundamentally Filipino story, it reveals its Americanness in two ways. The first one disturbed me when I realized it: the film is mostly in English with bits of Tagalog, as I would expect, but the only recognizably Filipino accents are among the old people. I recognized the big Filipino family at Raissa’s graduation, with the older people asking questions about where she is moving. She responds with CalTech, and the adults subsequently ask her several questions containing assumptions that do not match what she tells them, until her family is convinced that she is moving to Hollywood to become an actress like Tom Cruise. She has to correct them, and I don’t think she succeeded.

Did you know? I was ten years old at my aunt’s wedding when I had to explain to older relatives that my cousin from my other aunt was not my sister. I’m not sure I succeeded.

The American-accented youth trying and failing to correct the heavily accented grandparent is something I have experienced and I suspect many other Filipino-Americans have. But in doing so, I can’t help but think that the film is imposing a common experience among the diaspora in the homeland. This, in itself, is an interesting cultural difference but not particularly harmful, like the way that K-Pop Demon Hunters transposed American fandom norms of romantic speculation onto a Korean music industry that enforces extremely strong rules against their stars having relationships (a norm that began among the Japanese pop idol industry but was ruled illegal there). Among my own family, which came to the United States in the seventies, only my grandparents’ generation has thick accents. My mother’s generation can emulate it well if they want to sound like their parents, whereas I can only do an impression of my mother’s impression of her parents (and it isn’t very good).

Did you know? I once tried to do a Filipino accent in the company of white people to demonstrate what it sounded like, and one of them asked me if it were possible to be racist towards a group I was part of.

What disturbed me about the aspect with the accents is that the youth of the Philippines, and therefore in some sense the future of the Philippines, is simply not allowed to sound Filipino beyond slang. There are few of the voiced consonants that produce the distinct Filipino accent, none of the Spanish that peppers the language, no ‘f’s that are blunted into ‘p’s,’ no slightly elongated vowels, no blunt glottal stops. What this implies is that Filipino languages belong to the past, that Filipino culture belongs to the past and cannot change, which is itself an old orientalist trope that delegitimizes non-European cultures. I know they did this to make it marketable - but then, this shows you what is marketable, doesn’t it? (recall my sister’s quip that we aren’t the marketable Asians)

Did you know? The Tagalog language is not pronounced like the girl scout cookie.

The other part that reveals to me that this film is American is that, ironically but ever-so-predictably, it really doesn’t want to talk about America. Many cultures, not only Filipinos, knew that one of their own moving to America would irrevocably change them (for example, in the 19th century, the Irish would hold wakes for their countrymen who got on the boats bound for New York or Boston). Raissa is depicted as the ambitious one, but the film never bothers to really reckon with what she actually wants. She wants to become a professional, an educated woman in a way that her home country could never provide her with, but the film, mainly through Jo, has only vague strokes of an idea of what that would end up doing to her. She would be moving to a country that openly hates anyone with a skin tone darker than a lily, a country that slaughtered Filipinos less than a century ago, and that until quite recently stationed soldiers and backed dictators there. What does that mean for her? What does that mean for the Philippines?

Did you know? Many of the tactics and practices used by American police departments and security agencies were originally pioneered during the occupation of the Philippines. The Pennsylvania State Police, the first state police agency, and from there every state police agency, were based on the Philippine Constabulary (the American colonial skullcracker force which was one of the ancestors of the modern Philippine National Police. Perhaps not unrelatedly, the British writer James Hamilton-Paterson, in his novel Ghosts of Manila, referred to the Manila police as "the Khmer Rouge in Disneyland").

The film isn’t particularly interested in these questions. I am once again reminded of Dylan Rodriguez’s book Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition, which spends a lot of time discussing what it really means to be ‘Filipino-American.’ He concludes, ultimately, that such a thing is impossible, as the American project towards Filipinos is to either murder them or to prevent them from being Filipinos. That is America’s bargain with its immigrants: don’t have too much of a conscience of your heritage, or you will be met with the genocidal force of the state. It is the state that has encouraged first-generation immigrants to not teach their languages to their children, in hopes of making them American, thereby destroying cultural memory in the process. That is the real cost of the melting pot, and a cost that Raissa, or the film, never really thinks about having to pay. Indeed you suspect that Dreamworks denies that cost at all.

But there is a part of me that thinks that Rodriguez simply hasn’t really considered the reality of the Filipino diaspora, and indeed the Philippines itself. It is perhaps correct that it is impossible for the idea of an American and the idea of a Filipino simply cannot coincide as the former is intent on destroying the latter - but Filipino-Americans actually exist. Some are half-white, like me, and some are half-Black, like H. E. R., who voices Jo. If I’m not Filipino-American, what am I, exactly? I am reminded of my friend Nathan Goldwag’s left-liberal reinterpretation of Margaret Thatcher’s quote “There is no such thing as society:” the ideologies and conceptual frameworks we devise to explain the world may be useful, but they ultimately don’t exist. What does exist is people.

Did you know? I pilfered much of the architecture of this essay, including the sprinkling of trivia, from my friend and colleague Arturo Serrano’s (frankly, far better) essay about his feelings about Encanto as a Colombian. I worry that this isn't as good because, being second-generation, not speaking Tagalog, and not having been to the Philippines, I don't have as good of a grasp of the culture as he has on his.

And what does exist, rather than an abstract conception of nationhood, is a real nation, a nation of over seven thousand islands, a nation named after a foreign king, a nation called the Philippines, inhabited by people called Filipinos. Raissa sees the opportunity that the Philippines sees in the world. Jo sees how the world can threaten the Philippines’ conception of itself. It is through the interaction between the two (or if you want to be pretentious, the Hegelian dialectic between the two) that has produced, and currently defined, this real nation called the Philippines, and the real people called Filipinos. The Philippines is not a bug frozen in amber, but rather a process, a perpetual becoming that never stops changing. That is what Jo and Raissa discover, to their ultimate joy, and ours.

Did you know? Political scientist Benedict Anderson called the nation an ‘imagined community.’

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.

Film Review: Her Private Hell

Bisexual Lighting: The Movie

Elle is a movie star with a perma-sneer stamped on her face, a taste for luxurious clothes, a golden penthouse the size of an Egyptian temple from which she plays her lonely Rapunzel routine atop a mist-plagued city, and more unresolved daddy issues than the whole cast of Magnolia. She’s currently filming a retro space opera with her once bestie, now evil stepmother Dominique, who brings her own Freudian can of worms. While a serial killer targets lost daughters under the cover of the mist, Elle has visions of Kay, an American soldier in Japan who is pursuing a bloody vendetta against the same threat.

Ambiguities quickly erupt like mushrooms. Is Kay the soldier a symbol of Elle’s unavailable father? Is the killer a symbol of the soldier? Assuming that Dominique’s marriage is an indirect response to Elle’s desire for her, is that response a yes or a no? Which of the two is Elle jealous of? Is Elle’s ingenue coworker Hunter actually a projection of her self-hatred? And what is the limbo of crystalline obelisks where the killer lurks?

Abandon all hope of getting explanations, O ye who enter. Filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn’s newest creation Her Private Hell is built on very specific, meticulously chosen vibes, and would be supremely irritated at the audacity of anyone suggesting that it might need to explain itself. Instead of offering answers, Refn has the movie parade its majestic set designs with mannequin dolls and Greek statues that ooze psychosexual tension; its grandiose orchestral soundtrack; its hypervirile men so rough that they literally light matches by rubbing them against themselves; its two-hued lighting that obscures alternating sides of the characters’ faces; its urban legends about the mist and the dangers it hides.

What comes closest to a statement on what the movie is about is a reference to the story The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen, a Dane like Refn. In the story, a starving girl freezes to death in the street while waiting for someone to buy matches from her. She is terrified of returning empty-handed to her father, who makes her work. As the night advances, she has delirious visions of the happy family life she wishes she had. She ends up in heaven, although those who see her dead body have no idea of her eternal bliss. Her Private Hell is full of lit matches, their smoke blending with the eerie mist that has enveloped the low levels of the city. Unlike the match girl, Elle is ridiculously wealthy, but her work is also done out of deference to her father, while her mind conjures a fantasy of a man running toward his daughter instead of away from her.

Another meaningful clue is a minor anecdote from the bacsktory of Elle’s father, who once bought an artpiece consisting of a tattooed fetus. To leave a literal mark on our children: that’s the curse of an all-devouring love.

Perhaps to give the viewer sufficient chance to decode these mountains of subtext, Her Private Hell proceeds at a painfully slow pace. But Refn is merciful enough to fill the runtime with compositions to please the eye: in a city where it’s always night, the artificial lighting is calculated to fall on body surfaces to evoke both joy and danger; the camera movements are choreographed with exquisite timing; and the still shots of pensive faces carry entire speeches’ worth of unspoken emotion. The many nebulous zones in the plot are magnificently filled with gorgeous scenery that gets all the spotlight it deserves.

The choice of final battlefield is of crucial importance (remember the Statue of Liberty in X-Men), and this is especially true in a movie as full of symbols as this. The misty limbo of phallic crystals is where Elle goes to resolve her destructive ambivalence toward her father, in a winning move that practically begs to be interpreted as castration. And yet, much remains to mull over. What does it mean that Elle solves the conflict with a weapon that her father gave her? What’s the link between Kay and Elle (that is, K and L), between his military rank of private and the title of the movie? Why are Dominique and her husband never seen together in the same frame? Why does Elle feel like a completely different person once Hunter leaves the story? What is the movie-inside-the-movie trying to say about the movie itself? And what on Earth is that mist?

At the risk of committing the sin of essentialism, we have to keep in mind that Her Private Hell was written and directed by a man, so the reach of the movie’s feminism will be limited. But all those mirrors, and the fixation with cigarettes, and  the killer’s distinct modus operandi, have to mean something, even if the movie refuses to help. It’s obviously for a reason that the victims call the killer “daddy,” that two alleged spirits remark that being pierced is an omen of luck, that Elle’s in-character makeup puts solid teardrops on her face. This movie wants to say a lot, but seems terrified to spell any of it out.

Perhaps the silence is part of the message. Our unconfessed feelings about our parents can be unspeakable. But where words hesitate, light can’t lie.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Film Review: Optimus Prime: Awakening

'Til All Are One

The decision to kill off Optimus Prime, way back in 1986, to clear young boys’ minds’ mental space for shiny new toys in The Transformers: the Movie was infamously a massive imbroglio for Hasbro. The corporate big shots had succeeded in selling thousands of toys, themselves jerry-rigged into a brand and a story, fronted by a cartoon and a comic, that was cobbled together from multiple Japanese toylines which were discovered at a trade fair by a Holocaust survivor who would go on to invent the type of camera used to televise poker tournaments. They had created brand loyalty through the fiction they viewed as ephemera, through the voice acting talents of the likes of Frank Welker, Chris Latta, and of course the late and great Peter Cullen, who as Optimus Prime was a surrogate father figure for a generation of latchkey kids.

Hasbro did not think that the decision to kill Optimus Prime, and many other Autobots and Decepticons, in the 1986 film would lead to any controversy. Instead, children were devastated, as their father was felled in battle right before their eyes, and flickered out on his deathbed in front of new characters-cum-toys, an audience surrogate, and a single character from the cartoon. Back then, Hasbro was shocked to find out what the death of Optimus Prime meant. Now, after so many reboots of the franchise and so many deaths of so many versions of Optimus Prime, they have finally decided to think long and hard about what the death of Optimus Prime actually means. They do so in the short film Optimus Prime: Awakening, released in 2026 and shown after credits of the fortieth anniversary showings of The Transformers: the Movie.

You start in that operating room, surrounded by other Autobots, as Prime takes his last metaphorical breaths (do Transformers breathe?). He hands the Matrix of Leadership, the physical manifestation of his leadership and noble qualities, to Ultra Magnus, as he did in the movie, and slips away. From there, he wakes up in a Bardo-like realm where he is accosted by an otherworldly being about his choices, his responsibilities, and the wars that he had fought in.

This short film simply could not have been about the passing of Peter Cullen, as it was made before he died. I do, however, strongly believe that it is a rumination about the passage of time, as the brand has become middle aged as has its earliest fans. I am too young to have seen the original cartoon on air; I grew up with the first Robots in Disguise and the subsequent Unicron Trilogy in the early 2000s, and so the Primes of my childhood were either Daniel Riordan or Gary Chalk. Nevertheless, I had a VHS tape of the 1986 film as well as a few Generation 1 episodes, so I also came to know Cullen as Prime. I am now months away from thirty.

One thing that has been noted about that early scene in this short film, that recreates the infamous death scene in the 1986 film, is that a character is missing. Daniel Witwicky, the human child who served as an audience surrogate, is gone, and I think this absence is the skeleton key to understanding the themes of the short film. In the original show and the 1986 movie, the viewer is assumed to be a child, and is invited to view the show and film through the eyes of a child, where the idea that transforming robots having brought their bitter civil war to Earth is an exciting, new thing. Not so in this short film, made forty years later. This new production literally starts with the audience seeing Ultra Magnus, Hot Rod, Arcee, Kup, Springer, and Perceptor through the actual eyes of Optimus Prime. The audience is now assumed not to be a child, but older, having experienced all the wars of Cybertron, and having experienced the suffering and joys of a life long lived.

In this bardo, Optimus Prime is faced with an angry being who makes a terrible accusation: Optimus Prime, through his dedication to the idea that freedom is the right of all sentient beings and his love for his friends, has been the very being that has kept the wars of Cybertron raging for millennia. Furthermore, he argues that Prime has not died only once, but that other forms of him will die several more times for his friends in different realities, likewise keeping these wars raging, the suffering continuing, the death toll ever rising. The One, as it is called, is making the most devastating possible accusation that Optimus Prime has faced: he has fought for nothing, and that his death is meaningless. He is telling Prime to give up his struggle, and Prime cannot help but bristle at the accusation.

Prime is then attacked by old foes: Soundwave, Starscream, the Insecticons. He fights them on a blasted asteroid under the light of a black hole (which is very significant - more on that later), and then seems to meet an ally: Bumblebee, perhaps the friendliest of the earliest Autobots. But this is not the case, as Bumblebee denounces Prime’s role in continuing the Cybertronian wars and shows a Decepticon symbol on him, and joins with Prime’s pursuers before they all combine into a larger, angrier form of Bumblebee.

Those who are fans of the franchise and have been following its recent comics will have noticed something about this scene: that black hole looming above the battlefield is the Sacred Ring from Void Rivals, one of the comic series that shares a universe (the Energon Universe, as it is called) with the ongoing Transformers title, as well as G. I. Joe and M. A. S. K (NOTE - fans of these titles, I am going to spoil the first two or three arcs of Void Rivals, so stop reading here if you are not there yet). The Sacred Ring is a black hole that contains Goliant, an ancient Quintesson weapon locked in the black hole by Zerta Trion, a Transformer fighting the Quintessons’ oppression of her people, and kept in there by a gigantic ring on which live two nations, Agorrians and Zertorians, who each control half of Goliant’s essence, and, having lost the details of their origins, fight each other pitilessly to keep him from emerging. In other words, these two peoples have been condemned to suffering and war because of the wars of the Transformers. An old war, fought by a literal cassette player and an old VW bug, is waged under the light of a new war, now told monthly in comic shops as we speak. From the beginning of the franchise to the present day, there is war between Cybertronians for our entertainment.

Let’s go back to the notion that the short film is inviting us to see ourselves in Optimus Prime. Optimus Prime, at the end of his last battle, is asked to give up fighting, to give up the Matrix of Leadership, and to accept his own culpability in suffering. He is attacked by old enemies in the shadow of a war that is ancient in-universe and very new in our own. This then raises questions: what are we, and by extension old Transformers fans, fighting? What are we being asked to give up? What are we supposed to accept? What are we suffering from?

Old Transformers fans like myself went to 40th anniversary showings of the 1986 movie out of nostalgia. ‘Nostalgia,’ as a word broken down into its Greek roots, is the pain of homecoming. There are two parts of this whole process, and therefore the decision to watch a film we loved as children as adults: a love, and a pain.

Let’s put that in the metaphor invited by the short film. We, through Prime, are being asked to give up fighting, to give up the infliction and the creation of pain and suffering. We are being asked, on some level, to move on. We, like Prime, are being attacked by memories of the past that have been hostile to us, as well as a memory of the past that seemed friendly but is now hostile. Those two have merged into something wearing the accoutrements of the old, the combined Bumblebee and Decepticons, and they are assailing us with grief, under the shadow of the grief we feel to this very day. The forces fighting Prime are the pain of aging, the pain of the loss of innocence, but also the pain of a loss of purpose. Soldiers who return home have sometimes talked of missing the front, as the front gave them an immediate purpose and, in a way, a simple existence. The One is trying to impress upon Prime that his war is over, and from there that our internal struggle between living in the present and looking mournfully at the past must likewise end.

The short film continues, as Prime is sent to battles on Earth and on Cybertron. On Earth, he is helpless to stop Unicron. On Cybertron, he fights valiantly alongside Bumblebee against Megatron, his greatest enemy. It is the brief sequence on Earth that makes the invited metaphor even more obvious; the damages of something he cannot stop begins to strip away the metal on his hand, revealing under that a human hand. If we are Prime, we are fighting aging, something we cannot stop, and having the self-conception we built for ourselves as children ripped away, revealing us humans, weak and vulnerable to the world around us.

Then, on Cybertron, Prime is almost killed by Megatron, but is saved by his ally Bumblebee. He then almost kills Megatron, but relents at the last moment. He gives up the Matrix by throwing it away, and walks into a shining doorway leading to points unknown. Megatron, a Decepticon, is our desire to return to the past, that much is clear. What does Bumblebee represent? He is an ally, a good thing that is nevertheless capable of turning evil. Bumblebee, here, is the love for something in our past that makes us want to undertake a homecoming. He is the attachment that was born in our childhood. He is the good part, the sweet part, of nostalgia, while Megatron is the evil, bitter part. But, ultimately, this is a desire to let childish things be childish, to let things remain in the past. He is the ‘adult’ part of our brains that is telling us to put down our toys and leave the good memories as memories.

But Optimus does not want to kill Megatron, and the film is telling us not merely to give up nostalgia as a whole. The film is telling us to move beyond this struggle between the desire to return to the past, and the desire to simply leave a memory as a memory. What it does not say is where Optimus went. It does let the metaphor walk through that doorway, and leave us in the theater.

We submitted to nostalgia by going to the theater to watch a film from our childhoods. What, according to this film, should we do? Certainly the answer is not to give up on Transformers. Firstly, Hasbro and TakaraTomy would never allow that and never would want that. We are invited to continue engaging with Transformers as a franchise, but how?

I will confess to having gotten back into Transformers only within the past year, and as such have not watched and read every single new piece of fiction in the franchise, let alone stuff from before I was born. There is a lot of Transformers. But I think I can detect what the logical conclusion is here, and will demonstrate it with another beloved franchise of which I am a devotee: Star Wars.

An adult Star Wars fan, nostalgic for their childhood when the franchise was new to them, is caught in a struggle between the desire to leave it in the past, to put away childish things, and to struggle with what the loss of that newness means. You are older, pining for what you felt as a child, while acutely feeling the pain that that child no longer exists. You can give up what you love, or you can rage at our own mortality and thereby try to restore something that never really existed. Or, you can take a third option: to learn to appreciate the old stories with adult eyes. You will see the flaws, the stereotypes and the silly acting and the wooden lines, but you will also appreciate in Star Wars the commentary on imperialism and democracy. The proper resolution of the great conflict of nostalgia is Andor, a respect for the old stories bolstered with a respect for where it fits in the adult world, an appreciation that these stories are of the world, created by humans, rather than falling in our laps out of nowhere.

That resolution of the tension inherent in nostalgia is the resolution of the conflict within us, the resolution of the struggle between Optimus Prime and the One. He has given up his desire to return to his glory days, and his desire to rage against their ending. He has ascended to a higher realm, a higher discourse, and will become part of the One. The Autobot rallying cry is ‘til all our one,’ and that rallying cry is also a cry of mourning. It is a cry of loss, and an exhortation forward. As Optimus Prime joins the One, we are invited to rejoin the world, a world with Transformers in it, but also with ourselves in it, with us and the franchise and the world all inextricably linked. Giving up the struggles of nostalgia does not mean giving up what we loved, or giving up love itself. It is, rather, a higher form of love, a love of reality rather than a construct, a love that can accept that a cartoon thrown together to sell toys, written by freelancers who didn’t think much of it, and containing some hideous anti-Arab racism, can nevertheless bring good things into the world, things worth loving.

In his book Anatomy of Criticism, the great literary critic Northrop Frye argues that a comedy ends with the integration of the protagonist into society, as opposed to tragedy, which ends with the total separation of the protagonist from society. With the themes of moving on, one would be tempted to call this film a tragedy, as there is separation of Prime from what gave him meaning. But the Autobots fight until the day that all are one, and he has joined the One. There is, in a way, a happy ending. He has become what he fought for. We, likewise, can join the world of which our love is part, and create a more durable, more formidable love in the process. We can love what we love for what it is, and not what we believe it to be. We can face the world, having used our love to motivate us to be better people, to be strong enough to be gentle. It is the proper use of love.

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POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy

TV Review: Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season 4

60 Years of Star Trek wraps up with an unusual 4th season of Strange New Worlds

From its first season, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds quickly became one of my favorite Star Trek series. I have loved Star Trek as a franchise from the days when all that existed was The Original Series (and The Animated Series). I later grew to deeply love Star Trek: The Next Generation. And, I have enjoyed (loved, or at least open-mindedly watched) all other iterations of the flawed but always compelling storytelling. Star Trek has benefited from and been burdened by the high moral expectations of its storytelling. From its earliest days, Star Trek has tackled real life social justice issues while still dealing with its own inherent frailty: talking about the future through the limited and imperfect lens of the limited and imperfect present. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds captured that spirit in its opening seasons but did it with a focus on character relationships rather than the external plot. While the plots were intense and engaging, the real exploration was internal or interpersonal. Season three was more of a change with more quirky or humorous storytelling episodes mixed with a majority of intense, high stakes episodes. Season four has been even more of a shift with half of the episodes being quirky or humorous (not always overlapping concepts) counterbalanced with an approximately equal number of intense episodes. Humor has always been an essential part of Star Trek, not only to take an emotional break from the intensity of constant space travel peril, but also to add complexity and authenticity to the characters. 

Some of my all-time favorite episodes of Strange New Worlds have been humorous, including “Those Old Scientists” and “Four and a Half Vulcans.” There is a distinction between sharply humorous versus solely quirky or silly, but this distinction will vary from person to person, and the jokes will land or fail based on the audience's viewing experience and even their personal mood at the time of watching. Widow’s Bay is an example of a show that I found extremely, sharply clever and laugh out loud funny, while others I know found it absurd, grim, or strange and confusing. Several of this season’s episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds didn’t land for me the way I would have hoped, although all of them were reasonably enjoyable, and some were particularly outstanding. Here is a quick episode roster: 

Valles Marineris – The crew is trapped on Earth during the age of dinosaurs and must find there way back and keep from getting eaten, without damaging the timeline by killing anything.

The Griffin Incident – A classic horror episode, where Kirk, Spock, La’An find a long lost starship whose crew died mysteriously and violently, and while exploring the very creepy ghost ship, the away team discover they are not alone and soon find themselves questioning reality and loosing their sanity as they face their own violent horrors. This episode has lots of creepiness and plenty of disturbing violence.

Human Best Friend – Shore leave on an inherently drunk atmosphere planet becomes a problem when a feuding (and inebriated) Ortegas and Scotty have to work together to complete a critical mission. This is a classic drunk vacation episode in the style of The Naked Time or The Naked Now.

A Case of Chiaroscuro – In an undercover mission to a planet, as a case of mistaken identity lands Una in the role of a mob leader secretly working against a Klingon occupation. There are plenty of plot twists as loyalties are tested and betrayed. The episode is an homage to films like Casablanca, even down to the black and white setting, jazz music, and “gin joint” references.

Level-Five Transporter Accident – A seeming transporter malfunction leaves Spock as the only normal person on the ship when the rest of the crew appears to be turned into small puppets and they collectively have to fight off invading pirates. It’s a Muppets style crossover that will test your tolerance for silliness.

Off-Hour – A disaster puts the ship in danger and critically injures M’Benga in a horrifying accident. Trapped with him, Chapel is determined to do the impossible to save him. This is a disaster episode mostly focused on the bond between Chapel and M’Benga, with plenty of intensity and emotions.

Like Chronitons Through the Hourglass – The Squire of Gothos returns to mess with the crew by turning the ship into a soap opera setting in which only Pike is normal and the rest of the crew is entrenched in melodrama. It’s the sort of premise that will be best appreciated by those who watched soap operas instead of (or while) doing their math homework after school. Otherwise, the sweet payoff at the ending may not be worth the initial silliness and the very fun Deidre Hall cameo.

Orders of Magnitude – The revered Admiral Reeger takes emergency control of the Enterprise while Pike and his landing party are trapped on an away mission. Visiting officer James Kirk becomes the ranking officer who must challenge the bitter admiral when his command to destroy a planet creates a moral crisis. This episode is a powerful reminder of why Star Trek storytelling is so enduring.

Once La’an a Time – La’an and the crew find themselves on a planet where doubles of themselves are characters in a traditional fairytale, with forbidden love, a wicked queen, comic side characters, and very elaborate costumes. Carol Kane’s Pelia makes lots of references to The Princess Bride which featured the actress decades ago. The episode is also a call back to the first season episode The Elysian Kingdom in which the crew recreates characters from a storybook adventure. However, without the poignant set up of the prior episode, this season’s adventure feels a bit more arbitrary. On the bright side, there are amazing costumes and the resolution of La’an’s season long angst about managing her inner dark side.

Tomorrow’s Enterprise – An encounter with a space anomaly creates a time rift that only Uhura and a future version of herself can sense. Both versions are motivated to fix it to save the life of a key crewmember. This is a great Uhura celebration and an inspiring reminder about believing in yourself even when you don’t feel fully confident.

Although some of the quirky stories were not my favorite, Season 4 should be celebrated for some top tier episodes. "Orders of Magnitude" managed to be riveting and powerfully acted, while also giving us an inviting character study of the young James Kirk and the loyalty of his brother Sam. The episode does a great job of showing Kirk as morally strong but also morally imperfect. That contrast made me like the character and the episode even more. While the ship’s crew is primarily neutrally obedient and star struck by the famous admiral, they too begin to question authority and consider their own moral positions. The episode is tour de force for Joe Morton whose acting is powerful and hypnotic, as we watch the admiral migrate from charismatic, to smug, to tyrannical, to unhinged. The secondary plot involves an away mission gone wrong where Captain Pike, Uhura, and Uhura’s Vulcan cadet are held hostage by Orion pirates. Uhura has a strong confidence evolution in this side story which sets her up nicely for the final episode of the season where she has to, literally, trust herself, to save the timeline.

The season’s final episode, "Tomorrow’s Enterprise," is a solid ending for Star Trek’s 60th year. Uhura, Scotty, and Ortegas go on a dangerous shuttle mission to explore a rare phenomenon known as a white hole. Things go wrong forcing an evacuation and on the return Scotty has disappeared. Uhura soon finds herself in a time travel crisis where she must work with a future version of herself to bring back their missing comrade while navigating the space anomaly which, as it turns out, is having its own crisis. The plot is a little wonky but the story is a great tribute to one of my favorite characters, giving her center stage and character growth and some much needed encouragement to trust her strength and become more confident. We also have a full time skip to the new Enterprise crew, with Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Lt. Uhura, and Nurse Chapel. It’s not quite all the way to the original series but it is getting closer in a way that builds anticipation for the final season’s potential handoff.

Overall, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, Season Four has very solid episodes along with some significantly quirky departures. These quirky episodes will appeal to some but won’t be everyone’s cup of earl grey tea. As someone who deeply loved Star Trek: The Next Generation, I sat through many episodes which were intentionally (or, in some cases, unintentionally) quirky and silly. Many of these stories were justified by holodeck hijinks or the trouble-making, omnipotent Q messing with the crew. However, we had so many more episodes per season and we had so few other choices of what to watch. Now there are only ten episodes per season while hundreds of other series are poised to grab viewers' attention. As a result, there can be a sense of plotting urgency that may undercut the fun of watching something quirky. This is especially true since Captain Pike’s impending demise is an essential premise of the series. Ironically, and perhaps for this same reason, the story seems to want to veer into whimsical stories while we move closer to the inevitable, grim conclusion.

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Highlights:

• Lots of quirky episodes
• A mix of powerful adventures
• Plenty of character introspection

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10

POSTED BY: Ann Michelle Harris – Multitasking, fiction writing Trekkie currently dreaming of her next beach vacation.