Star Trek: Discovery, Seasons Two and Three

Season Two went fine, though the actor playing Ash Tyler developed a bizarre speech effect from bad dialect coaching. It will sound farfetched, but he sounded exactly like Nick Blood did when he suffered from bad dialect coaching on Agents of Shield. British people! Just let them be British! If they're not good at an American accent, don't make them try to do one. Oh boy was that distracting. It was even hard to understand him, which by the way it would not have been in his native accent.

The character of Ash Tyler was a problem the whole season long. He was thrown here and there like they had no clear plan for him. The guy with severe PTSD and major identity issues who had like two hours of training to join Section 31 ended the season being head of it. More nonsense. This was the beginning of the make it up as you go along problems that became unmanageable in Season Three. 

Also L'Rell had a bizarre CGI face at the beginning that threw me out of the story entirely. And I don't know why everyone immediately forgets how to write drama when Klingons are part of a story. The Klingon scenes are unbearably boring and stupid, just people standing around grunting and yelling and giving speeches and occasionally breaking into another dumb physical fight. Story goes there to die.

The best thing about Season Two was Spock, because of the actor, who has an incredible voice and presence. He's also good at being Spock, that combination of withdrawn and sarcastic, above it all but judgmental. His relationship with Michael was excellent, especially when he called her out on being exactly who she is, with her self-important messianic complex. Of course, it did turn out that she really was the red angel, so she was right. And she is the main character of the show, the POV character.

Except then she isn't anymore? In Season Three, truly everything fell apart. 

The show switched to being an ensemble show, which would be fine if any of the bridge crew characters had ANY personality traits or characteristics written in. But they don't. There's an Asian guy, a black guy, a black woman, and a white woman with a facial appliance. I think her name is Detmer? She gets to have some story and personality. The rest don't. I don't even know their names. They are not characters. The black woman suddenly said she was raised in a Luddite community one episode. Interesting. Later she said she was from a family of pearl divers, too. 

These things are just thrown in there. Nobody is developed. Nothing is built up.

Compare that with even just the pilot episode of DS9, where all of the main characters are introduced and we know their traits and backgrounds immediately. Sisko, Kira, Dax, Bashir, Odo, Quark, O'Brien. You CAN do this. You can introduce characters well and quickly and give them depth and conflict and whole lives and issues and directions. 

Discovery is incomparably bad at this. It gets worse and worse when I'm at the end of Season Three and don't know which one is Rhys and which is Bryce, if those are even their names. I don't know and I don't care, because they're not written as PEOPLE. 

I'm angry at this show. 

Season Three seemed to be setting up a cool thing with the sphere data becoming a sentient being, who I thought was Adira, given that she appeared out of nowhere, nobody saw her come in, and she had ridiculously overblown skills and abilities and knowledge for someone of her age. Impossible. 

But no, they put the sphere data into these dumb little robots we've never seen before. And it decided everyone should watch Buster Keaton and laugh their heads off. You guys, nothing against Buster Keaton, but it's not the kind of thing that makes you laugh until you fall over. 

Instead, Adira is nothing. The character gives a speech about being non-binary, so I should say they. But the speech and that fact have NOTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING. It's not part of the story in any way. Not even part of that episode, or that scene. It's a terrible way to write anything. You don't just shove things in there undigested.

How you would do that well: have it be part of a story, any story. Do I even have to say more? No. It's the clunkiest kind of writing. I'm all for representation--that's not the problem. The problem is it's just dropped in there and doesn't mean anything in the story.

Adira also has an imaginary ghost boyfriend who appears then disappears then reappears. That also has nothing to do with any storyline. I can't even express how offended I am by this kind of writing. Because as viewers, as any reader would, we expect things in the story to MEAN SOMETHING. So I'm building theories about what this means, right? There's no earthly sense in putting things into stories that don't mean anything. It's self-indulgent first draft beginning writer nonsense and has no place in a show like this. It's not even a mislead! It's nothing!

If you want it in there, which is fine, make it MEAN something. Make it part of the story. 

Part of the problem here is the promise and the premise. You made a promise that the pieces would add up, but they don't. The premise of sci-fi and every Star Trek show requires that we do the math with the pieces we're given and figure out what they add up to. 

We can't do that if the pieces are meaningless. 

It's beyond infuriating. It feels like we're being tricked. And that feels like everything I hated about Voyager and Enterprise, where you could see the machinery, like someone wanted this element added so suddenly we have this thing, even though it doesn't make sense in any story. I hate that. 

Tell a good story. Good grief. It's literally your only job.

So Adira is nothing and her boyfriend is nothing and the show would be exactly the same without them. Fantastic. We already had Tig Notaro to do everything Adira was doing. Adira kind of replaced her. Terrible.

The shift to ensemble focus meant we lost the drive that was Michael Burnham's story and her need to solve problems. They gave her another beautiful boyfriend, yay, and I love Book like I loved Ash before he developed that speech problem and story problem, but Book again has NO PURPOSE in the storytelling. He has a cool ship and some local connections, fine, but Michael could have developed those in the year she was there alone. That would have been BETTER. Yes, I want her to be happy and have a beautiful boyfriend, but he could have been, oh, I don't know, one of those stupid bridge crew with no personality. 

They don't know how to make anything mean anything.

Imagine if Michael had been trying to be all Starfleet by herself and save everyone and that's what brought the Orions down on her and caused everything else down the line. That is good storytelling. That's what they did in the first season and to a lesser extent in the second season. A character does a thing out of inner need/conflict and that brings about effects that they then have to cope with. Character, choice, consequences. THAT IS STORYTELLING.

Instead we have this atrocious mishmash of random elements. I hate it.

By halfway through the third season, it was clear something was terrible wrong at the helm. We had three or four episodes that included very long extended sequences of alternate reality or dream world situations, which classically stop the action in its tracks because it could be anything and doesn't mean anything. What happens in a dream never matters. There are no stakes and no consequences. The final few episodes also focused on this kid who grew up alone in a holosuite kind of environment.

It almost makes me sick even to say it, but the plot revolved around getting him to face his biggest fear. This is a character who's not even on the main cast! And they made him talk like a damaged child, as though he grew up alone, when he grew up with a full set of advisors and teachers and a holo-grandfather. He would have spoken like them! The fate of the whole galaxy rests on this adult child opening a door. We don't know him or care about him and he's deeply unappealing so we never start.

Nothing is ever thought through by the last five or so episodes. 

The utterly boring and pointless mirror universe/dream/holosuite portions aside, with the leader of the Orions we also had ANOTHER atrocious case of a British actress who could not keep her American accent on, who even slipped between them seven times in one sentence. How is this happening in a tv show? How did they not make her dub her dialogue? Was nobody listening? People dub dialogue all the time. It was so bad.

She was also a boring cruel tyrant who saved one guy in a wheelchair, so we were supposed to be conflicted about her, but that doesn't work. She was obviously a cartoon villain. Ugh. She had no motivation and no reason to be doing what she was doing. And the shenanigans they used to get her into the heart of Starfleet headquarters were just ridiculous. Every single thing about her stretched suspension of disbelief far beyond the breaking point. Her PANTS didn't even fit. Nobody was driving the ship at this point.

The last episode was so far beyond any sense that I can hardly wrap my head around it. It was all after the fact logic. Like: we want Michael to save the day, so back up and make this happen. 

As an example, they had the villain open the vents so Discovery's air was getting sucked out...but slowly. WHY? Because they wanted the bridge crew to have to struggle to accomplish [whatever it was] by making their way to the nacelles through an empty ship. It was transparently a convenient obstacle placed there to give them something to do. And they did it, boy howdy, lots of acting class falling and gasping for air and the heroic pearl diver making her way there, only to fail at the last second. Oh she also shouted "I LOVE YOU ALL" to everyone, like Michael usually does, only it was so awkward and not set up in any way and so cringeworthy I may have had an out of body experience. Then she got rescued by the idiotic robot who saved the day. It sacrificed itself! But they fixed it so it was fine! NOTHING MATTERS.

It all feels so slapped together and profoundly tone deaf and stupid and it's just such fundamentally poor storytelling on every level. It's hard to believe it's the same show. But I suppose it isn't. Apparently they had a major meltdown at the highest levels and lost Bryan Fuller, who must have been bringing an awful lot to the table, because this was abysmal dreck.

Look, at the end they theorize that Book can use his magical empathy powers to communicate with the spore drive, because Stametts is where again? I DON'T KNOW. Because nothing made sense. It was like an improvised skit at this point. And so Michael sends him down there and ejects the warp core FOR NO REASON before they even know if Book can do this thing nobody in the universe but Stametts can do. And then it explodes, which the warp core doesn't do just on its own. Who cares about following the rules of an established universe, though, am I right? Why shouldn't a human get a Trill host, when that's completely impossible? Why not let magic empathy man control the spore drive?

Oh, and the one character who was sort of developed, Tilly, who is an engineering ENSIGN, gets made acting captain. There is no way this makes any sense at all. She's not qualified or capable. And of course she's a disaster at it and everything goes to hell. Why do something so terrible to this character who didn't deserve it? Make fun of the fat lady is what I see. They treat her like a joke. Someone can be funny without being a joke and that's how it should be, not this cruelty and mockery. The point of this is to try her out, make her fail, and make everyone glad when Michael is made captain. UGH.

There's another whole stupid thing about how the holosuite changed everyone's species randomly, which was transparently so we could get the luminous Doug Jones out of his horrible prosthetic makeup for once and see how lovely and wonderful he is, which I am all for, but again this is a ridiculous thing to do and it makes no story sense and kicks us out of the episode entirely. 

I was awake half the night, I was so angry about what this show devolved into by the end of season three.

Will I watch Season Four? I don't know if there's any coming back from this. Maybe it was a terrible period of transition and everyone dropped the ball and production had to march on with whatever they had. I imagine the people making the show were given impossible jobs to do, when there's no continuity or natural story drive. I did complain about this even with Season One. When someone wants something, or people have a goal, that should drive things, not this backwards reverse engineering of a story and shoehorning characters and scenes in to achieve some non-story goal. Nothing feels organic or sensible when you do that. 

Of course you CAN start with those elements that you want to have in there, but you have to build them in sensibly, not just slap them on afterward.

My goal here is always to learn more about how to (and how not to) tell a story, so in that sense, good job, Discovery! I really am here to learn. And lower my blood pressure and get more sleep by getting all this off my chest, because wow, it sure kept me agitated and awake last night. 

At this point, I am really not enjoying the show at all, though, so we'll see whether my compulsion to finish things overcomes my aversion to terrible slapdash storytelling. 

What a disservice to a show that had so much promise and actors that can and do give us so much more.

Star Trek: Discovery, Season One

I'm just starting to catch up to the modern iterations of Star Trek. After all of those, I'll catch up on Star Wars. The last Star Trek I saw, not counting the movies, was when I tried to watch Enterprise (hated it) and before that Voyager (hated it) and before that DS9 (loved it, lived it, breathed it, obsessed about it). So I am relieved but also I suppose a little disappointed that I neither hate nor love Discovery. I like it! I like it just fine. 

And I have many things to say about it, because when I watch something, I think about it constantly, to the point where I can't sleep after watching. This is sort of a problem, actually. I mean I was up most of the night. I was confused about why it was so bright outside my windows, until I realized that was morning starting to happen. 

Not sure what the solution to that is. "Don't think about it" has never worked with me.

SPOILERS ABOUND. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Discovery! It's fascinating to me that it's very much a first person show, focused on Michael Burnham and her story. We get side stories but they are all connected to her. I don't think Star Trek has ever done that before, since even the original and the recent movies are all definitely ensemble storytelling. This has an ensemble but they're very much back seat to Michael.

She's a very interesting character to me, partly because of her constant code switching, and I don't just mean Sonequa Martin-Green's dialect code switching, which deserves whole entire academic papers written about it. She goes from a sort of standardized American voice to a much more Alabama accent and speech pattern when she's being informal or funny. It's absolutely wonderful. I wish Avery Brooks had been allowed to do that, or maybe had felt comfortable doing it. If you watch the DS9 episode "Far Beyond the Stars" he speaks much more naturally there, as opposed to his usual careful speech. 

Martin-Green deserves every accolade for her astonishing acting all throughout. She can destroy you with a glance or an unspoken word. She has so much heart and empathy and energy in every performance. What a gift!

Her character is complicated on purpose, set up with inner conflicts one after the other. I'm not sure I'm always a fan of the "conflicted" character whose energy comes from an interior clash. I like to see storytelling come from character, but is inner conflict from past actions the only way to get that? Surely not. She's torn up over her mutiny, then over losing her captain, then over everyone hating her for her mutiny and losing the captain, then over what happened with Ash Tyler, then as I'm going into season two, over what she did to Spock back in the day, which we haven't found out about yet where I am. 

Building character on regrets and pain is one way to go. I would also love to see her built on goals and conflicts over ways to achieve them. That's where we started, after all. She committed her mutiny because she knew, based on information no one else had access to, what the best course of action would be, and knew the horrific results that would follow not doing it. Her choice to mutiny was for the best possible reasons and was not made lightly. 

That makes her an excellent but dangerous character, so I hope we see more of that. A person who will do terrible things for the best possible reasons is a very interesting person to me. And she suffered terrible consequences personally. 

I liked her relationship with Tyler very much. I have to admit I figured out he was the same actor as Vok because both of them did the exact same things with their facial mannerisms. I have face blindness, so I focus on things like that probably much more than others. I don't know, maybe everyone picked it up. He had a way of flicking his eyes to the left and leaving his mouth hanging open that was obvious in both characters, even through the heavy prosthetic makeup and the contacts and so on. 

I liked Ash Tyler very much as a character. He came with layers! He was known to have survived torture in a Klingon prison, so that carried a lot of weight. Then we learned he had been treated as a sexual object by the Klingon torturer, and that he had encouraged it because it kept him alive. That is a super complicated and dark thing to have in someone's past. Of course, we learn later that the two were in a fully consensual relationship before he was transformed into a human, so it's not as ugly as it seemed, but then again, it kind of was, because he wasn't Vok anymore.

I liked how he was supposed to be triggered with a Klingon prayer to return to himself as Vok, but that he didn't, or didn't quite, because of his relationship with Michael. That's cool! Tyler is a very interesting character so I hope he's coming back onto the ship to stay. Where I am now, they gave him and L'Rell a baby and he left the Klingons and sent the baby to be raised by monks. I was sure we'd have Tyler as dad with a Klingon baby on the ship for a minute there and I was not up for it at all, though presumably Discovery has daycare? Or is this before the time of families on ships as in Next Generation?

That's a gigantic flaw in the show, one I can't actually understand. They showed pictures of the Defiant and talked about how it traveled to the mirror universe, but that happened on DS9 literal centuries after this time, so how can they know about it? They're still using flip communicators and old-fashioned phasers. That future hasn't happened yet! Was that a colossal mistake on the part of the writers or did they just shrug and say, we do what we want? I am not sure. Why refer to it at all if you have to go so far outside the realm of the possible? Are they counting on viewers not having detailed knowledge of DS9 from the 90s? That's probably reasonable, come to think of it. But we are SUCH NERDS. How can you assume at least a bunch of us weren't going, "UM!!!"

They are very much playing on our previous knowledge, to the point where Pike and Amanda and Sarek are specifically cast to resemble the actors we're familiar with from earlier appearances. Amanda is based on the actress from the recent movies, while Sarek is based on the actor from Next Generation. Regardless, that familiarity is definitely something they're counting on, so why make such a fundamental time mistake? I'm truly baffled by it.

I was also baffled by the logic (sorry) behind some of the storylines, which don't make any sense at all in retrospect, but I suppose can slide by as you're watching, since you don't have all the information yet. Take Mirror Lorca, who presumably came through from the mirror universe, found his way to a Federation starship, learned all of the command codes and behaviors and information he'd need to impersonate Real Lorca, took command of the Discovery for how long? Ages? Was enough like him to get into bed with a former lover, but not enough like him for her to think he hadn't fundamentally changed. All for the purpose of what, going back through to the mirror universe and getting aboard the Emperor's ship, which he did as a PRISONER, something he surely could have accomplished very easily any day of the week without all those shenanigans. He was a prisoner along with all of his team. He didn't need Michael or anyone else to make any of that happen. It's nonsensical in retrospect.

Maybe someone more versed in the show can explain why any of that was needed, but I don't think it holds up. I don't see any reason at all for Mirror Lorca to be part of the story except that it yanks the rug out from under Michael Burnham again.

Season one seems to be all about this, taking away her family over and over. She loses her mother figure, then she loses her shipmates and that family, then she loses her father figure as Sarek leaves and she thinks she'll never see him again, then she loses her father figure as Lorca defects and then fights against her and the Emperor in one of those really small shootouts that's supposed to stand for a whole massive army battling another, then he gets killed in front of her.

In other words, these things were set up as ways to torture Michael Burnham and don't always stand up to narrative logic at all. I hope that this changes in future seasons. This was one of the things that put me off Voyager and Enterprise so very much, this after the fact logic in storytelling. You don't tell stories this way. You don't go, I want X character to suffer Y way, so we'll do ABC. It has to be organic to the present. Even laying in past trauma as a reason or justification or cause of present action feels weak to me. A lot of television writing leans on that heavily, to its detriment. 

That's why the pilot episode felt so strong to me. Burnham made her choice because of knowledge she gained right then and there, from asking Sarek. She had knowledge no one else could get, because of her past, but the knowledge was learned in the moment. Asking was a thing she did. She tried to do things the right way at first. But then she made a choice because of her knowledge and understanding of the situation that was beyond what others had.

And yes, that was based in her childhood trauma, but that's not why she did it. I would have felt extremely cheated if she had just KNOWN that thing about the Klingons and that's why she mutinied all of a sudden. It's essential in my mind that she went and asked a question and acquired information about strategy and that's what informed her actions. That's an ACTIVE character.

Hiding that Tyler was Vok (and a Klingon...sort of) also felt a bit like a way to spring this on Burnham for maximum pain. Once we know that she had a history of family trauma from her parents being killed by Klingons within her hearing, we can figure that finding out her boyfriend was actually Klingon (sort of...) would be especially distressing. She does a great thing where she turns aside in disgust when he speaks Klingon. But before that, she is horrified not because of what he is, but what he DOES. He turns on her and tries to kill her. She is only saved because he is interrupted. 

That's a fascinating distinction. What you are and what you do are two different things. We can't help what we are. Another fascinating question: what ARE we? Star Trek plays heavily on these various species and cultures being so visibly different and culturally divergent. It's shorthand for differences among humans, of course. But it also gets into weird essentialism territory, as it always does. What you ARE is not what you DO. Star Trek always focuses on this interesting disconnect.

Burnham was human but raised on Vulcan, but her adoptive mother was human. She has very different modes, where she's stiff and emotionless, versus when she's soft and empathetic. Again, code switching, both physically and behaviorally. Anyone who has to cross cultures in their daily life does this. You speak a different way with friends than at work, or with one group versus another group. I'm sure I do it. It's a very natural thing.

To turn it around, what you have done is also not who you are. I think we've already seen Tyler get turned around from the violent attacker he was, with that explained away by the incomplete personality change, supposedly reversed by L'Rell surgically. (A lot of hand waving there. Is he Klingon or not? Surely there's a way to tell. They were so insistent. No way to tell! Obviously you can tell which person's body this is, though maybe not which person's mind.) We've seen Burnham rehabilitated after her mutiny that made everyone hate her. Even the woman with the facial scarring and cheekbone appliance stopped giving her the hate face. 

That points you to a major flaw right there. I don't know that character's name and she's been in it since the beginning. Here are the names I know: Burnham, Saru, Stametts, Tilley, Lorca, Cornwall maybe? The admiral? Georgiou, which may be misspelled. Tyler, Pike, L'Rell. I would probably recognize the various main bridge crew members, and definitely the cute doctor who died, and the other black doctor woman, and Tig Notaro. The Klingons are hopelessly unrecognizable, even before they went to some blurry CGI face for L'Rell and made her impossible to look at, not to mention nothing like her previous face. 

Saru is a tricky situation. He's another Doug Jones long tall gangly heavily masked character. It gives me a panic attack to think of that guy's days. He has bizarro hoof shoes on and big rubbery glove hands and his entire face is covered in a heavy prosthetic, plus thick contacts. I can't imagine he can see or hear anything. My back hurts just looking at him. I don't see the character, I just see Doug Jones in major discomfort for no reason. His alienness isn't even a plot point 98% of the time, so WHY. I don't think this show knows how to think creatively about alienness or otherness or any of that. 

Saru is a joke or comic relief most of the time, as is Tilley, though it's nice to see a woman who's not bone thin, and she's a great actress. I just don't like that those two are treated as slightly ridiculous. Look at the people who are different from all of us, how funny they are. Oh and it's an outside the norm man and a fatter lady, what a coincidence. I kind of hate that. But I love Tilley and I'm sort of coming to tolerate Saru. I mean, I stopped calling him the fish. That's progress. 

Tilley is a cool character because she's wicked smart, insecure, ambitious, nervous, and having a rough time fitting in. She's a nerd! My people! She didn't really have anything going on in the whole first season, though, like the whole rest of the bridge crew. Captain Pike had to ask them to say all their names, and I still don't know any of them. Someone is named Rhys? I think? 

It's not an ensemble show and that doesn't seem like it's going to change. Maybe someone wrote interesting backstories for the ops and comm and whatever people, but we certainly don't know it. If they weren't all visually different, I wouldn't be able to tell them apart. Like if they were all one race and shape they'd be interchangeable. They're essentially background actors. I'm not even sure if they're in the credits, actually. I think this is an enormous waste of an incredible storytelling engine. I mean, give two of them history, not to do the thing I complained about earlier. Give two of them chemistry! Give two of them a secret they know about a third but the third doesn't know. Anything to make them pop out of two dimensions.

I wish Michael Burnham *wanted* something so very badly and wasn't able to get it immediately because of whatever character thing of her own. That to me is a character with a drive. It's a serialized show anyway, so why not? Characters who *want* are so much more interesting to me than those who are always fighting back against their past. 

I'm not super comfortable with only building story out of characters' past and trauma and pain. "I want a thing but can't get it" is in the present. The storytelling with Stametts and his bizarre mycelium network thing was cool because he was making present choices about what he wanted in the future, even though we could see he wasn't making the best choices. 

A funny thing going into season two is that I've listened to a million podcasts where Tig Notaro was a guest, so I've heard her stories about her appearances multiple times. That made the episode I just watched very strange because I knew for instance that she had trouble remembering the nonsense science lines and so someone stood there off camera feeding her each line. I couldn't stop thinking about how upsetting that must have been, not to be able to do the thing you're trying so hard to do. I can't memorize myself so maybe I related a little too well to that, not that I'm any kind of actor. Also I had to laugh because of the cocoon joke. Listen to her episodes of the podcast Do You Need a Ride? and you'll hear the stories. I listen to that podcast constantly as my go-to, as for example when I'm hoping to come down from watching the show and know I'll be unable to sleep. It doesn't work! Oh well.

A good question to ask about any narrative is: what do you want, as a viewer/reader? 

Right now I want Michael Burnham to succeed and be happy. I want Tilley to be okay and grow and develop. I want Stametts to get that cute doctor back from death, but I don't think that's going to happen. Is it? I want Tyler to come back from the Klingons and join the crew again as a regular. Don't join section whatever! They're unethical! I want the Klingons to shut up and go away, as they are incredibly boring, standing around smoky halls and fires and shouting exposition at each other. Oh my lord in heaven, the Klingons are just unbearably terrible in this show. If I could figure out how to fast forward on AppleTV, I would do it, because they're excruciating. I don't care about L'Rell and want her to go away, too. I want the rest of the bridge crew at least to get personalities and stories and lives, so we learn their names, maybe even what job they do, sheesh. A whole season already! And I could do with Saru being less of an arch jokey uptight character and more of a full personality, if we have to keep him, which I guess we do. 

Look at Saru as an example of what's not great. He has no arc at all. He doesn't want anything. He's an obstacle or an annoyance. He's only persnickety and fussy. And this is one of the top main characters, someone with absolutely nothing going on, a walking joke. 

But many other things are terrific and Michael Burnham herself is amazing, though I still want to know why her name is Michael. Nobody ever explained it. Anyway the actress herself is just brilliant and makes the whole thing work. At least, I'll keep watching for her, and because I have to know how things work out for her character. Get that tall cute sort of Klingon confused boyfriend back! You guys had excellent chemistry! Mainly because of all the undercurrents pushing against each other, something I wish the show would have EVERYWHERE, because that's amazing storytelling in the here and now.

Someone recently released from a terrible ordeal and dealing with active PTSD is a great example of here and now storytelling because it's actually happening to them here and now. It's not some nebulous event from the distant past that's still causing pain, it's a constantly daily experience. That right there is the difference between making a character dwell on past trauma versus writing someone who is in a situation here in the present time. That is how you do this thing. 

But Michael Burnham is a great example of a character who is very likable because she's generous and kind to her goofy cadet roommate (after an initial bump) and befriends Saru even though he's super annoying and is loyal and determined to do a great job for her captains and tries her hardest to do the right thing, even at great personal cost. That's a terrific character.

Noel Streatfeild: Thursday's Child

This was one of my very favorite books growing up. I'm rereading comfort food books because I don't sleep when I read upsetting books, whee! And for your own writing it's essential to read things you love and think about what makes them so important to you.

The heroine, Margaret Thursday, is an orphan who lives with the maid who raised her, but this year the money to support her did not show up, so her beloved Hannah and the vicar can't afford to keep her and have to send her away. 

That's a terrific story beginning right there. Margaret is very proud of the fact that she was left on the church steps as a baby with three of everything of the very best quality, so that even though she has the most precarious existence and no family, she has an inner pride and strength that gets her through everything.

It's fascinating to me that this is the very opposite of the Harry Potter books. Harry is abused and neglected in a cruel wealthy household. Margaret is loved and cared for in a kind poor household. And when Harry gets sent away at the same age as Margaret, he discovers not just wealth but a proud heritage. Margaret never finds out who her family is and gets sent to a horribly abusive orphanage where she and the others are starved and terrorized.

Even en route to the orphanage, though, Margaret makes friends with three other orphans traveling there too, Lavinia, Peter, and Horatio Beresford. Lavinia is going into service as a maid and asks Margaret to take care of the boys, as Horatio is little and Peter quite dreamy.

I definitely prefer this out of the frying pan, into the fire type of narrative. It's a constant race between Margaret and the forces that are making her life difficult. She's on the run the whole time.

The evil Matron immediately picks out Margaret as someone whose spirit isn't broken yet and decides to make an example of her, so she's locked in cupboards and sent to bed without supper and so on. Even their first evening there, the Matron opens the basket of clothes Hannah lovingly sewed and packed for Margaret and mocks them, causing Margaret to talk back and tell her that same story: that she was left with three of everything of the very best quality and money was left for her each year.

It's very funny to track this story throughout the novel as its retold, since Margaret changes the details and improves it each time. But that's part of what makes her such an excellent character. She insists that she has value, even while everyone is trying to stomp her into the mud.

The orphanage is outrageously awful, but she's managing, making friends and telling stories to everyone while on potato peeling punishment, until Peter "borrows" some expensive books and Margaret decides the police will be after him. She makes plans for a great escape, even dictating the note for Peter to leave for their teacher. 

But she refuses to leave without the clothes Hannah made her--and she needs her original street clothes, since the orphans wear absurd uniforms. There is a harrowing sequence where Margaret has to sneak out of her bed at night and make her way to the top of the building, to the room where Matron has stored all the orphans' clothing so she can sell it. (There is really no end to how believably awful Matron is. She even eats a huge steak after overseeing the orphans' skimpy meal.) This sequence shows great bravery, but it's also terrifying, as we know, even if Margaret doesn't, that climbing out a window onto a ladder at night in a giant nightgown is incredibly dangerous. The narrator even points out how easily she could have been killed, presumably so no young readers take this escape as life advice.

I adore the entire escape, as it's full of perfectly minimal connections and specifics. For example, Margaret and the boys have met the stable boy Jem when he drove them to visit Lavinia, and Jem jokingly told Margaret how to find his room in the stable if they ever needed to run away from the orphanage. She does exactly that, though. Jem takes them to his parents, who run a canal boat, and the next stage of the adventure is on.

Each stage requires quick thinking, physical challenges, determination, and that reliance on her inner sense of self-worth. I love how every character takes on all sorts of different jobs, even the hardest, dirtiest jobs, with no sense of fastidiousness, even though they weren't raised to do them. You wouldn't find Harry Potter scrubbing floors or leading a canal boat horse through a week of rain. 

Something that has always bothered me about Harry Potter is his utter laziness and lack of application, which somehow doesn't keep him from getting everything he wants. Terrible student, but passes all his classes. He's treated like a star without having done anything. That part isn't his fault, but it gives him this absurd and unconsidered privilege that is extremely distasteful to me. 

That's in part what this book is about. I would much rather see Margaret Thursday opening canal locks and Lavinia doing the hard work of a scullery maid and even six year old Horatio leading the canal horse, walking miles each day. At one point Lavinia's boss, Lady Corkberry (what a great name!) tries to get Lavinia to stay with them as a guest, since they've discovered that Lavinia and the boys are the grandchildren of an earl, but Lavinia refuses and laughs and says she couldn't do that since everyone knows her as the scullery maid.

There's a running theme about this and even overt references to the works of Frances Hodgson Burnett, who wrote multiple books in which children work hard and then discover they're from wealthy and privileged backgrounds. It's so much a narrative expectation that it's a surprise when Margaret turns down the Beresford siblings' grandfather's invitation to come live with all of them in his castle in Ireland. She's found something she's great at, acting, and intends to make her own name for herself. 

That's some independence and strength of character I'm not sure I'd have. Certainly Harry Potter wouldn't. He never works for anything up until the last book in the series. Maybe it's because I'm a teacher, but the way that kid never does his school work and cheats and so on drives me crazy. 

In a narrative as in real life, we want to feel like people deserve what they get and get what they deserve. It seems the Harry Potter stories posit that because Harry has had a rough time of it with the Dursleys, he deserves to have things come easy after that. But narratively speaking, that doesn't work. We don't like people or want good things for them because they've had a hard time. We like them and want good things for them because they are fighting for that goal themselves, even if it's impossible for them to achieve it. 

This is getting dangerously close to the nightmarish prosperity gospel nonsense, but that's not what I mean. Look at Margaret, Peter, and Horatio at the end of this book, before Lavinia and the grandfather ex machina show up, planning to have their own little house together. They don't realize how impossible it is that three children will earn enough money to survive, let alone rent or buy a little house. It's an impractical fantasy, but they're too young to understand that. They literally can't do it. But they've worked so hard on the canal boat and in the theater that we're hoping for good things for them anyway. 

I'm getting very good insight into some characters I'm writing. Children who have to fend for themselves in life are put into impossible situations, so the choices they make are never going to be great ones. Say they're not properly fed. Do they steal food? Do they go to neighbors and try to eat there? Do they eat windfall apples? Do they try to cadge food from friends at school lunches? There is no good solution here because children are supposed to be fed by their family. If they aren't, that's not the child's fault, but it ends up being the child's problem to solve, with none of the resources or experience necessary to solve it. So on top of neglect and suffering, there is the weight of breaking rules and crossing lines, social or legal. Then those children carry the extra weight of guilt and consequences from crossing those lines. Children always blame themselves for what happens to them. 

Except Margaret Thursday! Such a great heroine. I even like that her flair for the dramatic is what makes her get the children to run away from the orphanage, since it's unlikely the police would be called over a couple of missing books that could easily be returned. 

I'm also fascinated by the downfall of the villain, the Matron, because she gets shamed by the villagers and deposed by the committee and then just sort of disappears. It's a lot like Marla in Dig. We don't see a great comeuppance for either one, not like we often see in Joan Aiken's excellent books, which feature some truly dire consequences for terrible villains, especially those who torment and neglect children.

I wrote five books in a row with terrible, abusive, neglectful parents. In the first one, the parent dies to set the child free. In the second, she gets deposed and ousted from the clinical and antiseptic family McMansion and both parent and child get set free. In the last three, a series, the parents and child get set free when the home is destroyed, but then the child works very hard and buys back the land, saving it from development, and there's an amazing rapprochement between them with ultimate understanding, at least from the child's side.

I think we're getting somewhere. 

There's a sequel to this novel, but I seem to remember it's terrible. Maybe I'll read it again and see.

A.S. King: Dig

After I read this yesterday, I also read Still Life With Tornado, one of the most upsetting books for someone with a history of a severely dysfunctional family. Without getting into it too much, Still Life echoed a whole lot of bad things about my past.

Dig is quintessential A.S. King in that it features a cast of characters who are terribly stuck in their lives. Other than The Freak, who is the least stuck person on the planet, we meet five characters, all teens, who are in terrible situations. Jake is being abused by his older brother and made to join in actual felonies, not to mention white supremacy nonsense and recruitment. Loretta is living in a trailer with a violent and sexually abusive father and her abused mother. The Shoveler is starting his eighteenth new school (some atrocious number like that) and has decided that shoveling snow solves his problems, though carrying a shovel everywhere with him certainly complicates his social life. Malcolm's father is dying but he's being pushed off on his grandparents and not allowed to be there with him. Katie works fast food and sells drugs at the drivethrough window, and comes to realize how unfair she's being to her black best friend when her own mother is a vicious racist and a terrible person a lot of other ways. 

That's a huge simplification. Each one of those characters is so full and complex and conflicted that I can't begin to sum up everything going on in their lives. This is something King does extremely well. Even her awful characters--and there are a bunch--are complicated and you can see how they ended up where they are. They've nearly always boxed themselves into a corner and can't see a way out. Stuck, again, just like the sympathetic main characters.

I'm so curious why one stuck person is sympathetic when another one isn't. But it seems to come down to whether they have empathy for others and care for others.

By far the least sympathetic of the major characters is Marla, the grandmother (we find out eventually) of all five kids. If you've counted, you know there are six, but Jake isn't part of the family. I'm not exactly sure why Jake is in this story, except that (I'm just going to spoil everything, so buckle up) he and his brother kidnapped, raped, and murdered the girl we know as The Freak. The Freak can jump from place to place around the world, something that seems like magical realism at first, but then we discover she's actually dead. The Freak, the Shoveler (aka David), Katie, Malcolm, and Loretta are all cousins, children of Marla and Gottfried's five estranged children. 

One scene that showed just how different these kids are, and explains why we like them so much more than any of the adults, is that they were set to do an Easter egg hunt, but instead of competing to see who could find more or could find them faster, they worked together, to the outrage of their grandparents, who wanted them to work against each other. That says it all, really. 

Marla is horrible to Gottfried and all of her children. Marla is a real piece of work, an absolute villain disguised as a homey grandma who just wants to make a good Easter dinner for her family. What makes someone with this kind of seemingly altruistic goal into a monster? She only cares about herself. She doesn't care about any of her kids, even though she hasn't seen or talked to several of them in years. She is constantly cruel and dismissive to Gottfried.

Neither Gottfried nor Marla learn the Shoveler's name. Granted, it can be embarrassing when you miss someone's name early on and don't want to ask it, but the Shoveler has been coming to their house for months and they never get past their own embarrassment to be courteous to him by using his name. They don't find it out until Easter, the same day he finds out they're his grandparents.

Classic A.S. King character moves that get you good and stuck: don't talk about things, don't say things, don't address the elephant in the room no matter what. Cut people off, don't mend bridges, don't reach out. 

I really feel like these books are blueprints for how to have a wonderful or a terrible life.

Marla cut off one of her daughters when she got pregnant in high school, just kicked her out and never spoke to her again. That's the act of someone who cares more about her own pride and shame than her daughter's actual life, not to mention her grandchild's life. 

She denies that her son who is dying of cancer is actually dying of cancer. 

She refuses to help her daughter who is stuck in a trailer with an abusive husband, on the grounds her daughter made bad choices and should have to live with them.

All of the cruel, spiteful, judgmental, prideful, hateful choices that Marla makes should come back and bite her at the end of the story, but no, she just sort of fades away, because once the kids have found each other and have gone off to locate The Freak's body, Marla disappears from the narrative. The last thing she does is say something to Gottfried that he doesn't even hear, because he's stopped listening to her. 

A lot of people let go of others in this story. The Shoveler made friends with a neighbor who lent him the original shovel, spent a lot of time with him, treated him like a de facto dad, but then discovers a white supremacist tattoo on the man's shoulder and essentially silently breaks up with him. Katie has to let her best friend, Ian, go, because she realizes she's been using him in a way to get back at her racist mom, and realizes just how awful it must be for Ian to be friends with someone whose mom thinks so little of him. Malcolm has to let go of his impractical plan of running away to Jamaica and being with a girl he met on the beach there, when he realizes how imperialist and exploitative he's being.

There's a constant theme running through the book of racism and how we have to deal with it in complicated real world ways. Really there's about one eighth too much plot and that's mostly the racism material, but also the flea circus. (Don't ask.) It's very interesting to see the ways it plays out for Katie and Jake, and the Shoveler breaking up with his pseudo-dad is actually an extremely cool plot line, but it's awkwardly juxtaposed with all of the dysfunctional family storylines. 

It's about family not treating each other as family, so how does the racism theme work with that? Should we read it as: race is family? No, that doesn't work either. It doesn't all quite fit together. It's a bit like five eighths of one book and four eighths of another book pressed together.

I loved that I had forgotten that The Freak was dead the whole time. You give me magical realism, I figure people are magical and can do magical things. We don't actually know right up until nearly the end that the kids are all connected by family and that terrible crime. We don't know that The Freak was their cousin, even though I can't imagine how anyone would not know that, if her name was in the news, right? Even these awful dysfunctional families like Katie's would tell her that that was her cousin, wouldn't they? Her father would have had the same last name as Marla and Gottfried, the same as Malcolm. And wouldn't the girls know their mothers' maiden names, assuming they changed them at all, which the Shoveler's mother would not, as she was never married? 

I don't like a "buy" like that, when it unravels the whole plot, especially when it's so easy just to make her dad a mom and avoid the whole question of last names.

This book completely wrecks me every time I read it. These kids are so vulnerable and so dependent, but blamed for everything that happens. 

My niece a few weeks ago told me that her dad was furious that she had marked up a clipboard with a box cutter doing an art project. I said: "You're more important than any clipboard." Doesn't that sound obvious? It was never true in our family and it's not obvious in any of these families either. These kids are treated like absolutely everything is more important than they are. Money, work, school, status, everything. It's heartbreaking. 

I feel like A.S. King's collected works should be required reading for all teens, but also for anyone who's stuck. Any time I reread them, I think again: Say the thing. Take the steps. Do the next thing. You don't have to stay stuck. You have the tools to dig out of your weird mind prison and escape. 

It always reminds me of a therapist friend who said, in response to a conversation we were having about how people keep everything bottled up: You're going to have consequences either way. You're already suffering the consequences of not saying the thing. Why not try the consequences of saying the thing? Say the thing!

It's bigger than you know (More on Naomi Novik: Uprooted)

I recently reread Naomi Novik's Uprooted for maybe the tenth time. I was struck again by something brilliant she does that I've rarely seen elsewhere, though I think it happens in an Alan Dean Foster novel called Glory Road. I need to reread that one. And there's something related in A Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, which I also need to reread. It happens in one of my favorite movies (despite the disempowered heroine), Jupiter Ascending.

I'll come back and write more about this when I've reread those. 

What Novik does is start out with a character with an extremely limited view of the world she inhabits, then move that character into a larger and more complicated world, over and over and over, almost every single chapter. 

Agnieszka starts out as a village girl who gets yanked unwillingly into the Dragon's tower to serve him as a cook and cleaner, though also she has the power of magic, though she doesn't know that. Just going to this new place enlarges her world in ways she could not have foreseen or understood ahead of time.

That keeps happening. I can't stress enough how little she grasps about the world she's in. She knows the Wood is scary and dangerous, yes, but she doesn't understand that there's a malevolent intelligence behind it. She knows the Dragon takes a girl from their valley every ten years, but doesn't understand that there's something special about their valley and the girls' connection to it fades after that time, so he pays them well and lets them go and replaces them with a new, untrained, and extremely annoying clueless girl. 

Agnieszka takes steps for humanitarian reasons that end up drawing the attention of larger political forces within the kingdom. Again, she has not the slightest clue that such things exist. She is vulnerable to being manipulated by everyone she meets because she doesn't (and can't) know about the power struggles or the rivalries or any of it.

And every time she gets her feet on the ground and starts to feel a little secure about things, the world expands again and suddenly it's all strange and scary and unfamiliar again. 

It's like Novik has bottled that baffling and alarming expanding world feeling of adolescence and applies it over and over.  

One possibly less enjoyable effect is that Agnieszka is always a clueless rube no matter how much she learns. I found it implausible that she would not recognize that Lady whoever it was in the big city, who pretended to be her friend, was actually being really mean and making fun of her. That's not a country/city thing. That's a human nature thing. But most authors are impossibly bad at writing inexperience (or being from the sticks) and nearly always conflate it with stupidity this way. 

The brilliant thing here is that since Agnieszka doesn't know the ins and outs of any of these new worlds she enters, she can do things that she doesn't know are impossible. She has all sorts of insights and abilities that the much more experienced people are unable to access. That's a wonderful side of this constantly expanding world phenomenon.

In my experience, people navigate new worlds by using the rules they already know. Agnieszka does this somewhat, but more often she just follows her instincts and figures things out, or does things because she simply doesn't know that she can't, which gives her an amazing ability to achieve the impossible. 

I really liked the way she had no idea that there was an intelligence behind the Wood. She treated it like a natural phenomenon and was brought up short by learning there was a mind behind it, that this mind would do things like let someone be freed because then it could use them as a channel or puppet in areas it could not otherwise reach. That's terrifying. Imagine discovering that a natural force you're dealing with, the wind or the ocean, is actually operating with intelligence. 

There's a whole underlying metaphor throughout the novel that troubles me because of this constant reiteration of innocence. That's "corruption." I wished constantly that the novel had used a different metaphor or image for this. And ultimately it's just something like bitterness or hatred that lies behind the corruption anyway. I get it, but corruption carries such deliberately venial associations. It's politicians cheating the system out of greed. In the novel, it's more like some kind of grotesque moldy rot or something. 

I was never quite comfortable with "corruption" as the metaphor because it implies a state of purity and innocence that then is marred and defiled by what, experience? Evil? So is Agnieszka corrupted as she learns more and more about the world , as she does every chapter? Is she corrupted when she and the Dragon get into a sexual relationship? The weirdly judgmental or even Biblical view of corruption as the opposite of innocence means that the city people should be the most corrupted, but they're not. It carries echoes of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. No coming back from that. It's a deeply flawed metaphor. That's specifically why I don't like it. 

However, I don't really have a better idea. Supposing hate causes this vile thick green evil to grow in you, what would we call that? But it has to come from the source, from contact with an infected source. It's definitely MUCH more like an infection than anything else. We're more in the realm of The Thing or some other more moralistic zombie type horror story, where you only get infected when you make mistakes, so you deserve it. But since there's a moral element to this "corruption" as well as a contagious element, it feels like it teeters on the edge of saying innocence is good and knowledge is evil, even though obviously it never quite goes there. Corruption is such a fraught word to choose.

Anyway, I deeply admire the thing Novik does where the world expands and expands and expands again, becomes more complex and nuanced and vast with each passing chapter. It's absolutely brilliant.