Reading/Watching Log #110

That felt like an uncommonly long January; usually they’re over and done with before you can blink.

I decided to continue in my theme of last month’s viewing, which involved picking things out of all the categories I selected in the previous year: eighties fairy tales, historical epics and Shakespeare productions, mainly. I also managed a few graphic novels from the library (I haven’t read any in a while) and more of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines series, which is just as good as I remember it.

More Babysitters Club books, more Apple paperbacks, another Robin Hood movie, and I finally get started on Hustle, which I’ve been meaning to watch since... well, back when it first aired in 2004.

I’m looking forward to February, as I’ve decided to read something from each of my favourite authors: Frances Hardinge, Patricia McKillip, Philip Reeve, Garth Nix, Susanna Clarke and Meredith Anne Pierce – it’s my birthday month, so I may as well enjoy it. I’ve also finally found the most recent Musketeers film on DVD! After so many attempts to find a subtitled copy on-line, it turns out we had one at the library the whole time.

Titanic in 90 Minutes (Botanic Gardens)

I grabbed a packet of chips and a blanket and met my ex-work colleague in the Botanical Gardens for this: a comedy show that compressed the entirety of James Cameron’s Titanic into ninety minutes. It was equal parts funny and rather stupid, with all the creative shortcuts, lowbrow humour, karaoke, and meaningless pop-culture references passing as jokes that you can imagine. Three actors and a pianist took on the challenge, and naturally there was a lot of fourth wall breaking and audience participation, including Titanic bingo (with boxes such as “cast member steals food from audience”), volunteers being asked to compete in a “draw Rose naked” competition, and an ongoing quiz across the course of the show (my team won!)

The iceberg ends up being a lettuce (as in, an iceberg lettuce) that gets thrown at the stage, and the whole thing ended with the cast attempting to prove the most contentious part of the entire film: that both Rose AND Jack could have fit on that door. Their attempt to wring some pathos towards the end of the show, in which they reminded us that people did in fact die on the Titanic, didn’t really work given the otherwise farcical tone, but because it was free, you really can’t complain.

Twelfth Night (National Theatre)

You know what I thought would be fun? If I watched Twelfth Night on the Twelfth Night. Our ancestors knew how to go about it: Christmas festivities started on the 25th of December and then continued for twelve days and nights afterwards. That’s why the song is called “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” None of this Boxing Day, then weird liminal time, then New Years Eve celebration nonsense. Just twelve solid days of Christmas.

I studied this play in high school, so I have a certain fondness for it. This production leans into a Jazz Age/Art Deco/Bohemian sort of vibe, in which various characters race around on bicycles and most of the action takes place in either Orsino or Olivia’s opulent mansions. Musicians are forever lounging about the partitions of the revolving stage, Orsino celebrates his fortieth birthday in one scene, and there’s a chill, laidback atmosphere to it all.

As you might expect, there are some modern tweaks: twins Viola and Sebastian are Black, the characters Malvolio, Feste and Fabian have been gender-swapped into Malvolia, Festa and Fabia, and the homoeroticism between Antonio and Sebastian is no longer subtext (at least on Antonio’s part).

In fact, with the portrayal of Malvolia as a woman, this play is now filled with unrequited gays. Although Twelfth Night is very much an ensemble piece, there’s no getting around the fact that this time around, Tamzin Grieg’s Malvolia steals the show. She’s a strict, man-hating lesbian housekeeper with a severe fringe and dour expression, and she manages to get huge laughs from the audience with mere gestures. She’s that good.

It's a rare modern adaptation that doesn’t milk the Malvolio subplot for some degree of pathos, and I’ve always felt rather sorry for the guy, whose worst crime is being too uptight (heck, I’m totally on his side when he scolds Toby and his cohorts for waking the entire house in the middle of the night with their drunken merrymaking).

Of course, back in Shakespeare’s day, his worst crime was the upstart presumption that a lowly steward could become a lord by marrying his mistress, and knowing that won’t translate well to a modern audience, this production has Malvolia deliberately get a little physically abusive toward Maria just to give viewers a reason to get behind her subsequent humiliation. 

In a nice touch, the play has Malvolia break the fourth wall in order to read the letter “from Olivia” directly to the audience, which makes them culpable for not warning her, as well as for laughing at the subterfuge that follows. At the end of the show, her deadly serious “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of thee,” is therefore addressed directly to the audience as well as the players, and you could almost feel them squirm at their participation in her mortification.

Oliver Chris makes Orsino a good-natured doofus, while Tim McMullan is Sir Toby, played here as an aging rockstar and that deadbeat uncle we all have who always outstays his invitation. Olivia is Phoebe Fox, who proved she had comedy chops in The Great, and manages to get plenty of laughs out of her none-too-subtle interest in Cesario. She’s not afraid to be a bit foolish about Olivia’s response to “the youth” in her midst, which is a very different take compared to the more dignified Helena Bonham Carter in the 1996 movie. Finally, Tamra Lawrance and Daniel Ezra as the twins are pretty much what they’re supposed to be: nice-natured people in way over their heads.

There are some interesting creative decisions: I like that Olivia (once the truth comes out) doesn’t warm to Sebastian straight away, which is certainly more realistic than the whole “shrugs and goes with it,” routine in the play, and that Orsino hilariously addresses Sebastian rather than Viola in their final scene together, having gotten them mixed up again. It’s a great gag.

Still, nothing can be done with the mood whiplash between Malvolia stalking off in humiliation, and Orsino trying to get the party started directly afterwards. Likewise, the gender swap of Fabian is the only update that strikes me as a bit unnecessary, even though she still gets the best line in the piece: “If this were play’d upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction!”

Romeo and Juliet (Globe Theatre)

This is by far Shakespeare’s most famous play, and so the challenge is to try and derive something new and fresh from it. Or, as in this case, you can just go fully traditional (aside from the colourblind casting) with Elizabethan costumes, set design and staging. They did the same with A Midsummer Night’s Dream, so I wonder if this is just par for the course with the Globe Theatre – trying to make it as period-accurate as possible might be considered the whole point of the project.

I have to say it’s not my favourite play, simply because I always have trouble with stories that utilize Love at First Sight – even in this case, which is not only the most famous example of the trope in all of human history, but subtextually made fun of in the play itself if you look at it the right way. It’s not a tragedy because two young people die for love, but because two young people throw their lives away on what they THINK is love.

Is the moral to teach teenagers to obey their parents? To establish the importance of peace when the price for warmongering becomes too high? To punish those that tried to inflict control over love? You can get a lot of mileage out of this play when it comes to trying to discern its meaning and purpose. As always, it’s up to the viewer to decide, and it’ll probably come down to how much of a romantic they are.

The gorgeous Adetomiwa Edun (Elyan from Merlin) is Romeo, who puts in a very physical performance of relentless, restless energy. He prowls up and down the stage, unable to keep still, and though he captures the expected bluster and bravado of the character, Edun also gives him sincerity. This is a Romeo who truly loves Juliet (or at least truly thinks he does) not just the idea of love itself, and demonstrates it with every move he makes. I wasn’t surprised to see sweat on Edun’s face in all the closeups.

Juliet is played by Ellie Kendrick (Meera from Game of Thrones, though for the longest time I assumed she was a younger Gemma Whelan, who does in fact have a close resemblance to her). This character is often portrayed as all sweetness and light, which is fair enough given she’s only fourteen and has to sell the purity of first love – but I’ve always wanted to see a Juliet with some teeth.

Not in the bratty sense (though that would still be a valid interpretation – in fact, it would be fun to see both Romeo and Juliet played as completely self-absorbed ninnies running entirely on teenage hormones) but with a steely conviction. After all, whether this romance would have been a life-long love affair or an infatuation that would have run its course in a couple of weeks had the couple lived is up for debate, but the fact remains that Juliet feels something so strongly that she follows it into death.

As it happens, Kendrick does sell this conviction, to the point where she emerges as the true protagonist of the play in its second act. She’s the one that sends her nurse out for intel, agrees to Father Lawrence’s plan, bravely takes the potion to mimic death, and dies last of all (and stabs herself, at that! Romeo only takes poison; she takes the hard way out). It might be called Romeo and Juliet, but the final line of the whole show is: “For never was a story of more woe, than this of Juliet and HER Romeo.” In this final account of what has just unfolded, he is the one possessed by her.

Other familiar faces are Jack Farthing (George Warleggan from Poldark) and Rawiri Paratene as Father Lawrence. My jaw dropped when the latter appeared: this is a well-known kiwi actor who was in a children’s educational show I watched as an under-five year old. I’d recognize his voice anywhere, and I had no idea he was in this!

I didn’t really like their Mercutio – he was a bit of a creep this time around; moody and threatening, and his iconic line (“a plague on both your households”) is thrown out too casually. Come on, a line like that is meant to be savoured! In saying that, a lot of the death scenes in this production are quite anticlimactic – Juliet’s in particular is a brisk affair that happens in a matter of seconds as she tries to beat the approach of the men she can hear entering the tomb.

On the other end of the scale, their Paris is a total nitwit, and I can understand why so many adaptations remove him from the final act (Baz Luhrmann completely does away with the character by this point, so we don’t get to see Leonardo Decaprio kill Paul Rudd at the tomb).

Still, his haplessness makes his death rather pitiful, and I did feel sorry for him when he asks: “lay me with Juliet” as he dies. His last words, and no one is going to heed them.

I can’t say this production gave me an added appreciation for the play, as I’ve never really taken to it as I have Shakespeare’s other works (that’s just my cynical nature though). Too much of the dialogue starts with variations of “this is how I feel,” or “this is what has just happened,” and at the end of it all we get Father Lawrence delivering a giant exposition dump on everything we’ve just seen happen.

And I’ve never understood why everyone freaks out so badly over Romeo’s exile. I mean, wouldn’t the young couple have had to leave the city anyway once their families discovered what they’d done? Putting aside Lawrence’s expectation that their marriage would have forged peace between the feuding lords, I’m pretty sure Montague and Capulet would have responded by disowning their children. So why didn’t Juliet just go with Romeo after Tybalt’s death? Wasn’t that the plan anyway?

I can appreciate that the whole thing doesn’t waste time with Shakespeare’s usual comedic subplots/characters; rather just getting straight down to the business of its two title characters, but there’s not even a rudimentary attempt made at why these two fall in love with each other. They just do because they have to: that’s the story. Hey, maybe that’s the point.

In regards to this particular production, the sword-fighting wasn’t filmed particularly well (please, let us see what’s going on – those actors must have practised for ages!) but I liked the way the upper and lower levels of the stage were repurposed from the balcony in Act Two to the underground tomb in Act Three. Love and death exist together on the stage, built into the fundamental construction of this world, from the play’s start to its finish.  

A couple of final points: I can see why Rosaline inspires so many other stories (off the top of my head: Still Star-Crossed by Melina Taub, Romeo’s Ex by Lisa Fiedler and Fair Rosaline by Natasha Solomons, not to mention the Shonda Rimes Still Star-Crossed television show and 2022’s Rosaline movie) as she is a tantalizing ghost throughout this play: oft-mentioned but never seen.

I also never realized until watching this version of the play that Juliet has a couple of psychic visions and premonitions of doom across the course of the story. Not that they helped her, of course. The whole point is that the lovers die, and so the lingering question of whether their love could have lasted for longer than a few days remains a hypothetical. They perished when their love was at its height, and so it will live forever.

The Bounty Hunter and the Tea Brewer by Faith Erin Hicks, Peter Wartman and Adele Matera

The latest in the one-shot graphic novels belonging to the Avatar: The Last Airbender franchise, this one focuses on a reunion between everyone’s favourite Uncle Iroh and June, the bounty hunter who appeared in a couple of the show’s most memorable episodes.

Set post-show, Iroh is enjoying his new lease on life as the proprietor of a teashop in Ba Sing Sa, and only occasionally getting bothered by protestors who don’t like the fact a former Fire Nation general is living among them (they kinda have a point – he DID lay siege to the city for several years).

Then one night, as he’s locking up, he’s taken captive by a familiar face: June and her shirshu Nyla. She’s fallen upon hard times, as the reestablishment of peace and order means that there’s little use for bounty hunters and mercenaries. Still, the Wuyi Cartel has promised to pay her a fortune for the capture of the legendary Dragon of the West.

Iroh decides to go along with her, partly out of pity and partly because he’s curious as to who exactly is paying such a large sum of money for his capture. Along the way they get to know each other a little more, and if you ever took umbridge at the “dirty old man” gags that took place between them on the show, then rest assured that he apologizes to her here. (To be frank, the interactions between them weren’t that bad, but were still an odd note to strike in a show that was otherwise pretty on-the-ball when it came to respecting women).

You’ll be unsurprised to learn that by the time June has returned to her employers, she’s having second thoughts about what she’s doing, and so – like Iroh – finds a new path when it comes to what she truly wants out of life. We even get a quick glimpse of her childhood which is pretty interesting; ditto some scenes of Iroh’s near-capture of Ba Sing Sa during the Hundred Years War.

These graphic novels were originally designed to bridge the narrative gap between the end of the show and the beginning of The Legend of Korra, but they’ve been releasing these singular character-centric books for a while now. I’m not entirely sure why Nickelodeon seems to have dropped the ongoing saga in favour of one-shots, though I suspect it has something to do with the upcoming resurgence of animated projects (which purport to be about the Gaang as young adults).

There’s no risk of continuity errors or repetitiveness if they leave some of that time period for creators Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko to fill with whatever they’ve got planned for the future of Avatar.

The Dragon Prince: Dreamer’s Nightmare by Nicole Andelfinger and Felia Hanakata

I was halfway through the seventh and final season of The Dragon Prince when I read this prequel story, which ends up having no bearing on the show itself (at least, I don’t think so. As of this writing I still have three episodes left to go).

This is a little interesting since the previous tie-in graphic novels served either as midquels between seasons, or to introduce characters and places that would eventually turn up on the show. This is just a prequel, detailing an adventure experienced by half-brothers Callum and Ezran before the inception of the show itself (so their mother is dead, but King Harrow is still alive). While accompanying their father/stepfather on a diplomatic visit to an outlying village, the boys learn that a strange and sudden series of storms in the area are leaving behind an equally strange sleeping sickness. Random people have fallen unconscious and can’t be woken up.

Sensing the danger, King Harrow orders the return of his sons to the castle, only for their envoy to be hit by the storm/sleeping sickness on the way. As such, Callum and Ezran take it upon themselves to try and solve the mystery, drawing upon Callum’s booksmarts and Ezran’s ability to communicate with animals.

The mystery itself is fine, though a little random. There are some animal sidekicks that make themselves known to Ezran across the course of the story, but how and why they’re connected to the storm remains unexplained. There’s even less explanation given as to what the source of the storms actually is or how it fits into the greater mythos of Xadia, and I seriously doubt the show itself is going to shed any light on the subject.

Both Amaya and Gren feature here, and because it’s set so early on in the franchise’s chronology, there’s a deep animosity held by ordinary people towards the elves. Both are neat touches. It’s also nice to see King Harrow again, given he was killed so early on in the show. The illustrations are fine, and on the whole it’s a decent showcase for Callum and Ezran’s brotherly bond.

Dulcinea in the Forbidden Forest by Ole Könnecke

A quirky original fairy tale that reminded me a little of The Skull by Jon Klassen, this tells the tale of a young girl called Dulcinea who lives with her father on a farm. They’re happy enough, though her father warns her never to venture into the nearby forest, for there lives a wicked witch in a foreboding castle.

But on the day of her birthday, father and daughter realize they forgot to purchase Dulcinea’s favourite treat at the market: blueberries. Against his own rule, her father goes into the forest to search for some, and is promptly turned into a tree by the witch.

Now it’s up to Dulcinea (and the goose that follows her around everywhere) to find a way to rescue him. It’s a fun, rather silly little book that nevertheless requires our heroine to take matters into her own hands, relying on both courage and quick-wits to rescue her father. I’ve no idea if her name is derived from the Don Quixote character of the same name or if Könnecke just liked the sound of it, but she certainly subverts that character’s passive, acted-upon nature.

The illustrations aren’t exactly my style; they’re quite blocky and minimalist, and are rendered solely in black with a few shades of orange, but the characters are still very expressive (the look on the face of a local woodcutter after Dulcinea’s father is transformed back into a human is fairly priceless). The book itself is beautifully put together, with a hard cover and stitched binding, and according to the afterword, the publishers at Gecko House deliberately go in search of “unsameness.” This certainly qualifies.

The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde, adapted by Harry Woodgate

Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” is one of my favourite depressing fairy tales, and so I was intrigued at the thought of a retelling, even though I usually blanche at such things. I’ve seen my fair share of awful modernizations of stories attempting to “fix” things that aren’t broken.

For those not in the know, the tale is about the statue of a young prince that stands in the town square of a large city. He’s covered in gold leaf, with sapphire eyes and a ruby in his sword hilt. One day he’s joined by a swallow who is about to fly south for the winter. The prince asks the bird to delay his journey in order to deliver his precious stones and flakes of gold leaf to impoverished people living throughout the city. The swallow reluctantly complies with these requests, though by doing so loses the window of opportunity to reach the warmer climes, and so eventually dies at the foot of the statue.

At the end of the story, the Happy Prince has lost his outwardly magnificent appearance, and is torn down by the townsfolk to make room for a statue of the mayor.

Yet it has a somewhat uplifting ending (or at least, as uplifting as you get from a fairy tale written by a persecuted gay man living 1888, when this was originally published). God Himself sends one of his angels down to the city to bring back whatever he deems most precious – the angel dutifully returns with the body of the swallow and the leaden heart of the Happy Prince.

Because I read this story so young, it got its hooks into me at a very early age. As an adult, it never fails to get me a little choked up. Woodgate’s take on the material is to move it into the modern day, and to turn the swallow into a boy called Swallow (who for some reason, is still trying to migrate for the winter).

But the biggest changes come at the conclusion of the story, in which Swallow is discovered in time for his life to be saved, and for the townsfolk to continue tearing down statues “that just wanted to remind them of [the government’s] power and authority.” In the town square where the Happy Prince once stood, they create a garden with the fortune raised by his golden flakes, and plant a fruit tree to memorialize his sacrifice.

I suppose I’m not too fazed about these changes, though you can very much see what contemporary issues Woodgate is plugging the story into! Just as The Bounty Hunter and the Tea Brewer argues for “honest buying and selling of tea at reasonable prices,” this book leans into the taking down of controversial statues that embody corrupt causes.

At heart, I think I enjoy a good tragedy (and I’d argue that they’re important for children too) but this is a nice enough retelling, with beautiful purple-tinged illustrations, and enough passages borrowed from Wilde to hopefully lead people to his original text.

Mallory and the Ghost Cat by Anne M. Martin

The third instalment in the Babysitters Club Mystery spin-off is Mallory’s first and only book in the subseries. I’m not sure why this is exactly – though for what it’s worth, Jessi only got a single one as well. This was also the first in the Mysteries that dealt with a potential ghost, and I was rather amused to see that the tag at the back of the book states: “American’s favourite baby-sitters are ghost hunters, too!” instead of the usual “detectives too!”

There would be more ghost stories, some more intense in their hauntings than others, though this one really goes hard on the Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane angle. It’s also rather amusing to see that Dawn has become the resident expert on ghostly activity in the Club, and called upon to ascertain whether the titular ghost cat is in fact a ghost.

Yet despite the tantalizing title, most of the book is taken up with a completely mundane storyline: Mallory’s father’s uncle is coming to stay with the Pikes for a few months before transferring to a Stoneybrook rest home. (This exact same scenario also happened in Betty Ren Wright’s A Ghost in the House, but there the excuse was that they needed the extra rent money. This is just nuts.)

How anyone thinks this is a good idea in a household that’s already chockful of children is anyone’s guess, but perhaps it has something to do with the honest-to-God crush Mr Pike seems to have on his uncle. To quote: “when I was a boy, I thought Uncle Joe looked like he should have been a cowboy. He had this rugged face, and clear blue eyes...”

Unfortunately, Uncle Joe turns out to be an old grump who is rude and unpleasant to everyone. Mrs Pike needs to keep skipping work to look after him, leading to her saying: “I think my supervisor’s getting upset about all the time I’ve taken off recently. I’m worried about Uncle Joe too, but there’s no way I can stay home every day to look after him.” SO WHY IS HE THERE?

His behaviour grows increasingly bizarre until the Pikes realize he’s exhibiting symptoms of dementia, so they call it quits and send him to the rest home earlier than planned. None of this has anything whatsoever to do with a ghost cat, not even thematically.

Over in the plot we all came for, Mallory ends up taking on new clients called the Craines, which HAS to be a shoutout to The Haunting of Hill House, right? The three little girls are very precocious and charming, but while Mallory is at their house she often hears the crying of a cat in what sounds like distress.

One day she goes up into the attic and discovers a stray white cat that the girls call “Ghost Cat,” as well as a bundle of letters. These turn out to be written by a man called Kennedy Graham to his nephew Samuel, who then sent them BACK to the house after his uncle’s death with a note to his sister: “I thought you’d like to have our Uncle Kennedy’s letters, since you are now living in what used to be his house.” Why not just go with a journal? Why this rather needlessly convoluted back-and-forth with the letters?

In any case, the letters tell the story of how Kennedy found a little white cat called Tinker who relieved him of his loneliness, only for him to grow increasingly disturbed after the cat died of a wasting illness, describing sounds of a mewling cat from somewhere in the attic. There’s even a photograph of an old man, with a small scratch under his eye.

Although a seemingly flesh-and-blood cat has been found, Mallory still hears meowing noises from the attic, and one day opens the laundry door only for a blur of white to rush out. The girls spend hours trying to find out where the cat has gotten to, only for Mallory to check back in the laundry and realize it never left the room. So what was the white blur?

It gets weirder. Mallory fields a call from a man who identifies the cat as his own (the Craine parents put out an advert in the local paper). He accurately describes a nick in the cat’s ear, claims that its name is Rasputin (which the cat reacts to) and says it took him a while to contact them because he’s been out of town. Mallory wonders to herself: “if this guy was out of town, how did he see the paper? And couldn’t he get here sooner, if he really missed his cat?” Good questions that’ll never be answered.

They then bring in Dawn to ascertain whether Ghost Cat is in fact a cat. This is daft since it’s clearly not. They’ve already touched him and fed him, so why are they checking to see if he leaves footprints in scattered flour? The animal is clearly corporeal!

Eventually the man turns up to collect his cat, and it’s the same man from the old photograph, right down to the scratch under his eye! So... he is the ghost? At this point Mallory tells the girls: 

“The Ghost Cat mystery is over.” I sounded sure of myself. But I wasn’t. Not at all.

But it is in fact over. We never revisit this ghostly part of the story. So what exactly is going on here? There are clues that don’t get resolved, questions that are raised without any answers being provided. I get the distinct impression that the ghost writer started this story without any idea of how it was going to end, and as a result it feels like half the story is missing.

The Craines tell Mallory that since Rasputin went away, there’s been no more meowing noises from upstairs. The cat they found was clearly not a ghost, but there does seem to have been a presence in the house that ceases when the man who looks uncannily like Kennedy came to collect his cat.

So, was HE the ghost? How is a ghost looking after a live cat? How’d it get from the man’s house to the Craine house? It can't have been a coincidence that a guy who looked so much like Kennedy ends up visiting his former home. But if there was a connection between the two potential ghost cats, shouldn’t the lost feline have been called Tinker instead of Rasputin? Were there two cats, the real one and the ghost one that was somehow spiritually picked-up by the old man? And how do we account for how the man found the article if he was out of town, and why there was a delay in coming to pick up his pet? (I only ask because these are questions that the story itself raises).

It's a weird one, guys. The cherry on top is that (as far as I know) we never see Uncle Joe or the Craine girls again.

As ever, here are some other notable details. Mallory muses about what it’s like to be eleven and states: “[the older girls] tell me that everybody feels [confused] at eleven. Kind of caught between childhood and the next phase. Teenagerhood? What would you call it?” Um, it’s called adolescence, Mallory. It’s not an uncommon word, and a budding writer should probably know it.

We’re also told that “my best friend Jessi and I sometimes pretend we’re horses. (This is a deep, dark secret.” First of all, no it’s not, because you just told us, and second of all – yikes. These girls look after other people’s kids!

This leads into Mr Pike insisting on meeting the Craines before she babysits, and Mallory thinking: “How humiliating! Actually, I knew he was right, but I felt he was treating me like a baby. Would anyone else’s dad do it?... I felt like I was going to die of embarrassment. The Craines would probably think I was just a kid myself.” The thing is, Mallory is eleven. By law she IS just a kid. I met an eleven-year-old this month, and they’re literally still children.

Her family still haven’t stopped taking advantage of her, and the book actually opens with her making a meal for the entire family because her mother is running late from a meeting. Later Jordan decides he doesn’t want to have waffles that the rest of the family are eating for breakfast, so Mallory says: “how about I make you a peanut-butter-banana-and-salami sandwich?” He’s ten, why the hell can’t he make his own damn sandwich?

She also has that weird guilt complex still going on, stating that she looked forward to babysitting the Craine girls, and that: “I felt a little guilty about abandoning the rest of my family so often.” Why? Uncle Joe isn’t your responsibility, you didn’t invite him into your home, and you’re fulfilling your (paid) obligations elsewhere. There is literally no reason for you to feel guilty.

The Craine girls have sleeping bags with pop-culture characters on them, which is rather amusing since only ONE has dated. See if you can guess which one: “We got [sleeping bags] for Christmas this year. Mine has Barbie on it.” “Mine has the Simpsons. And Katie’s has Muppet Babies.”

At one point, Margaret tells Mallory: “Next week a really famous author is coming to talk to us [at school].” Inexplicably, budding writer and bookworm Mallory doesn’t ask who this might be.

There is a revisit to Stoneybrook Manor rest home and Mallory recalls the events of The Mystery of Stoneybrook: “we came to visit an old man who was the only living person who could tell us the truth about this house we thought might be haunted. Come to think of it, we never did learn the whole truth about that house.” That was the other mystery book that seemed to tap in real supernatural phenomena, when Stacey has a vision of the house on fire that nobody else notices.

Eventually the Craine girls get another white cat, who is deaf, and Mallory is told: “lots of white cats with blue eyes are deaf. Nobody knows why.” It’s true! I once babysat for a family who had a white and deaf cat, and another time I passed one in the street from behind, and accidentally gave it a terrible fright since it obviously couldn’t hear me and only saw me in its peripheral vision when I was almost on top of it.

The Mysteries series are so far operating as one-off additions that have no relationship whatsoever to the main books, though I get an inkling that they become more integrated in time, and rest on preestablished continuity (like the bully in The Secret of Susan being used as the culprit in Beware, Dawn!) Maybe the Craines turn up again, but this stage, things are carefully calibrated so that they don’t interfere with the sequential books in the series: in this case, the girls are usually looked after by their aunt who is temporarily out of commission with a broken leg (though better by the book’s end). Likewise, we never hear of the Gardellas or Joey Conklin, introduced in the first and second Mystery books, ever again.

Mary Anne + 2 Many Babies by Anne M. Martin

A Mary Anne book. Hooray. And yes, that’s the actual spelling of the book as it appears on the cover, along with those horrifying looking babies in the stroller, so let’s keep this one brief.

You remember how in every American high school sitcom (and Buffy the Vampire Slayer) there’s an episode devoted to the students getting an egg to take care of which is meant to represent a baby and teach them something about adult responsibility and not getting pregnant? I’ve no idea if this actually happens in real life, but it’s happening in this book, and it’s possibly the weirdest thing I’ve ever read in this series.

There are technically three little subplots throughout the book: one in which all the older girls have to look after an egg with a classmate (they’re grouped into heterosexual pairs, though some of the outnumbered boys are made to work together, which sadly doesn’t get mined for any meaningful queer subtext), one that has Mary Anne looking after the Salem twins from Mary Anne Misses Logan and realizing they’re not just cute little dolls to dress up and show off, and a very minor one in which Mary Anne and Dawn talk about how great it would be if their parents had another baby. (Richard and Sharon shut down this possibility FAST).

It's pretty boring all things considered, aside from the fact that everyone goes INSANE over these eggs. Here’s a conversation that takes place between Mary Anne and Logan on the subject:

L: “Hi. Did you feed Sammie.” MA: “I was just about to.” L: “Okay. By the way, is Claudia’s room warm enough?” MA: “Yes.” L: “Maybe you should add a little blanket to the basket.”

And another between Kristy and Alan Grey:

K: “Alan, trust me, he’s fine. Um, except for...” A: “WHAT? Except for what?” K: “He seems kind of nervous here.” A: “I thought he was asleep.” K: “He is now. But when we first got to the Papadakises’ he was really shy.” A: “Well, you know, new faces.” K: “Yeah, but I’m concerned that he’s not socializing right.”

THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT EGGS.

Later we get the older girls seriously telling Mallory and Jessi that: “you guys don’t understand; you’re not parents yet,” and this little gem: “Angela and Kevin were holding hands and Angela was crying. ‘Um, Kevin and I lost our baby.’” (I’m not supposed to laugh, but it totally reads like she had a miscarriage).

At one point, Mary Anne struggles to look after the twins when she knows she’s supposed to “feed” the egg. Girl, you are looking after two actual human beings – you’re allowed, nay, required, to forget about the stupid egg for a couple of hours.

Kristy babysits a four-year-old girl called Alicia (the wiki tells me she’s a staple character in the Babysitters Little Sister series) who starts shrieking in fear with no explanation when she sees the egg, and over at the Pike house the kids are excited at the idea of looking after eggs of their own, only for Vanessa to smash one on the floor:

“The paper towels?” wailed Vanessa, “is that all you care about? The rug? Our egg has just been in a terrible accident. If I were in a terrible accident, would you run around trying to clean up my blood, or would you worry about the rug?” “Vanessa! For heaven’s sake it’s an egg.” “And you’ve only known the egg for a couple of minutes.”

All this goes on for a MONTH. In short, absolutely nobody acts like a reasonable, rational, normal human being around these eggs. It is baffling.

Here are some other notable minor details that feature in this book:

Along with Ricky and Rose Salem, there’s a return appearance from Shawna Riverson, the girl who copied Claudia’s math test and let her take the rap for cheating – only this time around, she’s depicted as a total ditz. This is weird, since she was supposedly quite intelligent in Claudia and the Middle School Mystery, just struggling a bit in math (which is why the teacher believed her and not Claudia).

Mary Anne mentions that “earlier this year my father got married again,” even though the girls were celebrating the New Year just a couple of books ago. Time vortex strikes again!

As part of their egg-sitting assignment in the “Modern Living” class, which also involves teaching the kids about marriage, job-hunting, finances and divorce, Logan and Mary Anne have to find a place to live – only to discover that the rent for a two-bedroom apartment is two thousand dollars per month. In a small Connecticut town in the 1990s?? That’s crazy even by today’s standards.

The numbers get even weirder: Logan is astounded that a checkup at the paediatrician costs seventy-five dollars (oh honey, that’s NOTHING) and at the end of the assignment Mary Anne hands in her essay which is “seventy-five pages long, typed, single-spaced.” What in the...? That’s the size of a freaking BOOK! What the hell does she talk about for seventy-five pages?

We also get this exchange between Adam Pike and Mallory, in which the former says: “washing dishes is girls’ work,” with the latter replying: “Adam, there is no such thing as girls’ work.” I mean, YOU’RE the one that keeps making these ten-year-olds sandwiches, MAL. You can’t really blame them for outsourcing all the domestic chores onto the girls when you act like you’re their mother.

Finally, someone makes this comment towards the end of the book: “’Isn’t sex education part of Health?’ Logan laughed. I blushed.” Well, that’s a rather racy joke for a Babysitters Club book. Which is ironic really, since all these babies that get sat have to come from somewhere.

The Frighteners by Pete Johnson

This is a short, rather random little story from an author who (judging by the titles featured on the back cover) is rather prolific in the genre of “spooky stories for young readers” – with illustrations by David Wyatt, who really does turn up everywhere.

Not to be confused with Peter Jackson’s 1996 film of the same name, the story concerns new girl Chloe who immediately gets off on the wrong foot with her classmates at school. With no other options, she reaches out to Aiden the class pariah, who the other children seem to regard with a certain amount of actual fear.

In particular they seem very upset about the pictures that he draws, and when Chloe gets a hold of one she can understand why: they’re covered with images of terrifying creatures with claws and scales and blazing red eyes. Aidan is upset that she’s seen them, and soon Chloe starts to hear strange noises and see odd things out the corner of her eye – almost as if the creatures in his sketches are real, and starting to follow her...

It's a fun little story, though as mentioned, some of the story elements are a bit random. For instance, I can’t fathom why a shell of all things is what conjures the Frighteners, or how exactly Aidan’s sketches work in regards to how he brings them to life. Things just happen for the sake of the plot, though it ends on a surprisingly positive note of friendship and forgiveness – which is a bit at odds with Wyatt’s highly ominous illustrations throughout.

The Ghostly Term at Trebizon by Anne Digby

I’ll admit I only picked this up at a second-hand book sale because it had the word “ghostly” in the title, and ended up reading a pretty standard boarding school story that was published in the nineties but feels like it was set in the fifties. The phrase “jolly good!” technically doesn’t appear, but it certainly feels like it might.

A group of girls who were no doubt properly introduced in the previous books of this series reunite for their next year at Trebizon, though one has sustained a broken wrist. As such, she has to focus more on her studies than her tennis ambitions, though she still has time to find herself in a minor love triangle with two boys that are very difficult to tell apart.

On that note, the story can get confusing at times since one character is called Roberta, another called Robbie, and both nicknamed Bobby (why would you do this?)

The ghost ends up being of the Scooby Doo variety, comprised of several different people – and one cat – being where they shouldn’t for a variety of reasons and making it seem as though the dormitory is haunted. Without the context of the rest of the books in the series, it’s rather difficult to care about any of the characters when you’re plopped in halfway through their arcs, and I’ll probably forget everything about this story in approximately... [checks watch] one and a half minutes.

Crandall’s Castle by Betty Ren Wright

The last of the Betty Ren Wright books I managed to pick up at the local bargain book sale, which follows her usual formula of a placing a family drama alongside a supernatural haunting – though in this case, it differs in several respects. First of all, there are two main characters at work here: Charli, who is coping with the integration of a new stepfather into her home, and Lilly, a foster child who has just moved in with Charli’s aunt, uncle and cousins across the road.

The girls don’t get off to a good start, namely because Lilly is something of a psychic, and has a visceral reaction to Crandall’s Castle, the old manor house that her new foster-father has just purchased in order to convert into a bed-and-breakfast. Charli has always been on-board with her uncle’s crazy schemes, and is irritated with Lilly’s apparent reluctance to go there, exacerbated by her stepfather’s disapproval of the whole thing.

The chapters alternate between Charli’s third-person perspective and Lilly’s first-person narration in her private journal, thematically connected by their joint experiences in trying to adjust to a new family. (I have to say, I wasn’t that impressed by Charli’s stepfather and the implicit fat-shaming that goes on, what with his ongoing insistence that she get more exercise).

The story is also unique is that the ghost part of the story is never really resolved. The girls identify the ghost and establish why she’s haunting Crandall’s Castle – but then solve the problem by never setting foot in the place again. Charli’s uncle realizes his folly and decides to sell the place, and that’s it! If this ghost is ever going to be laid to rest, it’ll have to be at the hands of some other plucky little tweenagers.

Skewing heavily towards the family drama rather than the ghostly occurrences, any readers who turned up for the chills and spooks may be disappointed, though the growing friendship between the two girls (and Lilly’s longing for a permanent home while refusing to let herself grow too attached) is nicely handled.

Wildsmith: The Hidden Sea and Wildsmith: Magical Mountain Rescue by Liz Flanagan

It’s a shame I couldn’t read these in tandem with Skye McKenna’s Seawitch, since I read the first two books of both series at the same time around the beginning of last year. They vibed well together despite being for quite different age groups, but thanks to a weird screw-up in the delivery service that provides new books to our library, I’ve only just been able to get my hands on The Hidden Sea.

If the first two books laid out a formula (in the midst of a war between two countries, a young girl called Rowan tries to rescue and protect mythical creatures from those that would poach them for their magical properties) then the next two streamline themselves into an overarching story in which our protagonist becomes more entangled in the political turmoil going on around her.

In The Hidden Sea, she’s captured by enemies on her way back from taking a pegasi foal back to its herd, and in Magical Mountain Rescue, she and her family launch a rescue attempt for a kidnapped prince, whose disappearance threatens the newly-established peace between Estria and Gallren.

For me the drawcard is the illustrations by Joe Todd-Stanton, who has illustrated some really good picture books and graphic novels – in fact, I’ll always be a little disappointed that these stories weren’t in the same vein as his Brownstone’s Mythical Collection, which boasted large, full-colour pictures. Here, we only get little black-and-white sketches.

Some of the writing is a little sloppy as well, and I get the feeling that The Hidden Sea in particular was a little rushed. Early on, Rowan is rescued by a boy who turns out to be an enemy Estrian, though she defends him to her travelling companion when she says: “But he helped us. So he can’t be like the others.” Yet a few pages on, we’re told: “Rowan was shocked to hear Leo’s story. She was embarrassed to realize she’d been thinking of Estrians as all the same: as bad, dangerous, thoughtless.”

Except... she very explicitly wasn’t.

Then there was some garbled conveyance of exposition. Early on, Rowan is told: “On your way back, you can take a river boat to Hazelhaven. Then your friend the fisherman can bring you this final part of the journey.” She has a friend that’s a fisherman? Uh, okay. I didn’t recall that, but sure.

Several chapters later we get this: “The ferry was small and full of people heading to market in Hazelhaven, the village on the coast where Bella’s aunt and uncle lived. Rowan would get off there too and ask Bella’s uncle to drop her back on Thornback Island.” Wait, who the hell is Bella? Is she the friend that was referred to earlier on?

It’s not towards the end of the book that we finally get the context we initially needed: “[The streets] reminded [Rowan] of the races she used to run against her old friend Bella, back home in Holderby.” Oh, so Bella is Rowan’s friend and her uncle is the fisherman whose help she sought. Got it.

Maybe I’m being too critical, but an editor should have picked up on this.

All things considered, they’re nice little books that’d be perfect for animal lovers and budding fantasy fans. Plenty of active female characters, and cute illustrations to go with some genuinely gorgeous cover art. My childhood brain would have gone nuts for the symmetry, colouring and character layout of those covers. 

Night Flights by Philip Reeve

There is a very lovely dedication at the start of this book, which reads: “To Jihae, who plays Anna Fang with such style and grace that I realized she needed some more stories.” So at least one good thing come out of that otherwise terrible film: a book of short stories that focus on fan-favourite character Anna Fang.

There are three stories in all, each framed by the lead-up to Anna meeting Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw for the first time in Mortal Engines. “Frozen Heart” serves as a prequel to the whole thing, detailing how Anna came into possession of the Jenny Haniver (AND her trademark red coat) when she escaped thraldom upon the Arkangel. “Traction City Blues” involves her attempt to recruit a Stalker to the Anti-Traction League, whilst “Teeth of the Sea” finds her forming an unexpected alliance with a raft town, and rescuing them from a crew of underwater pirates.

Character-wise, you never know where Reeve is going to take his creations, or where they’ll eventually end up. He’s pretty unpredictable in that regard. Here, Anna starts off hating Traction Cities, only to learn that not everyone who lives upon them deserves retribution for what happened to her family. So ironically, the final story has her defending a small raft town against a large static city, and making the call to assassinate the woman responsible for luring vessels into the so-called “teeth of the sea” (those aforementioned underwater pirates).

Her last words on the page are: “I have a Sultana to strangle,” and this cold-blooded assertion is presented as a triumphant one-liner. But that’s Reeve for you – he’s not interested in simplicity or moral clarity. Anna’s arc is learning that the world is more complicated than she would necessarily like, and that all she can do is act accordingly when faced with different circumstances. 

Reeve also touches on his familiar themes of religion and belief, though he goes a little easier on the subject this time. Although Anna initially: “had not thought about the gods in a long time – the way they had let her be eaten up and enslaved by Arkangel suggested pretty forcefully that they either didn’t exist, or weren’t much interested in her,” the story ends with her making her escape from Arkangel and feeling: “as if [her ma and pa] were with her, standing behind her in the gondola, watching over her as she worked the controls... the gods of the sky hung out their glowing flags to welcome her.”

Like a lot of overtly atheist/agonistic writers that pen speculative fiction, I find there’s always a sense of wistfulness when it comes to the subject of a higher power. Almost as though they can’t fully believe in it, but on some level they still want it to be true. (Maybe I’m projecting).

His sense of humour is still intact (“we’re going to need a bigger town,” someone says after seeing a much larger predatory vessel), the likes of Arlo Thursday and Charley Shallow get shout-outs, and because it ends with Tom and Hester’s arrival into Anna’s life, it provides a great jumping-off point to Mortal Engines, the first published book in this series.

Ian McQue provides the illustrations as well as new cover art for all the books in the series, and his work has perhaps become the visual epitomization of these stories in their entirety. That said, Reeve truly lucked out with the cover art for his books: David Frankland originally gave them a great old school pulp-fiction comic vibe, whilst the detail and whimsical realism (it’s a thing!) of David Wyatt’s later work is also exceptional.

Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve

Here’s where it all began, with that famous opening line that’s surely up there with Philip Pullman’s: “Lyra and her daemon moved through the darkening hall...” In this case, we’re given: “It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.”

I love it: traction cities crawling across the earth like hungry animals, devouring each other in a system called Municipal Darwinism, always on the hunt for their next meal. What a concept!

Rereading Mortal Engines after several years, I found that the best thing to compare it to is Star Wars: A New Hope. Not just because of the grimy aesthetic or the naïve protagonist who goes on a journey of self-discovery (though unlike Luke, poor Tom gets his idealism forcibly kicked out of him) but because it reads as a standalone. The following books expand on the world and its characters, but often in such an interconnected way that it feels a little surprising to return to Mortal Engines and read about so many important supporting characters who complete their arcs in a single book and never return (largely because they’re dead).

It just reminded me of A New Hope in this regard. Like Moff Tarkin, Mayor Magnus Chrome is a significant figure in the unfolding story, and then handily defeated in its final pages. Ditto the likes of Katherine Valentine and Bevis, who command their own multi-chapter subplot that ends in complete disaster for both of them. As a result, they all retrospectively come across as rather insignificant in the context of the wider series.

Or to put it another way: as a standalone story, it’s complete. As part of a wider saga, certain aspects feel a little like Early Instalment Weirdness.

In a post-apocalyptic world that’s roughly divided into the Anti-Traction League (static settlements) and Municipal Darwinists (on Traction Cities) the latter roam the earth on their massive wheeled edifices, catching and dismantling other cities for resources. Because scientific progress has almost completely halted, and since so much technological knowledge was lost during something called the Sixty Minute War, Old Tech is highly regarded in this society, and archaeologists are regarded in much the same way that explorers would have been in the early nineteenth century: as awe-inspiring heroes.

Tom Natsworthy is not one of these heroes, but rather an Apprentice Librarian, who reveres the great Thaddeus Valentine, an archaeologist who has just returned to London, one of the greatest and most powerful Traction Cities. Tom is rapt to meet his hero, as well as Valentine’s beautiful daughter Katherine, especially since there have been rumours flying that Valentine is searching for a particularly important piece of rare Old Tech... whispers of something called MEDUSA – and yes, it’s always spelt in all-caps. (To keep up the analogue with A New Hope, it’s essentially a Death Star).

But as the three of them watch a small city get torn apart for resources, a young woman with her face concealed emerges from the wreckage and tries to assassinate Valentine. Tom chases after her and (on seeing her terribly scarred face and being told it was the work of Valentine) watches her escape down a rubbish chute to the ground below. Before disappearing, she informs him that her name is Hester Shaw, and on repeating this intel to Valentine, Tom himself is thrown down the chute after her.

At this point the story divides into two main storylines: Tom and Hester are forced to work together in order to catch up to London, even though Tom is bewildered at her animosity towards Thaddeus Valentine, refusing to believe that his hero would ever commit the crimes she’s accusing him of, while Katherine Valentine tries to figure out what happened to the nice young man she met so briefly, and why her father is acting so strangely in the wake of his disappearance.

Reading the entire series in chronological order is finally reaping its rewards, as a lot of the continuity is starting to match up in satisfying ways. Shrike in particular hits very differently now that I know his backstory, and it can get pretty painful:

“Unexpected memories fluttered through his disintegrating mind, and he suddenly knew who he had been before they dragged him on to the Resurrection Slab to make a Stalker out of him. He wanted to tell Hester, and he lifted his great iron head towards her, but before he could force the words out his death was upon him, and it was no easier this time than the last.”

Likewise, Anna Fang’s backstory only gets brief mentions throughout Mortal Engines; references which then became the basis of the stories that were explored more fully in Night Flights: namely the strangling of the Sultana and the construction of the Jenny Haniver. Some of the details have been retconned just a tiny bit, but that can be handwaved by the ignorance or untrustworthiness of the characters telling said stories to Tom and Hester.

It was almost bemusing to realize that the whole book takes place long after the Golden Age of Municipal Darwinism, what with Anna showing Tom and Hester a bunch of little cities feasting on a bigger one that ran out of fuel, and how the plot in its entirety is driven by the desperation of the Traction Cities in trying to find new hunting grounds to pillage for resources.

I smiled when Reeve has Tom and Hester spared by dangerous pirates when their leader realizes Tom is a “gentleman” from London and keeps him alive so that he might teach his crew highborn manners, since a similar device was used in Thunder City in which our protagonists are taken captive by potentially hostile forces, only for their leader to recognize Tamzin Pook as a renowned arena fighter.

Likewise, the author’s sense of humour is still very much intact here. We get an airship called “My Shirona,” CDs referred to as “seedys,” a Dalek shoutout, and this: “[Tom] cut through the 21st Century gallery, past the big plastic statues of Pluto and Mickey, animal-headed gods of lost America.”

But there’s also a real sense of darkness that’s prevalent throughout all these stories: themes of how difficult it is to discern right from wrong, how heroes can be profoundly disappointing when you meet them in real life, and that death is inevitable, no matter how good you are or how noble your intentions. (In saying that, Katherine’s dog ends up being a rather blatant case of Death By Newbery Medal, since he has no real narrative purpose except to die tragically at the most heartrending moment).

On that note, the author gets closer here than he ever does in the later books to exploring the possibility of an afterlife (“it was a lot like Clio House, and Dog and Bevis were both waiting for her there, and her hiccups had stopped, and her wound wasn’t as bad as everyone had thought, it was just a scratch...”) which I found interesting, since he very much leans into a more atheistic outlook from here on out.

It all culminates in a Kill Em All conclusion, which isn’t particularly rewarding, especially since at least half of the page-count is spent building up the deceased characters; their hopes, dreams, and struggles to find out the truth and attain justice (as I mentioned earlier, it makes the following books feel a bit lopsided with their absence). SPOILER ALERT: Katherine ends up dying for Hester, a development that is never really explored in the later books, not even when Hester realizes that the two of them were half-sisters. Isn’t that a revelation that should have occurred when they were both alive in order to better work through the ramifications of it?

Obviously it’s difficult to explore a dynamic when one-half of it is dead, but it feels like a case of They Wasted A Perfectly Good Plot – especially since Hester and Tom end up in a love triangle with a very Katherine-like character in the very next book anyway. Why not just keep the original around? (The answer is that, like A New Hope, Reeve probably hadn’t figured out what exactly was going to happen next).

In many ways, the whole thing is a litmus test of what is to come. Reeve has laid down the basics of his world and the (remaining) characters that inhabit it, and declared his bittersweet thesis statement when Hester tries to comfort Tom after the destruction of London:

“It was an accident. Something went wrong with their machine. It was Valentine’s fault, and Crome’s. It was the Engineers’ fault for getting the thing to work and my mum’s fault for digging it up in the first place. It was the Ancients’ fault for inventing it. It was Pewsey’s and Gench’s fault for trying to kill you, and Katherine’s for saving my life...”

This passage more than any other really captures the tone of the Mortal Engines saga in its entirety: that life is crazy and chaotic; that nobody really knows what the heck they’re doing or why, and the best we can hope for is simply someone to keep us company along the way. (And sometimes, we don’t even get that – see below).

Predator’s Gold by Philip Reeve

The direct sequel to Mortal Engines kicks off with a brand-new word to describe Traction Cities: “urbivores.” I love that. Like any good sequel, Reeve takes the opportunity to delve deeper into this world and its politics, specifically concerning a terrorist cell within the Anti-Traction League which is steadily growing in power, and willing to inflict the same level of pain and violence upon the Great Cities as they do upon their prey.

It’s fascinating in a way, since we the reader naturally feel like we should be on the side of the static settlements. They’re just normal people trying to go about their lives without being “eaten” by urbivores that will (at best) make them slaves in the pits of their engine rooms, or (at worse) have them executed as unnecessary jetsam. But the concept of the Traction Cities is so compelling, and the characters that make up the ranks of the Green Storm so unappealing, that our love of drama and the natural urge to side with the protagonists (all Municipal Darwinists) instinctively keeps us on the side of the “bad guys.”

Tom and Hester have laid claim to the Jenny Haniver and are happily flying through the skies on various trading and transport missions. But after taking on a slightly dodgy passenger who claims to be a great explorer (the wonderfully named Nimrod Pennyroyal), the vessel is attacked by agents of the Green Storm, who believe they’re responsible for the death of Anna Fang and the subsequent theft of the Jenny Haniver.

Taking refuge on the great Traction City of Anchorage, the couple start to get to know the inhabitants – or at least what’s left of them, the population having been decimated by the plague (which leads to some hilarious scenes of a single dwarf taking on several roles around the palace, each one delineated by what hat he’s wearing). Tom proves himself popular, especially with Freya Rasmussen, the young and pretty margravine who rules over the city.

It's enough to make Hester bitterly jealous, to the point where she takes drastic steps to make sure Tom remains loyal to her; wanting only for the two of them to return to the sky, alone together. Yes, this book marks the start of Hester’s deconstruction as a character, from a damaged woman grappling with severe trauma and trust issues, to... an even more damaged woman grappling with even worse trauma and trust issues.

The debate over the creative choices Reeve took with Hester’s characterization probably continues to this day. Yes, it’s a little annoying that she’s so defined by her possessive love for Tom, and in any other book I’d probably be annoyed – but it makes perfect sense for how she’s portrayed in this specific story, and (for my money) I think Reeve is pretty brave for committing so thoroughly to such an unlikeable and morally compromised anti-heroine.

As a post on Tumblr once put it: “y’all want complicated female characters until you actually get them.”

This book also brings us the Lost Boys, which bear more of a resemblance to the street urchins in Oliver Twist than the runaways in Peter Pan, complete with the Fagin-like Uncle as their leader (having read Night Flights first, it was a bit of a shock to rediscover that he was the Stilton Kael of that book – I had totally forgotten about this connection). In reimagining them for his post-apocalyptic future, Reeve has them travel about on tiny worm-like limpets which burrow through the ice, clamping themselves onto any given city, and using cameras on crab-like legs to spy on the inhabitants and rob them blind.

I’ve already espoused at length about how good Reeve’s writing is, so I’ll just leave you with my favourite descriptive passage:

Iron statues of the wolf-god Eisengrim guarded the gates of Masgard’s mansion. Inside, gas-jets burned in iron tripods, filling the big reception room with patterns of jittery light and slashing, knife-edged shadow. There was a buzz of engines in the shadows under the barn-high roof and Masgard came swooping down on her, riding a leather sofa which swung beneath a small gasbag, midget engine-pods sprouting from the head-rest. It was a chairship, a rich man’s toy, and he steered it close to Hester and hovered in front of her, relishing her surprise.

And as ever, we get a certain sense of melancholic longing for a higher power to help guide Reeve’s characters, without being able to commit to any certainty of them existing (look, it’s a recurring theme that interests me!)

Once again [Freya] knelt in the dim candle-glow of the refrigerated temple and looked up at the lovely ice-statues of the Lord and Lady and asked them to tell her what she should do, or at least to send assign to show her that the things she had already done were right. And once again there was no answer: no miraculous light, no voices whispering in her mind, no patterns of frost arranging themselves into messages on the floor, only the steady purr of the engines making the deck plates judder against her knees, the winter twilight pressing at the windows.

Rereading all this for the first time in years, I was rather surprised by how much I had forgotten. That Anna Fang dies in Mortal Engines, that Hester and Tom stayed onboard Anchorage, that Sathaya was such an important character – this had all honestly slipped from my mind. But then, that’s the best part of a reread after so long: you know you’re going to enjoy it, and it can still manage to surprise you.

Infernal Devices by Philip Reeve

This story does something surprising by picking up fifteen years after the last one, though in many ways it acts as more of a direct sequel to Predator’s Gold than Predator’s Gold does to Mortal Engines, with many lingering strands in the latter story picked up immediately in the opening chapters.

Tom and Hester are in their thirties now, having settled down with the people of Anchorage in a remote community off the coast of America at the end of the last book. They have a daughter called Wren, and are generally content, though Hester has never fully been accepted among the rest of the Anchorites – she’s too surly, too distant. Still, they’re happy enough.

But their daughter Wren is tired of life in Anchorage, and is desperate to see more of the world. She gets her chance when a vessel pulls up off the shore and a man comes ashore – one of the Lost Boys, who is looking for a mysterious artefact called the Tin Book in the Anchorage library, and devises a way of using Wren to get his hands on it. In return, he agrees to take her with him on board his submarine when he leaves.

Unbeknownst to any of them, the intervening years has seen the rest of the world get caught up in a brutal war between the Green Storm and the Traction Cities, with no end in sight to the destruction. This is what Wren ends up in the middle of, with Tom and Hester leaving Anchorage in order to track her down and bring her safely home.

It’s the most ambitious Mortal Engines book yet, which follows dual plots of Wren struggling to survive her captivity onboard a Lost Boy vessel, then slavery in the wealthy estate of Nimrod Pennyroyal, and then a terrorist attack upon the floating city Brighton and Cloud 9 by the Green Storm (which also features in Thunder City), while Tom and Hester traverse the world to try and find her.

Along the way, Hester comes to realize that she’s better suited to violence and bloodshed than she ever realized, and makes a choice at the end of the book that puts her at odds with her family – and possibly the reader as well.

Meanwhile, the resurrected Stalker previously known as Anna Fang is ratcheting up her attempts to find the Tin Book and the secrets it contains, unaware that a high-ranking Engineer called Oenone Zero is plotting against her in a desperate attempt to stop the endless warfare. As part of her assassination attempt, Zero has restored the Stalker Shrike back to “life” as Anna’s bodyguard as part of her plans – though when he finds out about what she has planned, he decides to thwart her.

Is there anything better than reading a book you haven’t read in so long that you’ve forgotten most of the details but you remember enjoying it so you know you’re guaranteed a good read? That said, I remembered more of Infernal Devices than any other book in the series (no doubt because it was my favourite), and it still reads like a masterpiece of plotting, characterization and tone.

From the way all the subplots collide at the story’s climax, to the reveal of the mysterious Agent 28’s true identity, to the careful seeding of Hester’s devastating final choice, everything flows like perfectly calibrated streams of water down a series of canals that eventually lead to the sea. Or something, I’m not great with analogies. This is one of those books you not only read, but also study in order to learn what it is to write well. The structure, the pacing, the tone! It’s all impeccable, and by this point the characters and their situations are established enough that you’re truly invested in their lives and wellbeing. The scene in which the Jenny Haniver (the series’ equivalent of the Millennium Falcon) is brought back into play deserves a fist-pump, as it really does feel like our protagonists are being reunited with an old friend:

“Remember how it works?” asked Hester, behind him. She spoke in the sort of whisper you would use in a temple. “Oh yes,” Tom whispered back. “You don’t ever forget...” He reached out and reverently pulled a lever. An inflatable dingy dropped from a compartment in the ceiling and knocked him over.

This is a story that contains humorous allusions to things like Pride and Prejudice:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a fake explorer in possession of a good fortune must be in search of a wife, and Pennyroyal had got himself lumbered with Boo-Boo Heckmondwyke.

But also searing insight on the hypocrisy and negligence of mankind:

The good-natured actors and artists of Brighton, who had spent so many dinner parties agreeing with each other about what a terrible life the slaves led and organizing community art projects to show how they shared their pain, now fled for their lives, spilling out of the city aboard overloaded airships and listing motor-launches.

Not to mention the inherent unfairness of life, and how things never work out the way we plan. After Zero successfully disposes of Anna Fang (or so she thinks), the war doesn’t come to an end as she had hoped. Instead, General Naga comforts and congratulates her on her bravery, and then simply seizes control for himself:

“In order to continue our glorious struggle against Tractionist barbarism I am assuming supreme control. And prepare the Requiem Vortext for departure, I want to be back in Tienjing before one of our comrades tries to seize power for themselves.”

And as ever, Reeve subtly explores the theme of religion and faith in a battered world, as when Zero goes to visit a derelict Christian chapel:

“All she knew of Christians was that they worshipped a god nailed to a cross, and what on earth was the use of a god who went around letting himself get nailed to things? The noisy, popular gods of the neighbouring temples seemed to dish out comfort and advice like agony aunts, but the god of this place was less scrutable; maybe he was asleep, or dead. Maybe he was busy with some better world, off at the far end of the universe.”

Grim stuff, and yet later on, when Zero faces her death, Reeve answers his own question:

“She squeezed her eyes shut and whispered a prayer to the god of the ruined chapel in Tienjing, because although she’d never had much time for gods she thought that He must know what it meant to be frightened, and to suffer, and to die.”

In thinking this, she loses her fear and is ready to face what comes next. Furthermore, Reeve choses to capitalize “He” in this passage, having not done so the first time around. Interesting...

And just for posterity, here’s my favourite passage:

According to the old tradition, wishes made at moonrise on this sacred night were often granted by the Moon Goddess. Pennyroyal’s guests were far too sophisticated to believe such fairy tales, of course, but they bowed their heads regardless, some with shrugs and smiles to show that they were just being ironic, but moved in spite of themselves, remembering the magical MoonFests of their childhoods. They wished for love and happiness and yet more wealth, while down in the city Brighton’s artists wished for dame and her actors for long runs in successful plays, and on the underdecks their slaves and indentured labourers wished for their freedom.

Rumpelstiltskin (1960)

This was another Kanopy offering, and I wonder if this and last month’s Snow White were produced by the same studio seeing as both are in German and clock in under a pretty tight runtime (this was an hour and ten minutes).

I’m always up for a fairy tale retelling, especially ones that are rather dubious in quality. Rumpelstiltskin – or in this case, Rumpelstilzchen – is a difficult story to fathom, as I’m never really sure what the takeaway is meant to be. Don’t lie? Sure, but that’s hardly the fault of the miller’s daughter. Keep your promises? Well, if she’d done that, she would have lost her baby. Don’t sing songs in public that contain your name when you’re trying to keep it a secret? Bit specific, but okay.

It never ceased to annoy me as a child that the miller was never punished for his lies, nor that marriage to the king was apparently a good thing for the miller’s daughter considering he threatened to execute her should she not perform the impossible. And of course, the ominous unanswered question that lingers over the whole thing: what did Rumpelstiltskin want with a human child?

In other words, it’s difficult to find the moral centre of this story. Who is good? Who is bad? What exactly are we meant to learn from it? And I have to say, I’ve always found it strange that Rumpelstiltskin’s magic didn’t end up making fool’s gold, or that the miller’s daughter didn’t face further trouble after being demonstrating magical powers. They've accused women as witches for less.

The story also contains a lot of fairy tale motifs: the second use of a spinning wheel as an important component (the other story being Sleeping Beauty, of course) and the magical quality of true names (for some reason, knowledge of Rumpelstiltskin’s gives people a degree of power over him).

This time around we get a narrator who breaks the fourth wall to address the audience: he’s Hans, the miller’s helper, though in fact he’s the one doing most of the work. His employer Kunz kicks his feet up all day, drinking wine and telling tall tales – until one day he tries to distract the tax collector by bragging about his daughter’s skill at spinning. She’s apparently so good that she can spin straw into gold.

Seizing an opportunity, the tax collector (who is also the royal chancellor) has young Marie taken to the castle to prove her father’s words – though the only golden thing about her is her hair. No one really believes she can do what her father insists she can, but because the young king’s father bankrupted the entire kingdom before he died, he’s willing to take a chance.

Marie is locked in a room filled with straw and a spindle, but just as she begins to despair... look, you know how all this goes. The most interesting thing about this take on the fairy tale is that it tries to provide Rumpelstiltskin with actual motivation – and sympathetic motivation at that! He helps Marie because “lies and greed are wicked, so I want to help you,” and goes on to say: “only humans think wealth makes you happier.”

Years later he comes back for her firstborn child because he wants it to grow up away from the excesses of court, “uncorrupted by the power of gold.” He’s actually surprisingly friendly and amiable, and when Marie bests him with the revelation of his true name (brought to her by Hans), he doesn’t stamp his way through the floor as per the usual retellings, but instead admits defeat graciously.

To give Rumpelstiltskin noble intentions is an interesting take on a character who usually leans more toward the dark side of moral ambiguity. But here he’s the arbitrator of said morality: stage-managing the lead-up to the king admitting that his child is more important than his wealth, and testing Marie on whether she’s prepared to tell the truth on how exactly she learned his name. Having done so, he’s then invited to stay in the castle by the royal couple!

And on a final note of ethical jurisdiction, the miller is eventually (and satisfyingly) punished for his mistruths. Congratulations to the film managing to find a moral hidden within the obtuse nature of the original fairy tale, which is: “never lie for the sake of gold.”

So, a mildly interesting take on the material, albeit a softened one. As with the dwarfs in Snow White, I was surprised Rumpelstiltskin wasn’t played by a little person, and they add a trickle of bittersweetness what with Hans remaining in unrequited love with Marie (you can’t say no to a king, I suppose).

Robin Hood: The Rebellion (2018)

I will never not watch a shitty Robin Hood movie. Not possible.

This one can be best described as “Die Hard in a medieval castle involving Robin Hood,” as after a brief interlude in the forest, Marian and Much get captured, and Robin organizes a team of himself, Will Scarlett and Little John to go after them. The whole rest of the film involves these characters creeping around Nottingham Castle, trying to find each other and escape.

I have absolutely nothing to back this up, but it’s tempting to think the director may have had access to a castle and so built this entire story around the opportunity to use it as a set.

The major problem is the tone. The whole thing is very grimdark when technically you could have told the exact same story with a lighter 1950s aesthetic, as well as far less torture, bloodshed, rape and cruel death scenes. Robin Hood’s darkest hour comes ten minutes in, and it only gets worse from there. There’s fun nasty and then there’s just nasty nasty.

Too much time is given over to the Sheriff and his evil monologuing to various prisoners/retainers, just as Robin Hood never runs out of solemn naval-gazing speeches in the middle of life-or-death situations. It’s also somewhat bemusing to note the actors credited on the poster: Kristian Nairn (Hodor in Game of Thrones) has his name up there, even though he’s in exactly one scene. He turns up with arrows in his back, issues a warning, and dies instantly. That’s it. I can only assume he was friends with someone on the crew and did them a favour.

Brian Blessed of all people also turns up as Friar Tuck towards the end of the film, who recites the entirety of the Lord’s Prayer intercut with scenes of extreme violence as Robin mows down his enemies elsewhere. Then Gareth David-Lloyd (Ianto from Torchwood) turns up over halfway through as a character called Green (as in, George-a-Green? That’s a deep dive!) which feels like an availability issue.

I have to say they get a reasonably interesting Marian: the actress is quite compelling and intense, but naturally she’s let down by the script.

From the opening scroll which states the Sheriff demands that the people “pledge allegiance or become an outlaw” (that’s really not how it works) to the epic fail of the rescue attempt itself (Robin keeps getting trapped in various rooms, and by the time he reaches the dungeons, Marian has already escaped to another part of the castle) this is a bust. I kind of wish they’d stuck with what seemed like the initial premise of the film: tension in the ranks of the rebellion. I mean, the film is actually called The Rebellion, and that’s a neat hook: Robin trying to get people onboard with his attempt to defeat the Sheriff’s regime, despite the dangers that await them.

Outlaw/King (2018)

I’ve seen this movie before, and rewatched it less out of a burning desire to see again as the fact it vibed well with the other period dramas I saw this month (The King and The Last Duel). Set in 1304, it operates as a quasi-sequel to Braveheart, in which Robert the Bruce takes up the reins of Scottish rebellion in the wake of William Wallace’s execution. 

It’s taken me this long to realize that the film isn’t called Outlaw King but Outlaw/King, with a stroke to denote Robert is either/or depending on what side of the battle you’re fighting on. Sadly it doesn’t really lean into the more bloodthirsty “outlaw” side of this equation in order to explore the full cost of rebellion – or the fact that it’s those around Robert that tend to undergo all the suffering.

As I discuss below in The King, so many filmmakers are stymied by the fact that their historical epic protagonists were probably not-very-nice people in real life, and so end up portraying them with decidedly modern sensibilities. Keeping all the war crimes firmly on the side of the English, Robert is the type of man who is willing to wait until his new wife is ready to consummate the marriage on her own terms (yeah right) and whose oath-breaking and murder of John Comyn in a church is completely glossed over.

Florence Pugh plays the aforementioned wife, who is in the usual “be devoted and eventually you’ll get rewarded with devotion and status” storyline, with the prerequisite “proves herself” moment when she stops a small boy from being forcibly conscripted. I mean, it’s Florence Pugh, and she’s always excellent, but the part remains underwritten. There’s a scene in which she confronts her husband and tells him that she reads books and forms opinions and that she’s decided to chart her course with him – but we’re not given a single reason why. At this point he hasn’t done much to impress her, and why would she choose Scottish independence over her English king and family? (I’m not saying she wouldn’t, just that we’re not given a reason why she would).

Ultimately her story is one of survival and endurance, as most female characters arcs are in these sorts of films (see also: Lucilla in Gladiator and Marguerite in The Last Duel).

Chris Pine is pretty good, and despite his contemporary Instagram face, he still comes in second to Aaron Taylor-Johnson in the “what the heck are you doing here?” competition. Tony Curran’s presence is practically inevitable, and Stephen Dillane and James Cosmo turn up to give the necessary “respected character actor who helps raise the tone” performances. I also glimpsed Clive Russell (Brynden Tully in Game of Thrones), which is funny because he also has a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it part in The Last Duel.

It all kicks off with a very impressive Oner, and closes with someone having a lot of fun putting together the closing credits, as every single featured character gets a full name and occupation, no matter how small their role. I’m not kidding, we’ve got Mary Coutts, pie-seller; Thomas Dickson, farmer; Iain Calder, carriage driver; and Aileen Walker, lady-in-waiting. None of these characters are addressed as such in the film, and some only appear for a couple of seconds, but they’re all credited with this level of detail.

They should do this for every single movie in existence. I’m not kidding.

The King (2019)

I knew so little about this film going in that I honestly had no idea what king it referred to until the name Falstaff was dropped. Best described as a redo of Shakespeare’s Henry V without any of his language or pro-Tudor monarchy spin, it covers the early reign of Prince Hal as he steps up from his drinking and debauchery in order to become the king that early fifteenth-century England deserves.

It’s... fine. There’s nothing glaringly wrong with this film, and perhaps the presence of Timothée Chalamet will make history more watchable in various high schools across the globe, but the lacklustre dialogue and the rather stodgy pacing makes it a bit of a slog at times.

We move through the familiar beats of history as Shakespeare laid it down: the dying king, the defeat of Hotspur, Henry’s rejection of Falstaff, his ascension to the throne, the threat of war; the invasion of France, Siege of Harfleur and battle of Agincourt, and finally Henry’s betrothal to Catherine of Valois. All very neat and tidy, marking off Henry’s steps from wastrel to ruler... but then the film can’t resist a little deconstruction of this noble history in the final act.

Turns out that the France’s needling of England (including sending an assassin after Henry) was the political machinations of Henry’s Chief Justice, who stood to benefit financially if England went to war. Yes, it’s the “old advisor was manipulating our protagonist all along” ploy – Margrete: Queen of the North did the very same thing.

I have mixed feelings about this twist, as up until the reveal, it has been a story about choices and the heavy price that is paid for them. But then it’s GOTCHA! Postulating that Henry was being manipulated the whole time makes it (in retrospect) a very different film, with a completely different set of themes. It’s not about how Henry went from wastrel to king, but how he was just an easily-led fool the whole time. Granted, it’s foreshadowed when his sister Phillipa warns him about the dangers of court, and nicely bookended at the conclusion when his wife-to-be guides him towards realizing the deception, but still...

I also have to laugh a little at the pickle modern filmmakers find themselves in: there is often an earnest desire to be “historically accurate” (at least by relative standards), but everyone is terrified of having an unlikeable protagonist, which they would inevitably end up with if their main character was an accurate depiction of the social mores of the time in which he lived. To make Henry V relatable and good, he must be against war; a man who takes every measure to avoid it wherever he can in the name of peace and responsibility. This is our understanding of a “good man.”

At the same time – bloody war is what all the audience came to see, and is the Chekhov’s Gun of these types of period dramas (see also: The Last Duel below). As such, we end up with characters who passionately argue against war before being reluctantly dragged into it (the exact same thing happens to King Louis in 2023’s The Three Musketeers: D’artagnan) which bears no resemblance whatsoever to how combat and the motivation for entering it was approached back in the fifteenth century.

Timothée Chalamet isn’t bad, but remains a baffling choice for Henry V, being rather unconvincing as either the degenerate libertine or the warrior king, though Joel Edgerton and Sean Harris pick up the slack as John Falstaff and William Gascoigne respectively. Robert Pattison and Ben Mendelsohn have brief roles in which they try to out-ham each other, and it was nice to see Thomasin McKenzie in an even smaller role as Phillippa of Denmark. As for Lily-Rose Depp... I have to admit, I had dismissed her as a nepobaby, but she was surprisingly good here, doing quite a lot with very little.

The Lighthouse (2019)

Well, that was certainly a Dave Eggers movie. I’m still waiting to see Nosferatu, and so I thought I’d tide myself over with this, the only other Eggers’ film I hadn’t watched. I won’t deny he isn’t good at silently conveying information with striking visuals (two men leave the island, two men arrive to take their place) which befits the fact that this is shot entirely in black and white. It almost comes across as a silent film, which in many ways is good, since the accents on Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson are a bit incomprehensible at times.

That said, it’s also a film filled with deliberate and rhythmic sound: the creaking of the house, the beats of the revolving lamp, the tapping of seagull beaks against glass – farts even. The regularity of noise is enough to drive you insane, which is very much the point of this film.

Two watchmen come to tend an isolated lighthouse for four weeks, with no one but each other for company. It’s obviously not going to end well, and the younger of the two begins to spiral into insanity, brought on by the confusing and occasionally abusive behaviour of the elder, who for some reason prevents him from ever visiting the light in the topmost lantern room.

I suppose my problem with the entire premise is that if the audience has no idea what’s real, what’s a dream, what’s deliberate gaslighting, or what’s a hallucination taking place in the mind of a mentally unsound individual, then it’s very difficult to care about anything that’s going on.

I mean, it’s already not real because it’s a movie. But when you start insinuating that what you’re watching is also not real within the context of the actual story, it gets a little exasperating. It’s not real on two separate levels, which is one too many for me. Are we watching madness, gaslighting, or a two-hour long hallucination à la An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge? (And yes, they float this possibility at one point).

It also reminded me of too many other films/shows, from Hitchcock’s The Birds (those vindictive seagulls), to Cold Skin (which similarly revolved around two strangers manning a lighthouse and a mysterious mermaid-like creature) to The Terror (also containing a character who killed someone and assumed his identity well before the story starts).

Sometimes narrative connections are made, but then never elaborated on. The younger of the two men seems to be followed around by a one-eyed gull, who goes onto suspect that Dafoe’s character killed his former partner. This seems evidenced by him pulling up a severed head from the sea which is missing an eye, and Dafoe’s assertion that seagulls embody the spirits of the dead. Is the one-eyed gull the spirit of the murdered man? Did Dafoe do the deed? We never find out, because it’s never mentioned after the body is found. The issue is raised and never resolved.

There are also some allusions to Greek mythology, which just seem included for the sake of making everything feel more meaningful than it actually is. For example, the final shot seems to echo Prometheus, with Pattison’s character being eaten alive by birds (just as the titan had his liver torn out by an eagle). Okay... but Prometheus stole the fire of the gods for the benefit of mankind, whereas Pattison just wants to see the inside of the lantern for himself, and is subsequently driven mad by whatever’s in there. What’s the connection between the two stories? What are we meant to get out of that allusion? I found it pretentious.

The film makes the most of Willem Dafoe’s inherent creepiness, and Eggers certainly knows how to stage a long panning shot, but that’s about all I can commend it with.

The Last Duel (2021)

I was always going to watch this film, despite the dark subject matter and Ridley Scott’s weird response to its financial failure at the box office, as the whole premise sounded fascinating. Based on a very real duel that was fought in 1389, which (apparently) ended up being the last trial by combat that was officially recognized as a judicial duel in France, it’s also a “Rashomon”-Style story in which the same events unfold from three different points-of-view: Norman knight Jean de Carrouges, his wife Marguerite de Thibouville, and the squire accused of raping her, Jacques Le Gris.

We follow all three of them throughout the course of their early friendship/courtship, Jean and Marguerite’s years of marriage, the accusations of rape that are levelled against Le Gris, and finally the duel itself (by which point, the narratives have merged). Watching three variations of the same series of events is fascinating in itself, as we see the differences in micro-expressions and tone across all three strands of the story, as well as getting fuller context on several scenes depending on what character is “narrating.”

In Jean’s point-of-view, he’s a mild-mannered noble knight who is constantly wronged by his liege lord and former friend. From the audience’s point-of-view, he has something of a modern American attitude in that he flouts the rules and declares “orders be damned!” when being prevented from doing the right thing (like trying to save hostages before battle). And yet both these outlooks are deconstructed as the film goes on. From Jacques’s point-of-view, Jean is too hot-headed and entitled, who endangers several missions by how easily he’s baited. For the audience, the “reckless anti-hero” vibe is destroyed when he later just comes across as surly and entitled.

This is done for all three main characters: from Jean’s perspective Margeurite is demure, to Jacques she’s coquettish; from Margeurite’s point-of-view, her husband is cold and distant, while Jacques barely makes an impression on her, leaving her confounded when he turns up at her house to declare his love for her. From his perspective, she removes her shoes as an invitation; from hers, she kicks them off to make her escape easier.

The most impressive thing about the whole film is that it seldom repeats itself. In fact, only one scene occurs across all three narratives, with subtle differences depending on whose point-of-view it’s coming from. This spares the audience from having to watch everything three times over, but still getting enough similar material that we can compare and contrast each version of events.

When it comes to the rape itself, I was reminded a little of the miniseries Liar, of which I said that one day we as a society will be ready for a difficult story about genuine confusion over a sexual encounter that one participant thought was consensual, while the other did not. But that day is not today, and the film itself leaves no ambiguity over the fact that Marguerite’s narrative is the truthful one. Each segment of the film begins with “the truth according to [character name],” but hers fades out until only the words “the truth” are left. No ifs, buts, or maybes about it.

In fact, there’s a real power in this; a sense of profound relief and almost awe when the narrative takes Marguerite’s side and brooks no room for debate or denial. Her version is incontrovertibly “the truth” (though I’m sure plenty of viewers still tried to find some wriggle room to excuse Jacques’s action, especially since he was played by Adam Driver).

In a way, this is the film’s strength and weakness. Obviously I’m grateful that it leaves no room for debate that Marguerite was raped and justice was done, but it does put an authorial stamp on the events which doesn’t really fit the tone of a “Rashomon”-Style film. Furthermore, when her version of events plays out, you can’t help but notice that it takes on a slightly different tone. I do feel that a lot of stories are afraid of writing women wrong, and this leads to some self-consciousness in the way they’re presented, with little trickles of modernity creeping in so as to avoid criticism. (Or am I doing that annoying thing when I hold the writing for women to higher standards and putting it under more scrutiny?)

All the people working on this film are extremely well aware that we’re in the middle of a massive reckoning for the treatment of women in Hollywood and beyond, and so they’re going to make sure we get the point. It’s undeniably Anvilicious at times, from the lawyer who insists that rape can’t cause pregnancy (in what is CLEARLY a dig at Todd Akin who said: “a woman’s body has ways of shutting down [unwanted pregnancies] in cases of legitimate rape”) to Margurite being slut-shamed for wearing a lowcut dress, given girl-power lines such as “I won’t be silenced!” and subjected to several heavy-handed horse metaphors (which is funny because they did the exact same thing with her character in The White Princess).

Even in her own narrative she comes across as a little thinly sketched; at times a no-nonsense girl-boss, and at others an oppressed woman of her time. Early on there’s a subtle allusion to a woman’s enjoyment in the bedroom, then a mention of the consequences if a woman speaks out about rape, but later (just in case the audience didn’t get it) they spell it all out explicitly. In other words, it becomes a modern parable about the #MeToo movement.

I hate myself a little for saying this, but I enjoyed the men’s stories more, watching the way each one appeared differently in the other’s eyes, than I did Marguerite’s, which has a specific point to make and will make damn sure that it’s made as clearly as possible. As a woman, I appreciate what they did in advocating for Marguerite (and by extension, women’s rights). As a storyteller, I think it was a bit too on the nose. Both things can be true!

More disappointing was that the film unnecessarily utilizes that prevalent trope in which another female character provides legal testimony against her friend – not for any particular reason, but just because that’s what women do to each other. The more I think about it, the more examples come to mind: Shay against Sansa in Game of Thrones, Hilary Swank against Cate Blanchett in The Gift, Maggie Pole to Catherine in The Spanish Queen, the old nursemaid against Magrete in Magrete: Queen of the North – you see this everywhere, to the point where I was actually astounded when it was defied in Taylor Sheridan’s 1924 (of all things).

Here Marguerite is given a friend who turns on her the moment she’s told about her accusations against Jacques, for reasons that remain completely opaque. She’s also got a mother-in-law from hell, whose suspicious absence from the house on the very day Jacques comes to visit (after taking all the servants with her, against her son’s express orders) is never fully explained. The story completely fails to take into account the fact that women in these situations desperately need the support of other women – all we get are some sympathetic looks from the Queen of France and Count Pierre d'Alençon’s wife, and a collection of lowborn women cheering for Marguerite when her husband wins the duel.

The performances are strong across the board, and Matt Damon in particular disappears into the role of Jean to a surprising degree. We’re used to him playing the nice guy in everything, but here he manages the nuances of an essentially decent man, but one so abrasive and bad-tempered that he’s a pain in the ass to be around. I can’t say Ben Affleck blends into the period setting to the same degree, but he’s having such a grand old time as the hedonistic Count Pierre that he ends up being the highlight of the film.

Marguerite is a bit of an odd role for Jodie Comer to play on the heels of Killing Eve, as it feels like she’s regressed back to the relative constraints of The White Princess, but she does some interesting stuff with her character in each narrative; depicting what it is that each man wants to see before she’s able to just be herself.

As for the rest... I laughed when Nathaniel Parker as Marguerite’s father turned up, as I’ve just finished watching him in Inspector Lynley, and was chuffed to see Adam Nagaitis as Jacques’s manservant since he was the only actor in The Terror that I had never seen in anything else (and he may as well have been playing Hickey’s ancestor in this film, as the two characters are equally loathsome). Good old Harriet Walter is here, as is Alex Lawther (Nemik in Andor), Michael McElhatton (Lord Bolton in Game of Thrones) and Marton Csokas (reuniting with Ridley Scott sixteen years after Kingdom of Heaven). Do you think all these actors are on a period drama rota-basis?

Ridley Scott is always good at capturing the minutia of life at the time: the wax seals, the thrown gloves, the nature of court justice, all of which goes a long way in tampering down some of the modern parlance that he deems necessary for getting his point across. And the fact remains that the past does reflect the present in several depressing ways: the ordeal Margurite faces in speaking out, the way avenues are offered to Jacques to help him escape justice, and the quiet conversations that take place in locked rooms which make it clear that the truth is less important than keeping the peace.

It's a tough, sometimes frustrating watch, but I don’t regret watching it, and I’m glad it exists.

Hustle: Season 1 (2004)

Having completed the entirety of Spooks a couple of years ago, I always meant to follow up with Hustle, which aired around the same time. In fact, I vividly recall that on-line discission during my tenure in the BBC’s Robin Hood fandom was very much flanked by both Spooks and Hustle, which both began before but concluded after that show’s three-season run, and contained a number of its pool of actors.

The premise is simple though the limited number of episodes (six per season, which was short even by British television standards at the time) speaks to the complexity of the writing that’s required for each instalment. Five con-artists band together in order to swindle wealthy fools out of their ill-gained dosh, using an elaborate blend of cold readings, manipulation, improvisation, psychology, and sexuality (thanks to the team’s Smurfette).

Specializing in long cons, they utilized the logic of magicians that was sometimes discussed in Jonathan Creek – that the cons are so elaborate, taking up so much time and effort, that none of their marks can truly believe it’s a set up. They can be fascinating to watch unfold, and I’d be curious to know if there was a real-life rise in grifting at the time all this aired (or perhaps a decrease given the show was giving all the tools of the trade away).

But these guys have a code – of sorts. According to their logic, you can’t cheat an honest man, and so they only target those that deserve it (a bit like Robin Hood, only they keep the earnings for themselves). I seriously doubt real con-artists regulate themselves in this manner, but it’s an easy way of giving the audience permission to root for career criminals... and just to keep things interesting, the team doesn’t get away with it every time.

Because it was 2004 there are some rather questionable gender politics strewn throughout (Danny decides he’s got the hots for Stacie, then yells in her face when she turns him down; later he’s baffled that another woman isn’t interested in him, then openly relieved when she tells him she’s a lesbian) though for the most part it’s tolerable.

Perhaps its most interesting feature is that Adrian Lester is the lead, as I have an inkling that casting a Black man in this specific role (a suave confidence man who romances/seduces a number of white women) back in 2004 was a bit of a risk. Certainly America didn’t follow suit when they aired their remake a couple of years later. I’ve no idea how it was received in Britain at the time (a comparative scenario is David Harewood playing Tuck on Robin Hood in 2009, who certainly did come in for some controversy) but it was the role that put Lester on the map.

Marc Warren plays the audience surrogate, naïve newcomer and wannabe grifter that Lester takes on as a prodigy (though I’m sorry, I can’t buy him as a lady’s man – there’s a reason he’s played so many villains, and it’s because there’s an inherent creepiness to his demeanour) and Jamie Murray is here too, who went on to make the rounds in a lot of sci-fi/fantasy shows (I really need to get back to Warehouse 13 one of these days).

It’s a lark, and has a lot of fun with its fantasy sequences and breaking of the fourth wall. Though some aspects have dated, I can totally see why it was such a big hit. And there’s plenty more to come!

Inspector Lynley: Season 5 and 6 (2006 – 2007)

I ended up watching seasons five and six of Inspector Lynley together, as there are only two episodes in the latter. For whatever reason, the BBC rather abruptly pulled the plug on this show, seemingly in the middle of production. At least each season contains standalone mysteries (so there are no cliffhangers) but the ongoing character arcs of Lynley and Havers suddenly come to a halt – I just can’t seem to avoid shows that get cut short, can I?

This season starts with Lynley, rather than Havers, in the hot seat, after losing his cool with a suspect at the end of last season and nearly throwing him off a balcony. Now it’s Havers’s turn to be the sensible and level-headed one, though she’s sporting long hair now, which is constantly blowing into her face every time she steps outside. Matter of fact, Lynley has the same problem. Not until Marvel’s Black Widow would fictional characters struggle so much over an inability to have an attractive yet sensible haircut.

Among the supporting cast there are regular appearances from Stewart Lafferty the forensic pathologist, Winston Nkata the detective constable, and our third actress to play the part of Helen. They just cannot get a handle on this character. Catherine Russell is more appealing than Lesley Vickerage in the role, but just as she and Lynley start to rekindle their relationship, she’s shot dead in front of him in the fifth season’s final episode, which seems incredibly pointless and mean-spirited.

As ever, there’s a bonanza of familiar faces, though it takes a while for them to show up. I was halfway through the first episode, when suddenly: Saskia Reeves! Having watched her so recently in Slow Horses, it was a shock to see her look so young. Then comes Blake Ritson, Joe Armstrong, Samuel West, Indira Verna, Roger Allam, Samantha Bond, John Shrapnel, Ed Stoppard, Geraldine Somerville, Denise Gough, Honeysuckle Weeks, James D’Arcy – man, so many actors cut their teeth on this show.

Other highlights include Liza Tarbuck as the heavily pregnant DI who Havers is paired with while Lynley is suspended, and it’s a damn shame she never reappears. She was fun! Likewise, it’s a trip back into the past with special guest appearances from portable CD players, flip phones, VCRs, camcorders, microfinche – even mention of a fax at one point.

Finally, the show was always good at capturing a real sense of place, no doubt helped by how it was all shot on location in some of the seedier sides of England: marshlands and trailer parks, off-season at the seashore, Hyde Park in London – one episode had so many shots of trains that I was convinced they were going to be a plot-point in the unfolding mystery, but nope – they were just there to capture the ambiance. You don’t see much of that these days. Even Slow Horses uses London as an interchangeable backdrop, but here the settings feel like an integral part of the show in its entirety.

Having come to the end of the series, I find that I’m going to miss it. Some of the storylines could get quite dark (and occasionally predictable, such as the battered wife who inevitably ends up being just as depraved as her abusive husband) but the team-up of Lynley and Havers is one for the ages. I suppose I’ll have to catch up on all those books now, won’t I. It’s a shame it had to end the way it did; so suddenly and without warning.

And I’ll always be annoyed that this was called Inspector Lynley, since it’s also very much about Barbara Havers.

Alex Rider: Season 2 (2021)

I continue my decades-long journey through the stories of Alex Rider, and at this rate I’ll be seventy years old by the time I get to their conclusion.

The way this show has been structured interests me: although there are fourteen books and counting in the original series, the show ended at three seasons, production having gotten caught up in the Covid pandemic. That said, it also managed to avoid outright cancellation, instead ending with satisfying closure – or so I’ve heard.

Furthermore, it skipped over the first book (Stormbreaker) in order to adapt the second (Point Blanc), presumably because the 2006 film had already covered that ground; where as the third book (Skeleton Key) is also left out in favour of the fourth (Eagle Strike). According to writer Anthony Horowitz, this was because Covid restrictions made it impossible to film such a complex storyline, which is partly set on a Cuban island and involves several underwater scenes.

This is slightly amusing when you watch what we get instead: a dreary holiday in Cornwall with inclement weather, and very few crowd scenes. Alex Rider has always straddled a thin line between James Bond-esque hijinks involving miraculous tech and exotic locales, and a more realistic depiction of what it must like to be caught up in espionage – Alex himself deals with PTSD, survivor’s guilt and a hero complex across the course of the books.

The visual language of this adaptation very much leans toward the latter tone; not glossy and glamourous, but just a step above the stale beer vibes of Slow Horses. The whole thing probably could have been condensed into fewer episodes, but I like that the whole thing takes its time. We get montages of Alex just hanging out with his friends, learning his lines for a high school drama play, supporting characters interacting with each other... it’s nice that a show like this has the chance to slow down and breath for a change, even if it means that it doesn’t get truly exciting until late in the game.

The show also does a good job with its adult cast, who naturally have to come across as realistically competent whilst also being outwitted by a teenager with comparatively little training. The MI-5 agents naturally make mistakes and overlook certain things, but they never come across as stupid, and they DO have a point when it comes to trying to keep Alex out of the field. He is a bit of a prick at times, and does cause the death of a valuable asset by flushing him out into the open.

Of all the cast, Stephen Dillane and Vicki McClure as Alan Blunt and Mrs Jones are pitch-perfect representations of their book counterparts, looking and acting exactly like they’ve just walked out of the pages. In fact, most of the scenes involving their characters play out like an adult drama, not a fun lark for adolescents.

It will probably be a long time before I get to series three, let alone the rest of the books, but as it happens, the last one I read was Scorpia – and that’s the book that the final season adapts.

Bridgerton: Season 3 (2024)

Why am I still here? I almost wasn’t; I told myself to skip this season of wealthy ladies pimping out their daughters to eligible suitors. And yet there’s obviously something about this show that makes me return to it. Maybe it’s because it’s a water cooler show at work, or maybe it’s my attempt to figure out why it niggles at me so much. This season I think I’ve pinned it down.

I was flicking through a Naomi Novik book of short stories at work, and this passage (her prelude to a Regency-era story) caught my eye:

The Regencies were my favourites... expect I had violent feelings about the ones that were wrong, by which I meant the ones where the characters were modern people playing dress-up in diaphanous muslins and riding in carriages, just pretending. Because I was interested in the rules, so inviolate and so obvious to the characters themselves, these people living inside narrow boxes, especially the women – in the short length of these books, their world couldn’t be more real and complicated, so instead they had to believe in the rules, inhabit them, or else it didn’t feel right. And I didn’t mind if they cheated, but they had to be clever about it.

This captures the underlying quality of Bridgerton that grates with me: it’s trying to have its cake and eat it too. For instance, the show knows on some level that its female characters are living in an oppressive patriarchal society. They cannot vote, they cannot inherit, they’re valued largely for their beauty and ability to have children, and so on. Occasionally the writers provide lip-service to this inherent unfairness of the world around them...

But the show also wants to be undiluted escapist fantasy for Romance fans. All the male love interests are “wife guys” with large wallets and even larger family jewels (wink, wink), who are besotted with the women they marry and have no other purpose in life but to please them sexually and emotionally, lavishing them with adoration and the benefits of wealth. They’re all forward-thinkers who respect their wife’s rights to autonomy and freedom of expression, and want nothing more than to please her every whim.

So even though plots are drawn from the social conventions of the time, any faux pas are treated as either mild inconveniences or titillatingly scandalous incidents that can nevertheless still be papered over if you have enough money and status to throw at the problem. So who really cares if these women remain trapped in patriarchal structures in which their only avenue to happiness is to marry well to a man who worships her? It’s not about overthrowing the system, but making yourself comfortable within it. In Novik’s words: they cheat.

Yes, I know that the show on the whole is a little campy/tongue-in-cheek, and on occasion they do discuss issues of societal injustice, but there’s not enough to counteract the fact that all these women are terrified at the thought of becoming old maids at the age of nineteen, or that the wish fulfilment element is often embodied in attaining a rich man’s love and/or being the centre of attention in society. Don’t get me wrong, I was equally annoyed when Meg March gets criticized for just enjoying a night off in a fancy frock, but here the desired endgame for these characters really does come across as vapid and superfluous. Just endless balls and instrumental cover music of pop songs and garish outfits.

It might be wish fulfilment, but none of this reflects my wishes.

The only response to that is that obviously it’s not for me, but I wish the show would just commit to the frothy nothingness of the storylines and drop their barely-implicit insistence that shows like this are healthy escapism for women because our lives are apparently so shit in 2025 that we need a fantasy about a Regency man coming along to get befuddled and captivated by our opinions and spirit/career aspirations that we’ll never actually have to do once we’re married/lady of the manor with a million servants to do all the hard work for us. At least that would be honest.

So. This season...

The format of the show is almost like an anthology series with a revolving cast: with each new season a Bridgerton sibling will become the next protagonist in their quest for love: first Daphne, then Anthony. This is the third season (though it feels like the fourth thanks to the spin-off series involving Queen Charlotte’s youth) and turns to Colin... though in fact, Penelope Featherington is really the lead this time around.

For the record, I love Nicola Coughlan, and as many have already commented, it’s fantastic to see a beautiful plus-size woman in a story in which she’s desired and sexual and happy. But when it comes to Penelope, I want to like her more than I do, and I have a lot of issues with her role as the anonymous Lady Whistledown, the gossip columnist that’s been terrorizing the Ton for the past few years.

The show finds itself in a bit of a pickle over it, and unfortunately doesn’t really delve that deep into the implications of it all. By this point the sordid gossip that Lady Whistledown has indulged in over the years makes her both feared and hated, especially by Colin Bridgerton, who has watched as two of his sisters and the woman he planned to marry have been slandered in print. He hates Lady Whistledown, which creates an interesting tension when he starts to see his friend Penelope in a new light.

Penelope herself has decided she’s had enough of life with her mother and newly-married sisters, and so decides that she’ll find herself a husband no matter what over the course of the season. She turns to Colin for advice on how to attract a suitor, and in true My Fair Lady style, he ends up falling for his own creation. Sort of. The show also seems uncomfortable with the potential implications of this, and as a result Penelope does so much of the work herself (choosing a new wardrobe, being assertive around men) that I’m not sure why she needed Colin’s assistance.

Even stranger, they also seem weirdly self-conscious about how Penelope is expected to give up writing as Whistledown after her marriage in order to keep it a secret from Colin, and so try to spin the persona as some sort of empowering thing, even though it’s really just a fancy gossip rag that she’s been using to talk shit about people for years because she didn’t like being a wallflower.

Then of course, Colin finds out about her secret identity...

Lip-service is rendered to the fact that Penelope has wreaked havoc over the past few years, and she doesn’t get away scott-free. She’s actually humbled more than I thought she would be, and I suppose it’s punishment enough that she’s stressed and miserable on what’s meant to be the happiest day of her life. But all things considered, she does get let off the hook rather easily.

Despite mentioning Marina a couple of times, no one points out to Penelope that she destroyed this girl’s life (and let’s be real here: she didn’t do it to save Colin from being someone else’s babydaddy, it was to prevent him from marrying someone else). Lady Bridgerton isn’t allowed to have any reaction to the fact that her new daughter-in-law has been slandering her family for the past few years, and Lady Featherington – despite being in serious financial stress for a long time – isn’t remotely fazed by the fact her daughter has been stashing thousands of pounds under the floorboards.

To top it all off, the show does that weird thing when the Romantic False Lead ends up feeling better suited to the heroine that the real one. I would have actually liked to see Colin falling in love with Penelope properly, and the Whistledown reveal happening early in order to better explore the fallout.

But perhaps sensing the looming threat of a cancellation-happy Netflix, the writers also attempt to do a two-for-one in the romance stakes, devoting half the screentime to Francesca; another Bridgerton daughter that I honestly have no memory of ever existing. Not only that, but the internet tells me the character has been recast, with the new actress who played Sarah Chapman in Enola Holmes 2. I rather liked her story: she’s pragmatic, introverted to the point of being withdrawn, and doesn’t have a romantic bone in her body, but unlike Eloise, she’s not a rebel. She wants to marry quickly and conveniently so she go about the business of getting on with her life – much to the disappointment of her romantic mother.

Francesca is placid and compliant, though having decided to simply take Queen Charlotte’s advice that she should marry whoever is selected for her, she comes to realize that there does have to be some common ground between life-partners. As such, she forms an attachment to John Stirling, a man with whom she feels she can be herself.

It's an interesting take on a love story since I was getting heavy aromantic/asexual vibes from her, which culminates in her mother admitting that she had her own ideas about romance (butterflies in the stomach, fireworks in your chest, getting swept off your feet and being unable to speak coherently) only to realize that Francesca’s approach to the experience was just as valid. At one point she commends Francesca on the “slowness” of the match (which is a little ironic since it seemed to move at the speed of light) but there are some lovely moments, such as when John brings Francesca a re-composition of the music that she likes, set to her own specifications.

It's nicely done, and a mature look at how romance can feel unique to different people in a show that’s always gone for the bombast and spectacle of love... until the final episode throws it all away when Francesca lays eyes on her new husband’s cousin and it turns out she’s been a lesbian this whole time. It’s disappointing really, as it undermines Francesca’s entire arc, as well as the rather touching way the show had gone about handling her potential aromanticism. According to what happens here, there IS only one way to recognize love.

Besides, wasn’t Eloise going to be the lesbian? That one is so obvious to me.

Miscellaneous Observations:

One can’t help but notice that society as presented here is divided into attractive people and the comically unfortunate-looking people, just so you can tell the difference between the protagonists and the losers; the ones you’re meant to project yourself onto, and the ones you have to dread being in real life.

Edwina Sharma has apparently married overseas. This is a bit of a shame, as she was a prime contender for another spin-off. I suppose it could still happen, though I won’t hold my breath.

Hannah New guest stars this season, which is fun since I haven’t seen her since Black Sails. I didn’t mind her as a love interest to Benedict, and she ends up inducting him into the world of threesomes, but it sounds as though someone else has been cast as his true love for season four. It seems a bit pointless to make him pansexual and then pair him up in an exclusive heterosexual marriage next season (or so I’m assuming) but whatever.

Also, wasn’t he an artist at one point? My memories are a little fuzzy, but apparently they’ve dropped that particular development down the hatch. Also missing is that printer’s boy Eloise was exchanging meaningful glances with last season – though that’s probably for the best since they looked so alike I could have easily bought them as twins.

Speaking of, Eloise continues to be a rebel without a cause, and between herself and Penelope, I marvel at how much animosity the pair of them can rouse in fandom. I mean, you come across these huge rants about hypocrisy and integrity and morality, and it turns out to be about one of these two secondary characters in a fluffy period romance show. Amazing. Personally, I’m quite fond of how Eloise is filled with such passion and fervour for social change and yet never does anything useful about it. She’s Erin from Derry Girls, basically.

(Though when they get to her character-centric season, I really hope they go way off-book. I’ve read a summary of her novel and it sounds appalling).

Turns out that Lady Danbury has a hitherto-unknown brother who looks like he’ll end up scratching the itch or “tending the flower garden” that Lady Bridgerton mentioned in the framing device of Queen Charlotte, which is a development about as interesting as the Mondrich family arc of this season. Their eldest son inherits a title, and they... cope with being rich. It has nothing whatsoever to do with anything else that’s going on in the show, and I don’t really know why it exists.