Reading/Watching Log #127

I’m swallowing my superhero fatigue in a desperate bid to clean out my hard-drive and make room for all the stuff I want to see in the not-too-distant future – which means that June is superhero month!

Either way, it’s long past time for me to wrap up the Arrowverse, of which there are still half-a-dozen shows I haven’t finished yet. By my reckoning I have one season of Supergirl, two of Batwoman, three of Legends of Tomorrow, three of The Flash and one of Black Lightning left to go. Oh, and the entirety of Superman and Lois. And was Stargirl ever part of this continuity?

When things ends before you’re given the chance to catch up with them, you inevitably lose a degree of investment, but I’m nothing if not a completist.

I also tackled the DC Animated Movie Universe, which is quite a mouthful, so we’ll go with DCAMU henceforth, though thankfully there were only four more to watch before their conclusion.

And yet while watching Superman getting killed by Doomsday for the third time, and Clark admit his true identity to Lois for what felt like the millionth, I realized that these types of stories are most akin to the King Arthur and Robin Hood legends in how they’re retold over the years. The origins of superhero stories are obviously not as ambiguous (I mean, they’re printed right there on the page) but we’re still dealing with a number of characters with set personalities and familiar stories that get adapted, readapted, rebooted and changed around until certain elements feel set in stone.

Robin Hood has an archery contest, the quarterstaff fight on the bridge, saving the poacher, helping someone marry their love, and rescuing someone from the gallows in the same way that X-Men has Wolverine struggle to remember his past, Jean Grey becoming the phoenix, someone returning to the past from a dystopian future, and Xavier’s School for Gifted Children getting blown up.

The Holy Grail was nowhere to be seen in the earliest King Arthur stories, but is now an essential part of any retelling. But is Percival the knight who finds it? Or Galahad? Or Bors? Different writers told different versions, and later versions handle the discrepancies by having all of them go on the Grail Quest.

This is type of storytelling is unique only to legends and comic book adaptations, and it’s quite fascinating to witness, as it’s the same story with the same characters every time… but not.

On another note, I realized I’m not hugely attached to superheroes. They were present in my childhood, but like The Wizard of Oz, were so American in nature that I never really felt a deep investment. This meant I wasn’t that phased about Zack Snyder’s dark-n-edgy take on the material, as it’s just another variation on the old stories – though I could understand why some people were upset. But as I said about Peter Pan in April, at some point you have to do something different, or else we’re just going to end up with twenty thousand identical adaptations.

(Though having said that, I watched Justice League Dark: Apokolips this month and was not ready for how grim that was gonna get).

Captain Underpants and the Big, Bad Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, Part 1: The Night of the Nasty Nostril Nuggets by Dav Pilkey

Yes, I am still reading these books, even if that title makes me want to dry-retch. Even as a kid I hated gross-out comedy in stories, so let’s get through this one quickly. George Beard and Harold Hutchins – troublemakers, practical jokers, comic book creators – fall into another misadventure.

It’s Demonstration Speech Day, and after our protagonists demonstrate a “squishy” (that is, placing a ketchup packet under the toilet rim so that the sauce squirts out when an unsuspecting person sits down), their classmate Melvin Sneedly presents his Combine-O-Tron 2000, a device that combines any two objects. In this case, a hamster with a robot to make a cyborg. It can also slice bagels.

But then Melvin uses the Combine-O-Tron on himself, accidentally sneezing just as the ray hits him, and therefore transforming into a disgusting “bionic booger boy.” Dismissing George and Harold’s suggestion to flip the batteries in order to reverse the effect (“that type of thing only happens in obnoxious children’s books”) Melvin continues attending school despite how gross he is – so gross that characters break the fourth wall to request the narrator stop describing him.

Unfortunately, a field trip leads to Melvin being offered a packet of tissues which causes him to freak out and promptly grow into a giant. I’m not entirely sure why, but he does. As with all these books, the third act is a rampage across the city – though it is the first book in the series to end with a “to be continued.”

And like every Captain Underpants book, this one also contains plenty of funny chapter names and the Flip-o-Rama pages, though my personal favourite would have to be the sight gag that goes with text that Melvin’s parents are working on “top secret government experiments.” In the illustration, we can see they’re putting pop rocks in coke. I lol’ed.

But with this, I am mercifully halfway through this series. Only six more to go!

The Bad Guys: Alien vs Bad Guys by Aaron Blabey

The sixth book in The Bad Guys series sees our wannabe heroes finally getting some credit for having saved the world from evil Doctor Marmalade’s zombie rays (even if the public aren’t sure what kind of fish Piranha is, or that Legs even exists), though it’s not over yet: Wolf, Shark, Piranha, Snake and Tarantula are still stranded on the moon – specifically in Marmalade’s space station, having discovered that the little guinea pig is actually a giant alien with teeth, tentacles and weird butt-shaped suction cups, secreting slime and goo everywhere.

There is an escape pod available, but just before they’re about to take off, Tarantula goes missing. Then Piranha, then Shark. They’re getting picked off one by one by the alien formerly known as Marmalade, and Snake isn’t making things easy. Always the most reluctant of the Bad Guys trying to reform themselves, he’s eager to simply take the escape pod and get the hell out of there.

But will he actually abandon his friends when push comes to shove? It doesn’t take a genius to know how it’s going to end, but along the way we get another of Shark’s amazing disguises (this time as a lady alien: “How did you manage to make this so quickly?” “I’m just good at it”), a pit of dried alien snot (so I ended up with two snot-related books this month, gag) and another cliffhanger ending. Turns out that Marmalade (real name Kdjfloerhgcoinweruhcgleirwfheklwjfhxalhw) is one of only thousands of aliens ready to invade Planet Earth, intel the Bad Guys have no chance of sharing after their escape pod accidentally sends them to the year 65 million BC (the last chapter is called “Out of the Frying Pan, Into The… hang on, that’s not invented yet”). The final panel has them coming face-to-face with a dinosaur.

Blabley’s illustrations are as funny and emotive as ever – the expressions he gets on the Bad Guys’ faces in particular are just hilarious, and Marmalade (I’m not typing out his full name again) in his true alien form has a great design, what with all the tentacles, teeth and butt humour. Given the choice between this and Captain Underpants, I’d definitely pick this.

Dawn and the Surfer Ghost by Anne M. Martin

I know I’ve said this before, but this time I’m one hundred percent sure this is the last time I’ll ever own both books in a single month and not have to rely on my library’s ebook collection – though technically they’re not actually mine. Each one has the name of an old friend from primary school written in the front cover. Whoopsie, I clearly forgot to return them back when I was ten.

This marks the first Dawn-centric book since she went to California, and demonstrates that the series will continue with her presence… the stories will just take place in another state. It’s a little strange that her first California story takes place in the Mystery subseries instead of the main one, but it makes for an interesting change of scenery.

Unfortunately, it’s not a very good mystery in the sense there’s not much for Dawn to actually solve (and it turns out the members of the We Love Kids Club are far less enthusiastic about sleuthing than the BSC are). Events just sort of resolve themselves with very little input from Dawn.

She and Sunny are volunteers at a children’s beach programme, which includes afterschool activities for many of the kids that have already been introduced in prior books. They’re also taking surfing lessons, during which Dawn meets a professional surfer called Thrash, who is described exactly as you’d expect: long hair, lots of piercings, and a snake ring. (Other surfers in the area are called Gonzo and Spanky – seriously, that’s what the ghostwriter decided to go with). Dawn and Thrash engage in some friendly chitchat and he gives her the nickname “Kelea,” only for him to go missing that very night.

The police don’t seem too interested and there are rumours that his surfboard was sabotaged, so naturally it’s Dawn on the case. She gets especially interested when there are sightings of a ghostly surfer riding the waves late at night, and of course tumbles to the theory that Thrash was murdered, and is now haunting the beach until his killer is found.

Turns out, that’s not the case. Thrash suspected someone was trying to sabotage his chances in the upcoming surfing competition, and so cut his hair and removed his piercings/ring in order to disguise himself, leaving his damaged board on the beach to make people believe he’d been killed. (For some reason, he keeps working at the concession stand, where absolutely no one expect Dawn manages to recognize him). Dawn talks him out of tit-for-tat measures and they come up with a plan that involves Thrash announcing himself at the competition, Gonzo panicking at his miraculous reappearance, and then getting arrested when he makes a run for it.

Er, what? Gonzo reacts badly to Thrash’s return and so undercover cops arrest him for sabotage? The cops who couldn’t care less about Thrash being missing in the first place? This is extremely silly. I also noticed one other plot hole: it’s during a cookout on the beach with the kids that Dawn first sees the ghostly surfer out on the waves (which was actually a very-alive Thrash practicing his moves under the cover of darkness), only for her to see the “mysterious new guy” (again, Thrash in his paper-thin disguise) at work a few minutes later. Thrash seriously managed to go from surfing to packing up in the time it took for Dawn to walk from the beach to the concession stand?

There are also another couple of “clues” that go nowhere – a spate of accidents on the beach that Dawn chalks up to Thrash’s angry ghost (which is very akin to what happened in Mary Anne’s Bad Luck Mystery) and Dawn finding a can of Thrash’s custom wax under the pier, with no explanation as to how it got there. In other words, a very dissatisfying mystery.

The B-plot takes place back in Stoneybrook, where Marilyn and Carolyn have taken up gymnastics, but are required to spot each other during routines. When Marilyn takes her eyes of Carolyn for a moment, the latter inevitably has an accident, and Marilyn decides she’ll never leave her sister’s side again. In a slightly subversive detail, it turns out that Carolyn is okay with her twin sticking to her like glue, but the two finally decide to quit it when the babysitters organize for each one to be invited to a different house at the same time. I’ve always thought of the Arnold twins as second-tier babysitting charges, but they actually turn up a lot in these stories.

In any case, not a great mystery but an important book for explaining how Dawn’s absence in Stoneybrook is going to work. For the first time in ages, chapter two includes more than just a rundown of the BSC’s inner workings (now it includes descriptions of the We Love Kids Club members as well!) and where you’d usually find the handwritten notebook entries at the beginning of third-person chapters are now letters from Dawn to various members of the Club (and visa versa).

Finally, I have never watched a single Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt episode, but apparently they use this book in one of the episodes, in which a teenager co-opts the basics of the storyline (she had a surfer boyfriend called Thrash who calls her Kelea that she meets on the beach at night so he can practice his moves without anyone seeing him) as her own life. Since Dawn and the Surfer Ghost was the only book she was allowed down in the bunker, Kimmy has the ability to call her out.

Claudia and the Perfect Boy by Anne M. Martin

Remember that post which went viral about twenty or so years ago, originating from the Sherlock fandom, which encouraged people to write about any kind of women, including “women desperate for a man”? That’s what I kept thinking about while reading this instalment, since it’s about how desperate Claudia is for a boyfriend. Can’t relate.

But then, some do, and this book is for them, not me. It starts with Claudia writing down a list of the desirable qualities she wants in a boyfriend, including “good listener,” “sensitive,” “artistic” and so on. In a conversation with Stacey, she comes up with a great idea: to pitch a personal columns page to the Middle School newspaper so that lonely singles can find each other, which immediately becomes a massive hit. Though she’s swamped with extra work, Claudia enjoys her new pursuit, and finds a way of using it to track down her perfect guy.

But of course, there’s no such thing as a perfect guy. After several disastrous dates (including one deeply uncomfortable one in which the guy has yellow fever) she receives a response to her own letter which appears to be from a boy who embodies everything she’s looking for – except that he’s left no personal details she can use to get back to him. It turns out that Stacey was the one behind this letter, in a bid to give Claudia hope that the guy of her dreams is out there somewhere (weirdly, all this happens in the very final chapter, and is resolved in the last couple of pages).

There are a few other mishaps along the way, such as Claudia accidentally putting Mary Anne’s love missive to Logan under the wrong name, leading Logan to believe she’s cheating on him, and Claudia struggling to help a student who’s grappling with his parents’ divorce.

Ultimately, the story doesn’t end with Claudia finding her dream guy, but instead realizing that: “I had my friends and I had myself. Everything I needed to be happy had been right here all along.” I can get behind that message, though I also appreciated the fact that Claudia was insistent on any hypothetical boyfriend being good-looking. It might be disregarded as shallow, but there’s no end to the discourse about how guys would never date someone unattractive, so I’m glad Claudia understands she’s entitled to those standards as well. (I mean for good or bad, we all want to date people we’re attracted to, right?)

In the rather poignant B-plot, there’s upset in the Barrett household when Mrs Barrett discovers that Marnia has a severe allergy to doghair – which means that their beloved basset hound Pow has to be rehoused. Buddy and Suzi are devastated, though there’s a silver lining when Pow is eventually adopted by the Pike family; not only friends to the Barretts, but within easy walking distance. It even manages to tie in with the main plot, when Stacey says: “I thought [sending you letters from a made-up guy] would be like with Pow. Buddy and Suzi feel better knowing he’s out there, knowing he’s at the Pikes’, if not at their house.”

But by far my favourite part was the profoundly nineties exploration into how a school paper is run, such as Claudia nearly having a heart attack after learning what Spellcheck is.

The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame

We’re taking my nephew to see a production of this story next month, which will hopefully be less traumatic than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Still, I want to make sure he’s properly prepped for it, so I checked out our library copy of this book, only to be stunned that it was written by Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows) and illustrated by E.H. Shepard (Winnie the Pooh). I had no idea either of those men were involved in this!

However, I was familiar with the Disney film from a very young age, something we had recorded on VCR, which is why I think my nephew will be okay with it. It’s a very simple story about a boy who befriends a dragon that has chosen to inhabit a nearby cave. When St George turns up to defeat it in battle, the boy intervenes and insists that the dragon is a “reluctant” one. With minimal fuss, George agrees to stage a battle for the sake of the villagers, and for the dragon to pretend to be so humbled by the encounter that nobody thinks of him as a threat any longer.

It all goes according to plan, and everyone is left in peace. It’s really quite lovely, and after Finn heard this story (heavily abridged, as he’s only five) he had a big smile on his face. So hopefully he’ll handle the performance, despite any initial attempts the dragon might make to be scary.

Originally written as a short story in a longer collection, it’s since taken on a life of its own, and is widely considered to be the first story to feature a “good” dragon. Shepard’s illustrations are perfectly matched to the content, and in fact the image of the Boy reading on the Downs has become the iconic image of the publishers – though I found out that Inga Moore has also illustrated a version. I have to get my hands on that!

Literary Gardens: The Imaginary Gardens of Writers and Poets by Sandra Lawrence and Lucille Clerc

This was one of those “read the premise, immediately check it out” books, in which Sandra Lawrence writes about thirty literary gardens – that is, the fictional gardens that appear in the novels, short stories and poems of a wide range of writers over the centuries and across the world. It would make a beautiful gift for bibliophiles and gardeners alike, and with its evocative, horticulturally-accurate full-page illustrations by Lucille Clerc, would look great on any coffee table.

It’s a coffee table book, which means it can’t go into very deep analysis, but it’s a fun read. It starts with The Secret Garden naturally, the most famous literary garden of all.

Of course, the chapters have more resonance if you’re familiar with the material on which they’re based. I loved reading Lawrence’s thoughts on places such as the gardens in The Secret Garden and Tom’s Midnight Garden, the rose gardens in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the apple orchard of Caer Paravel in The Chronicles of Narnia, the sunken garden in Agatha Christie’s Hallowe’en Party, and the flower garden in The Importance of Being Earnest… but was a little more lost when it came to Virigina’s Woolf’s description of Kew Gardens, the orchid-filled greenhouse in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, or Death’s Garden in Terry Pratchett’s Mort.

Obviously, Lawrence chose her selection carefully – also present are imaginary gardens belonging to the likes of Katherine Mansfield, F. Scott Fitzgerald, M.R. James, H.G. Wells, Jamaica Kincaid, and The Ramayana, but the more familiar you are with her sources, the more enhanced your enjoyment will be.

Each chapter contains a description of the garden, its relevance to the novel/author, and speculation about any real-life inspirations. Lawrence pulls out her favourite lines and passages, and provides some fascinating insight along the way, such as the meaning behind Algernon rejecting Cecily’s yellow rose (associated at the time with New Women) for a pink one (which was still considered the colour of masculinity), or how The Tale of Peter Rabbit is a reverse fairy tale, in which the forest is safety and the vegetable patch is lethal, or how Caer Paravel is in six of the seven Narnia books, but we seldom get to go inside it (narratively, the apple orchard is far more important).

Along with these discussions on specific literary examples, there are also five chapters on broader topic: Literary Plants (the poppy fields of Oz, strange fruit, Frances Hardinge’s The Lie Tree), Imaginary Species (Tolkien’s pipeweed, kingsfoil and the Ents; Rowling’s mandrakes, gillyweed and the Whomping Willow), Science Fiction (H.G. Wells’s red weed, Arthur Clarke’s “The Reluctant Orchid,” Frank Herbert’s inkvine, the Triffids, the Little Shop of Horrors), Fairy Tales (the rose garden of the Beast, the forest of thorns in Sleeping Beauty) and the World Tree.

At the very back there’s a list of locales you can visit that are open to the public which are either directly or hypothetically the inspiration for many of the included authors, such as Great Maytham Hall, the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, Orto Botanico in Padua, Loevestein Castle – though Lawrence advises caution. The gardens she describes are largely imaginary, and anyone who goes to visit Beatrix Potter’s house is naturally going to assume it inspired Mr McGregor’s garden… even though she purchased it well after the publication of Peter Rabbit. But we do like to visit real places and say “this is where that story was born,” don’t we.

And I have to say I was surprised at some of the omissions, though she touches on this in her introduction. There’s nothing from Shakespeare or The Decameron, and I was sorry to hear that she wanted to include the Owens Sisters’ herb garden from Practical Magic, but had to cut it. More tragically, there’s nothing on Hemingford Grey Manor, which did directly inspire the Green Knowe books, and in fact remains almost exactly as it was when first described in those books. Why cut it? Why cut any of it? It’s your book Lawrence, you could have made it as long as you wanted! 

Taylor and Rose by Katherine Woodfine

There’s nothing like re-reading a book that you know you really enjoyed, but can’t recall the details of. A couple of months ago I read the first four books in this series: The Sinclair’s Mysteries. The remaining four books were published as Taylor and Rose: Secret Agents, with a definite shift from London-based mysteries to international espionage. It’s always a bit of a risk to change the branding like that, but the change in tone and setting justifies it.

Like its predecessor, there are four books, unlike The Sinclair’s Mysteries, these stories are far-flung across Europe and America. And Woodfine knows how to pick a tantalizing setting: an aeroplane competition in Paris, a circus in St Petersburg, a masquerade in Venice, and a luxury cruise ship to New York. Just thinking about it is thrillsome, and it gives you no chance to miss the glamorous department store London headquarters.

Sophie and Lil spend most of their time apart in Peril in Paris, with Sophie investigating the murder of one Professor Blaxland while Lil poses as a governess to protect a pair of royal siblings, though they’re reunited in Spies in St Petersburg after their separate missions eventually collide. Poor Billy and Joe initially have to sit things out entirely, though Tilly is with Sophie in Paris, Leo and Jack accompany the girls in Villains in Venice to infiltrate a house thought to be owned by a member of the Fraternitas Draconum, while Mei and Billy go undercover in Nightfall in New York. Woodfine never forgets a single character, and ensures that everyone has something important to do.

She also pays close attention to details: as Sophie and Lil’s plots begin to converge in Peril in Paris, the characters start to catch glimpses of each other: Anna sees “a girl in a blue dress” run up the hotel steps, Forsyth complains of a girl spilling his drink, a commotion is heard on the street outside, another character brushes past “a girl with a dog” – and in the subsequent chapters that present the other character’s perspective, we can see who and what exactly they’re reacting to.

There are a few slightly silly elements – like how it asks us to believe the British Secret Service would give up an important almanac for the life of one man, and Nightfall in New York has our characters deal with a bomb and an iceberg in quick succession, right before the villain escapes on a submarine. As one of the characters remarks: “if I put that in a story people would think it was too silly for words!” But these later books also pay more attention to the social issues of the period beyond the existence of the suffragette movement: on going undercover to New York, Mei has to pose as a wealthy heiress or else she’ll be stopped at the border by the Chinese Exclusion Act, while Tilly has to be a maid for the same basic reasons. With that, Sophie realizes: “for all the difficulties that Sophie faced as a young lady detective, she was always learning of the many more that Tilly and Mei had to deal with.”

And yet in some way it’s rather nice these characters don’t have to deal with any overt racism or misogyny. It’s Woodfine’s prerogative that these be light and fluffy spy thrillers, in which every meeting between our protagonists involves hot cocoa and iced buns, and what follows is a standard comment a character might make: “We’ll jolly well have to find some evidence to prove the Fraternitas were behind all this. The likes of Forsyth simply cannot be allowed to go about trying to blow up ships, and that’s all there is to it.”

Best of all, there’s a wonderful focus on female friends. The main narrative thoroughfare throughout all four books are the ongoing attempts of Sophie and Lil to be reunited, each one aware that they work best when they’re together. Even on a smaller scale, there’s a lovely note which Anna (the girl Lil must protect in Peril in Paris) longs to go to an English boarding school. She gets there eventually, and though any other story would punish her by giving her more than she bargained for, it turns out boarding school is just as great as she imagined it – especially making a best friend for the first time. It’s just lovely.

As I said at the end of The Sinclair’s Mysteries, this would all translate so well and easily to the screen. Why hasn’t there been an adaptation yet?

Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer

One series finished, let’s crack on to the next. Artemis Fowl was reasonably well-suited to superhero month, as the plots are very comic booky, filled with supervillains and gadgets and secret missions and so on. I read the first book years ago, then trailed off halfway through the second, but I couldn’t resist the covers of the most recent publications.

In the immediate wake of Harry Potter there was seemingly no end to the [first name] [last name], and the [interesting adjective] [noun] books that were published about extraordinary young boys and their magically inclined adventures. Septimus Heap, Charlie Bone, Percy Jackson… and Artemis Fowl. Like Alex Rider, the books were very popular, though perhaps a little sneered at despite having no pretension of being anything other than a fun read for kids.

But there was a difference between Artemis Fowl and those other boys: he was no plucky young hero, but an amoral antihero, whose key motivation throughout the books is to restore his family fortunes by whatever means necessary. Along with his loyal bodyguard Butler, he concocts a plan to kidnap a fairy and hold them hostage for a vast fortune.

This attempt at ill-gotten gains is what makes up the plot of the first book, in which Artemis and the fairy he successfully kidnaps – one Holly Short, a captain in the LEPRecon (or Lower Elements Police) – match wits with each other in the rooms and hallways of the Fowl Manor. Despite the crimes he commits and the laws he breaks, Colfer adds enough pathos to Artemis’s background that we feel a little sorry for him: not only is his father missing, but his mother has never gotten over the shock of his disappearance and has suffered a mental breakdown because of it.

In The Arctic Incident, Artemis and Holly find themselves unlikely allies when the whereabouts of Artemis’s father is disclosed, and in The Eternity Code, they face a greedy entrepreneur who gets his hands on a piece of fairy tech (largely thanks to Artemis himself).

As a general rule I don’t like “comedy fantasy,” which puts me in the awkward position of admitting I’ve never read any Terry Pratchett. Even stuff like Disenchantment wasn’t my favourite, and in terms of gross-out humour this is definitely akin to Captain Underpants. I’m sure you already know how Colfer’s dwarfs are able to burrow at high-speed through the earth (it involves the intake and swift ejection of dirt) so your enjoyment of these books heavily depends on your tolerance for this sort of thing.

There are some interesting – and familiar – rules surrounding fairies at work here, such as the importance of exact wording, guest and ownership rights over a household, and the requirement to be invited into a dwelling (usually a vampire thing, but it makes sense here as well) but I can’t say I loved that the fairies were as high-tech as they were, complete with a bureaucracy and police force. There’s no sense of mystery about them, and they could have been underground aliens for all the difference it made. That’s just not what I read fairy tales for. (To be honest, the vibes kind of reminded me of Trollhunters).

The books have also dated in a lot of ways, with frequent mentions of Gameboys, Polaroids, digital cameras, AppleMacs, minidisc players and even a fax machine. I’ll keep reading, since the whole point of this exercise is to finish all the children’s book series that I never completed when I was an actual child, but Artemis Fowl is a real mixed back. For every genuinely clever invention, like how a strand of dwarf hair is so strong it can be used as a lockpick, there’s something immensely silly, like how Stonehenge is actually a pizza parlour.

Fargo (1996)

I actually watched this on the very last day of May, but didn’t have the energy to write about it in the limited time I had left. So, you’re getting it here instead.

Simone Weil’s famous quote on the nature of good and evil in fiction and reality is pertinent here: “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvellous, intoxicating.” This may be the only film I’ve ever seen that manages to thoroughly buck this trend – here, evil is greedy and ugly and stupid, while good is kind and intelligent and appealing. Why can’t all stories manage this?

Considered an American classic, it’s been so popular that I’ve probably inadvertently watched plenty of things that have been inspired by it (the first season of Happy Valley springs to mind), which means I saw most of the story beats miles in advance – namely that when a mediocre car salesman needs to get himself out of financial trouble, he comes up with the insane scheme to have his wife kidnapped in order to extort money from his wealthy, overbearing father-in-law, it’s inevitably all going to go horribly wrong.

In fact, it goes so wrong in such a depressing, gory and cruel way that if it wasn’t for Frances McDormand’s competent, observant, warm-hearted, heavily pregnant Marge Gunderson, then it would be unwatchable. She deserved that Oscar, and this essay spells out how crucial she is to the film’s success. That said, the entire cast put on a great performance, from Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare as the despicable kidnappers, to William Macy as the equally contemptible “mastermind” who is so out of his depth that it’s down to sheer dumb luck that he gets as far as he does.

Amidst all the violence, perhaps the great joy of the film is how specific it is to its time and place, and how much it delights in the small stuff: the little character beats that telegraph the decisions they’re going to make later on, the chirpy Minnesotan accents and the unforgiving nature of its winters – even the way Marge’s husband gets out of bed before dawn with her to make sure she has a cooked breakfast. 

4:50 from Paddington (2004)

Another sick day, another Miss Marple. I’m under the impression that this is Agatha Christie’s most famous Marple mystery, working with the premise that one of her friends witnesses a woman being strangled through the window of a train as it briefly runs parallel to her own. The police find nothing in the carriages, though Miss Marple comes to a suspect the murder was well planned in advance, with the killer deliberately throwing his victim from the train to a place in which he could conceal it better later. There’s only one location along the line that fits the bill: the grounds of Rutherford Hall.

For this Miss Marple employs the aid of young Lucy Eyelesbarrow to take on a temporary housekeeping job at the manor house, specifically to search for any dead bodies. She finds a house full of suspects: old patriarch Luthor Crackenthorpe, his grown children Alfred, Cedric, Harold and Emma, and his son-in-law Bryan Eastley. Soon enough, Lucy finds the body of a woman in the family mausoleum that fits the description of the woman seen on the train. But who is she, and is someone from the house responsible?

SPOILERS

I may be speaking sacrilege here, but this little TV movie actually improves upon Christie’s book in regards to one pertinent detail: motivation. The solution to the mystery is a perspective red herring, in which all the clues lead you to believe the dead woman is the wife of the family’s deceased eldest son, whose own child now has a claim on his inheritance. Clearly someone did away with her to preserve the family fortune, right? In truth, the killer only wanted to make this seem like the hypothesis, by planting fake clues as to the woman’s identity. The woman was actually the killer’s wife, who he wanted to get rid of so he could marry Emma.

Now, in the book his motives are purely mercenary: he also kills two of the Crackenthorpe brothers so his future wife gets a larger share of the inheritance. But in this adaptation, he chooses murder over bigamy so he can be with the woman he loves. Having been present at the passing of Old Mrs Crackenthorpe, he’s privy to her last words: “love is all that matters, not money” – and he takes this to heart. He legitimately doesn’t care about the family fortune, and the murder of Alfred happens not to further enrich Emma, but because he saw him planting evidence and decided to blackmail him.

He really does do it all for love – but in the context of cold, hard reality, it’s not grand or romantic, just rather sordid. Nicely done, show. Another nice touch is that Old Mr Crackenthorpe gets a mini-arc that’s not in the book; going from someone who complains about the care his adult children aren’t giving him, to someone who steps up and becomes their father in the film’s final moments.

More blasphemy: I know Joan Hickson is widely considered to be the best Miss Marple, but I think Geraldine McEwan best captures the character’s disarming exterior: that of a sweet little old lady whose trilly voice, fluffy hair and fey-like manner allow her to be easily dismissed. She’s who I picture when I read the books.

These adaptations always have stacked casts: we’ve got Pam Ferris (sadly not in it as much as I’d have liked; she was very funny and had great chemistry with Geraldine McEwan), Amanda Holden, John Hannah, Ben Daniels, Griff Rhys Jones, Niamh Cusack, David Warner and Michael Landes (I’ll always thinks of him as the original Jimmy Olsen in Lois and Clark). Heck, Jenny Agutter is here for one scene (in which she dies), as is Rob Brydon as a desk sergeant who won’t take the little old ladies seriously. Even Pip Torrens has a one-scene cameo. How are they booking all this talent??

Justice League Dark (2017)

I watched and enjoyed this movie years ago, so this month’s theme was the perfect excuse to revisit it. I love the esoteric, mystical side of the DC Universe, and this revels in its unique aesthetic of super-heroism and arcana, with a grab-bag of mystically attuned characters such as John Constantine, Zatanna, Jason Blood, Felix Faust, Swamp Thing, Boston Brand (the only one I’d never heard of before) and Batman along for the ride. Yeah, that last one is definitely the outlier, but he certainly makes more sense in this context than Superman or Wonder Woman (though they cameo, along with Green Lantern). The only obvious omission is Raven, though she’s already appeared on Teen Titans in this particular continuity.

Something is making ordinary people around the world hallucinate horrifying demons where there are none, leading to a spate of homicides/suicides. The Justice League believe the threat is supernatural in origin, so Batman rounds up some useful allies: Zatanna, John Constantine, and Boston Brand (also known as Deadman, a trapeze artist killed mid-performance who can now possess any human body he takes over). Also along for the ride is Jason Blood, a former knight of Camelot who was magically fused with the demon Etrigon after his death by Merlin. Comic books, man.

What follows is a great little supernatural mystery-adventure with animation that captures all the spell casting, body hopping and demonic activity that our leads are capable of. The House of Mystery is a great location, as is the character design of Orchid, its genus loci. The best part is our host of magic-users, as they really do feel like they’re tapped into a greater world of spells and rules and artefacts we can’t fathom – at one point during a fight Zatanna is desperately struggles to remove a blindfold from a small statuette. We don’t learn why, we only see the effects when she manages it.

Matt Ryan voices Constantine, as I’m not sure how they would have justified casting anyone else – like Patrick Stewart and Professor X, some actors are just born to play a certain character. This is definitely my favourite of the films in this particular branch of the DCU, and I’m looking forward to seeing them again in Justice League Dark: Apokolips War. (Edit: I spoke too soon – that movie is depressing).

One last thing: it amazes me that we can put Batman into a film without the need for any introduction, as the greater portion of the audience will know what his background is and what he brings to the table. This film also contains one of the all-time great Batman quotes. On being asked by an empath how he deals with all the grief and trauma emanating from him, he replies: “I have a butler.”

Suicide Squad: Hell to Pay (2018)

I say this a lot, but it’s been a long time since I checked in with this franchise (which is a very specific branch of the DCU, which is technically called the DCAMF, made up of sixteen animated films in the same continuity). It’s always a strange thing to watch comic book adaptations these days – writers have a huge pool of characters from which to draw upon, many of whom have their own set personalities and storylines that can’t easily be deviated from… which means this is the umpteenth time we’ve watched Deadshot attempt to reconnect with his teenage daughter, or Vandal Savage come up with an elaborate plot to consolidate his own power, or Amanda Waller push the ethical boundaries of whatever mission the Suicide Squad has been sent on.

And yet in other ways, this gives writers a sense of freedom: in a largely standalone story that isn’t beholden to a more lucrative big-screen franchise that has to hedge its bets and keep options open, this can play around with familiar characters and the premises they’re based on – and more pertinently, can kill them off if need be. This is what this film does; juggling a large cast pretty effectively, especially in utilizing their wide range of unique abilities. I mean, that’s the whole fun of these team-ups, right? Anyone who enjoys the basic premise of Suicide Squad (black ops missions by expendable villains) should enjoy this.

After establishing the Suicide Squad and its purpose in a short introductory mission that ends with three out of four participants dead, Amanda Waller puts together another team for another off-the-books mission which is more covert than usual: Bronze Tiger, Killer Frost, Copperhead, Captain Boomerang, Deadshot… and Harley Quinn, because apparently you can’t have a Suicide Squad without her, even though it never made a lick of sense that a ninety pound girl armed with a baseball bat was sent on these missions.

They’ve been tasked with retrieving a rather unusual MacGuffin: a small card that simply says “get out of Hell free.” The story goes that whoever has it when they die can bypass Hell and go straight to the pearly gates, no matter what crimes they committed in life. That is not how salvation works in any way, shape or form, but then that’s not the point. The point is that nobody actually knows whether this card is the real deal or not, but several interested parties – namely Amanda Waller, Reverse Flash and Vandal Savage, are eager to get their hands on it given their imminent deaths from various maladies.

The movie is definitely for adult viewers given the extreme violence and gushing wounds, not to mention a few exotic dancers – male and female. There are plenty of innovative actions sequences and the overarching plot of three different teams going after a “get out of hell free” card and all the ethical implications that it raised, was a solid one. There are a few neat cameos along the way; and the character design of Copperhead in particular (a humanoid snake) was very good – though I was deeply annoyed that once again they’ve made Amanda Waller svelte instead of overweight. That character is a powerful fat woman, dammit!

The Death of Superman (2018)

I don’t have a lot to say about this one, as between the 2001 – 2004 Justice League cartoon and the Zack Snyder movies, we’ve seen it before. Doomsday crashes to earth, and Superman fights him to the death. A massive funeral is held, but in the closing moments it would appear he’s returned to life – which is followed up on in the immediate sequel: Reign of the Supermen (so immediate that it’s since been released as a single movie).

As part of the DCAMU continuity, several voice actors return: Jerry O’Connell is surprisingly good as Superman, Rosario Dawson as Wonder Woman, Rebecca Romijn as Lois Lane, Rain Wilson as Lex Luthor and so on. There’s some interesting insight and commentary as to what Superman means to the world (he’s special because he’s essentially a decent person, regardless of any superpowers) and why Lex hates him so much (it boils down to jealousy and resentment this time around) and the film does a good job of slowly and gradually revealing Doomsday, both physically and in regards to the threat he poses, with a slow inexorable march towards Metropolis. Still, a near-mindless villain with no motivation beyond “destroy” is hardly an interesting one.

The emotion of the story is derived from Clark “coming out” as Superman to Lois and introducing her to his parents, but the truth is we’ve seen this play out so many times that it’s hard to get too invested. In fact, it’s such an intrinsic part of any Superman story that it took me a while to figure out that Lois didn’t know his secret in this particular continuity.

The Reign of the Supermen (2019)

In the wake of Superman’s death, four mysterious lookalikes emerge with a strong resemblance to the felled hero: a flying teenage boy, a person inside metallic armour, a logical, emotionless man with all of Superman’s powers, and a somewhat alarming looking cyborg who claims to be the real Clark. Stepping up into the role of protagonist is Lois, who works through her grief by investigating these Superman wannabes (she even gets to pass the Bechdel Test with Wonder Woman!)

There’s quite a lot of moving parts at work, but each Superman’s origins are eventually explained, whether they’re a clone made by Lex Luthor, a piece of Kryptonian technology, a vigilante with access to high-tech innovations, or a brainwashed puppet working for Darkseid – speaking of, the end of this film plugs straight into the events of Justice League Dark: Apokolips War…

Justice League Dark: Apokolips War (2020)

Holy shit, that was bleak. They were not kidding with the use of dark and apocalypse in the title. Despite saying earlier that I had no deep emotional connection to superheroes, I have to admit I was not prepared for how disturbing it would be to watch almost all of them get brutally slaughtered.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like for an existential threat to actually win? Like if Thanos’s snap was permanent, or if the White Walkers overran Westeros, or if “The Wish” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was the only reality there was? A perverse part of you might have always wondered what it would be like to see the total annihilation of the world’s greatest heroes, and you certainly get your wish with this film. It puts forth a scenario in which Darkseid legitimately defeats the Justice League. It’s practically a “worst case scenario” deconstruction of superhero films in which things go from bad to worse and there are no limits to the villain’s depravity and sadism.

Like I said, it’s pretty hard to watch. Heroes die gruesomely onscreen. Others are tortured into submission and turned into mindless, cybernetic slaves. The death toll just keeps building.

It also acts as the grand finale of this branch of continuity, cherry picking its main characters from the teams that’ve been spotlighted throughout: the Justice League, Titan Titans, Suicide Squad and Justice League Dark, giving us Superman, Lois, Raven, Damien, John Constantine and (sigh) Harley Quinn as our protagonists who put up one last desperate act of resistance after a catastrophic defeat in the film’s first few minutes.

The problem (if you want to call it that) is that the carnage is so profound, the destruction so complete, that they write themselves into a corner – either let the desolation stand and be a depressing albeit ballsy end to this branch of the DC, or reverse it and render the whole thing pointless. As upsetting as it was to watch, it reminded me a little of how I felt regarding all those Peter Pan adaptations back in February/March. These stories have been told so many times, and for so many years, that I can’t mind that much when recent offerings started taking big swings with the material. In the great scheme of the DC multiverse and all those billions of different worlds, perhaps this is the story of one of the unlucky ones (the ones that you usually only see about five seconds of in a prologue or flashback sequence, just to clue the audience in as to the stakes without ever endangering the “real” timeline).

As it happens, they find a solution – the film ends with the Flash running back in time to try and change things, though whether he’s successful or not is left ambiguous. That said, Wikipedia tells me there were more animated films in a new continuity made after this one; perhaps they’re set in the timeline derived from the Flash’s tampering (and even if that’s never confirmed, you could always chose to assume they are).

Warriors: Richard the Lionheart (2007)

This is the odd one out in this month’s watching/reading list, but the library recently announced it’s going to end its subscription to Access Video, which means I only had to the end of the month to watch it. This was part of a series about famous warriors across history, such as Hernan Cortez, Attila the Hun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, and Richard the Lionheart, but the reason I wanted to watch this one specifically was because it had ties to the BBC’s Robin Hood, not only featuring Steve Waddington as Richard (just as he did in Robin Hood) but also Harry Lloyd as one of the young Crusader soldiers.

Giving the timing, one can almost imagine they were snapped up on-location while they were shooting the final episode of that show’s second season. It wouldn’t have required much effort for the two to side-step into this docu-drama, and if it wasn’t for the fact Harry Lloyd’s character is called “Lucas,” you could easily pretend he’s Will Scarlet (you wouldn’t actually want to though, as Lucas comes to a tragic end – and there’s no sign of Djaq either). Also appearing are a few Merlin guest stars: Alice Patten, who played Igraine, and Donald Sumpter, who was the Fisher King.

This documentary covers Richard’s arrival in the Holy Land and his failed march on Jerusalem, but is mostly interested in staging battle scenes on a very limited budget. It also lionizes him far more than he deserves, choosing to leave out the massacre at Ayyadieh, which – taking into account all the complexities and atrocities of any war – I truly believe lies at the dark heart of the ongoing animosity between Christian and Muslim. Even at the time, Christian scribes struggled to defend it, but here Richard is simply lauded as a brilliant tactician, fierce warrior and nobly flawed man, closing with his reclamation of Jaffa and the compromises that both sides were forced to make.

I’m going to miss this library resource, as it’s also how I found the documentaries Angel Coulby and Anjali Jay featured in. Not only is this sort of material not included on anyone’s IMDB pages, but it’s well-nigh impossible to find it anywhere else. Ah well, at least I got to see it once… nearly twenty years out from when it was most relevant to my interests.

Freedom Fighters: The Ray (2017)

I’ve had this one for ages, but was mistakenly under the impression it was part of the build-up to Crisis on Infinite Earths, though it’s clearly a prequel to the Earth-X crossover instead, introducing Ray Terrill (“the Ray”) as voiced by the same actor that played him in live-action: Russell Tovey. In fact, the likes of Melissa Benoist, Carlos Valdes, Danielle Panabaker, Echo Kellum and Megalyn Echikunwoke also lent their voices to the characters they already played in live-action (or in Benoist’s case, her evil alt-world doppelganger).

Like its predecessor Vixen, which did the similar task of introducing Mari McCabe before her live-action debut, all twelve episodes only clock in about thirty minutes of footage, but it tells a fairly involved story of how Ray’s doppelganger from the Nazi-ruled Earth-X escapes into Ray’s dimension and bequeaths him his armour and its light-based powers. After using them to foil muggers and bank robberies (what else?) Ray meets our line-up of familiar heroes (Arrow, Flash, Vibe, Mister Terrific, Vixen) before ending up on Earth-X, pursued by the New Reichsmen who want the cerebral cortex in his possession, and eventually choosing to fight alongside doppelgangers of his work colleagues.

The animation looks better than you’d expect (I suppose we have the show’s brevity to thank for that) and much was made of this featuring the first gay superhero to headline his own show (bisexual Sara on Legends of Tomorrow doesn’t count?) It’s a fun, inconsequential little lead-in to that particular crossover, working best as a vehicle for Russell Tovey’s character and providing him with some needed context. As I vaguely recall, he appeared quite abruptly in the live-action episodes.

Legends of Tomorrow: Season 5 (2020)

It’s always strange catching up with a show that ended some time ago, as the attention and excitement has long since subsided, but hey. I did vaguely recall the conclusion of the last season, in which some timey-wimey alternate-worlding went down and Zari was exchanged for her brother Behrad. This one is concerned with resurrected villains from across history (dubbed “encores”) getting released on the world, all because a little girl called Astra that Constantine failed years ago is all grown up and wants her revenge.

From there, the storyline spirals out to include a number of different subplots. Charlie (who has mostly been tagalong up until now) reveals her true identity, Constantine wants to give Astra a chance to redeem herself, Nate attempts to track down the “mystery woman” that he recalls from the previous timeline, Mick discovers he’s a father and tries to bond with his now-teenage daughter, and Zari returns to the team as a vapid influencer who has no idea who they are or what they’re doing. It all comes together in a mission for the team in which they track down the Loom of Fate in order to save one of their own.

One of the pros and cons of a revolving-door ensemble cast is that you get great characters alongside some truly awful ones. This show boasts two of the greatest female characters in all of DC’s history – Sara and Zari, no contest. It also features the best comeback story for Matt Ryan, who gets to reprise his born-to-play role as Constantine after his own show was cancelled. There are more hits than misses, as Charlie, Ray and Nora are lots of fun, and Shayan Sobhian as Behrad pulls off the incredible feat of making it feel like he’s been on this show all along.

But then there’s the likes of fratboy Nate, womanchild Mona, terminally neurotic Ava, and the horrifically annoying Gary. I suppose I can tolerate Nate and they get rid of Mona pretty quickly, but there’s really no excuse for the other two. They suck up so much screentime, and actively make other characters worse by association. Sara is such a vibrant free spirit, such a perfect blend of devil-may-care tough girl and empathetic, responsible leader, and to see her saddled with a dour, needy, self-absorbed stick-in-the-mud like Ava is profoundly depressing. Sara has to constantly coddle her even when she’s the one in pain, or blind, or facing her own death. Can you believe the episode in which she’s grappling with the death of Oliver Queen ends up being all about Ava, who writes her a jealous, passive-aggressive condolence card about “the guy you cheated on your sister with”?

She also answers Sara’s phone without permission, dismisses her as “going looney” when she starts having premonitions, inexplicably tries to hide important stuff going on in the ship, and somehow makes Sara’s impending death all about her. Even the little things irritate. There’s one scene in which the characters are lining up to use the bathroom, with Sara first in the queue. But when it finally becomes free? Yup, Ava is first through the door without a second glance.

And guess which character the writers are seemingly obsessed with? There’s not a single episode that seemingly doesn’t involve Ava working through some sort of insecurity issue and a member of the team praising her at the end for how special and important she is. At about the halfway mark the writers start pushing the idea of she and Sara being co-captains of the Waverider.

This is some bullshit since she’s not a particularly good leader, mostly because the Legends are intrinsic rulebreakers, and she’s a strident rule-follower. She gives orders and everyone just ignores her. But all this pushing of the co-captain agenda starts to make sense when Sara is abducted in the last seconds of the final episode – obviously Ava is going to have to step up in her absence, though I’ve no idea how that’s gonna work since no one listens to her and she needs a pep talk every time she faces any minor issue.

The crazy thing is that when she’s paired with other characters or off doing her own thing, I like her just fine, but she’s a TERRIBLE girlfriend to Sara, who hardly gets to interact with anyone but her. It physically pains me to see Sara in this relationship, and the way they incessantly call each other “babe” does my head in.

Yeah, I get that we all project ourselves a little on characters, whether we mean to or not. There’s every chance that Sara LIKES being able to emotionally support Ava to the extent that she does… but I shudder at the thought of having such a high maintenance person in my life.

On the general topic of shipping, chemistry is a funny thing. Sara and Ava don’t have much, and Nate and Zari don’t either, though I’m reconciled to the fact that these relationships were what the writers had committed to. And then, out of nowhere, Zari and Constantine perform Romeo and Juliet together (it makes sense in context) and promptly set the screen on fire. Holy shit! The writers quickly realize what they’ve got, and end up making this most unlikely of couples the show’s powerhouse pairing. When it comes to shipping in long-term ensemble shows, sometimes I think it’s best to commit to nothing, and just see what the actors bring to the table. Let the chemistry/dynamic find itself.

Also, this is perhaps the first time I’ve ever seen a female character actually benefit from a love triangle in the sense that it sheds light on her characterization rather than just exist for the sake of drama and shipping engagement. Zari 1.0 lost her entire family in traumatic circumstances, which means it makes sense she’s attracted to benign himbo Nate. Meanwhile, Zara 2.0 is a child of privilege who enjoys play-squabbling with a bad boy. The difference in each one’s taste in men perfectly accentuates their backgrounds, and Tala Ashe distinguishes each one with her body language, speech patterns – even facial expressions.

Storywise, the season is dominated by Charlie, Constantine, Astra and Zari, whose decisions and actions are most integral to the overarching plot. This means Sara often feels like a supporting character in her own show, while Ray and Nora get written off entirely. Sometimes Mick only appears in a single scene per episode. In Caity Lotz’s case, I’m pretty sure her limited screentime (especially at the start of the season) was because she was busy filming the crossover, though from what I could discover about Brandon Routh’s exit, it was an attempt to cut down the budget (as a former movie star, he was far and away the most highly paid actor. That and the effects for his Atom suit were astronomically high). It’s a bit of a loss, but at least it allows Caity Lotz to take her rightful place as first billed in the opening credits.

Legends of Tomorrow is by far the most enjoyable of the Arrowverse shows; that the premise is so broad means you can look forward to whatever craziness they come up with for each episode, and man do they deliver. Genghis Khan is one of the Encores, and after establishing that he revolutionized warfare with the use of horses, the episode’s big twist is that he’s now done the same with scooters that can easily weave through traffic in order to attack Prince Charles’s motorcade. The god Dionysus ends up being the leader of a frat house so he can maintain his power through a never-ending party, and in order to save her friends’ lives, Charlie places the Legends in a range of television shows that spoof the likes of Friends, Downton Abbey and Star Trek. Oh, and the final battle is set to “The Song Thong,” as performed by Sisqó himself. The mad genius energy that runs through this show is just impeccable.

Also, is it just me or is it quietly trying to forget it ever established Nate as a hemophiliac? Not only does he cross paths with Tsarevich Alexei (perhaps the world’s most famous hemophiliac) without saying a word, but he’s constantly getting into scrapes and fights without his (presumably expensive-to-render) steel superpower. (He’s Colossus from X-Men, basically). Isn’t that incredibly dangerous?

Supergirl: Season 6 (2021)

I’d say there’s a new Supergirl on the horizon, but she’s technically already here: Millie Alcock cameoed at the end of James Gunn’s Superman, and her own film released just this month. That’s as good a reason as any to finish up with Melissa Benoist’s take on the character, in a show that ran for an impressive six seasons (and this season alone had twenty episodes, which made me gasp. It’s still hard to believe that amount was once the norm). 

That said, it’s very obvious this season had some production trouble. If I recall, Covid lockdowns messed with everyone’s shooting schedules (The Flash and Nancy Drew had similar problems) and the result is that the seasonal arc feels a bit lopsided. First of all, the season premiere was clearly meant to be the last season’s finale, what with Kara getting sent to the Phantom Zone. Secondly, I’m under the impression that Melissa Benoist was pregnant during this time, which means that her screentime is fairly limited while in the Phantom Zone, with most of the action revolving around her friends trying to get her out.

Finally, it’s very obvious that the show has gone through some pretty significant budget cuts. There are smaller sets, less special effects, and the frequent cost-saving measure of splitting up the cast so that different storylines can be shot simultaneously across different locations (if there’s an episode in which one of the regulars doesn’t appear, I can guarantee they’re off shooting their own character-centric storyline in a completely different place).

Another example: early on the show introduces us to a pair of blue alien traffickers. Later on, only one of them returns in a recurring role, and the actor appears in his normal skin tones without any explanation.

The season itself is roughly divided into two halves: the first with attempts to extract Kara from the Phantom Zone, and the second with the whole team dealing with a fifth-dimensional imp called Nyxly who is collecting powerful totems from around the world to create an all-powerful MacGuffin that… I dunno, leads to world domination or something? She’s played by Peta Sergeant, who I very recently watched as the Jabberwock in Once Upon a Time in Wonderland.

The stuff in the Phantom Zone can’t help but feel like padding (even if it’s where Kara first meets Nyxly) though she does get to find her presumed-dead Kryptonian father played by Jason Behr, who I haven’t seen since his Roswell days. Yup – her father is alive too, and is greeted with the same “oh hey, what’s up?” nonchalance that her mother also received. Once they’re rescued, he goes off to be reunited with his wife, and is never seen or mentioned again. Buh? Why on earth wouldn’t Kara travel with him to see her parents together again? That’s insane!

But at this point Nyxly becomes the season’s Big Bad, with a Gotta Catch Em All hunt for a collection of magical totems that have an effect on universal emotions like love, hope, courage and so on. Along the way she teams up with Lex Luthor, while the Superfriends (yes, they really call themselves that) deal with their own little subplots: Alex and Kelly adopt a little girl called Esme, Nia gets closure with her estranged sister, Lena discovers her biological mother was a witch, Brainy learns he has to return to the future, and Kara once again grapples with her dual responsibilities as Kara and Supergirl.

There are ups and downs. Esme is insanely cute (though the precociousness is overkill – the cuteness was more than enough to carry her through) and fulfils Alex’s long-established desire to be a mother. J’onn doesn’t get much to do. Kelly taking on the mantle of Guardian is completely unnecessary. Nyxly makes for a decent villain, not so much immoral as amoral, though after giving her legitimate grievances and a moral line she won’t cross, they ultimately just toss her back into the Phantom Zone. It’s a bit of a waste.

A stint of time travel lets us see Cat Grant as a younger woman (the actress nails Calista Flockhart’s mannerisms) and David Ramsay as John Diggle turns up for an episode with some hints he’s already become a Green Lantern. As much as I like Jon Cryer’s take on Lex Luthor (there’s a real shark-like menace and ruthlessness to him), a little goes a long way and the character tends to dominate whatever storyline he’s a part of.

Andrea doesn’t get much to do but be antagonistic toward her employees, and the likes of William and Lillian Luthor are ultimately only present to fall to the Sacrificial Lion trope. Someone has to die in order to establish how high the stakes are.

A word on William: I actually didn’t mind this character, though everyone else seemed to hate him – probably because he was introduced as a love interest for Kara. But why not just let him be her sidepiece? He was hot and nice and yeah, I know I’m being a contrarian here since I usually advocate for female characters not needing a significant other to be happy, but it was painfully obvious his quick mention of an offscreen girlfriend at the start of this season was mostly done to placate shippers who are never, ever happy anyway, so why bother?

There’s no getting around the fact it’s a bit lacklustre, especially the anticlimactic defeat of Nyxly and Lex, and the fact that the day is saved by a stirring speech and a magical spell. There are a few (probably accidental) Actor Allusions along the way, such as Katie McGrath being endowed with magical powers (like Morgana), or David Harewood’s advocating for Supergirl to empower people instead of just fighting on their behalf (like Tuck once did). Also, they give away all the big Back For the Finale cameos in the last episode’s opening credits. Why spoil the surprise? Still, it was nice to see James, Winn, Cat Grant and Mrs Danvers once last time. And Mon-El I suppose. (Yeah, I know he’s married to Melissa Benoist, so they kinda had to have him here, but it was still weird he turned up to save her only to tell her he’s never coming back from the future again).

But where was Superman? M’gann? Mxyzptlk? Kara’s biological parents? None of them bothered to turn up to help in the last big battle? Like I said, you can really see the cracks and the budgetary limitations they were working with here.

Every time I finish a show, I immediately want to go back and binge the whole thing from the start, though there’s no way I’m actually going to do that. But we can now put a big fat tick next to the end of Supergirl, only five years out from its actual completion. My memories of prior seasons might be a bit vague, and it was never my favourite Arrowverse show, but the cast was committed, the vibe was light, the messaging was earnest, and any female-led project that makes it to six seasons is an achievement worth celebrating. One day I’ll no doubt watch it with my niece while she’s still too young to watch Buffy and Xena.

Harley Quinn: Season 4 (2023)

I’ve taken so long in getting to season four of Harley Quinn that the entirety of season five has been released in the interim. We pick up with Harley having joined the Bat-family and Ivy being appointed the CEO of the Legion of Doom, and if you think being on opposite sides of the good-versus-evil conflict is going to put a strain on their relationship, then you don’t really get this show. Not least because Ivy wants to promote “socially conscious” evil plots, while Harley is contributing to the fight for justice by straight up murdering people with her baseball bat.

Both want to impress their new coworkers, whether it’s the by-the-book Bat-family or the misogynistic super-criminals that Ivy now finds herself in charge of. In their respective corners is the delightfully try-hard Barbara Gordon and the defrosted Nora Frost, forging a new identity for herself outside of “thawed wife of supervillain” in the messiest way possible. I love them.

It’s always nice to be reminded that men can write good female characters since women are, you know, people. It’s not that hard. In this case the show can poke fun at the empty platitudes of lean-in feminism (various female supervillains lunch together and hand out tote bags, but will turn on each other in a heartbeat) while also allowing Ivy to take pride in being a powerful woman and wanting to succeed in her new role because of it.

Plotwise, the story is all over the place, and though I’d like to say it all comes together by the final episode, it remains rather scattershot. Among other things, we’ve got Harley catching glimpses of her doppelganger, Ivy attending a supervillain convention on the moon, Talia al Ghul attempting to sabotage Wayne Enterprises, Nightwing getting murdered and various other characters searching for his killer, and a sojourn into a dystopian future in which Harley and Ivy meet their future daughter.

As for the supporting characters, King Shark’s wife is expecting babies, Clayface is enjoying his newfound fame, Alfred robs a bank so he can join Batman in prison, Commissioner Gordon clones a potato, and Lex Luthor has some nefarious scheme that I honestly lost track of. It’s frenetic.

Despite the overarching plot not being nearly as tight this time around (and the ongoing objectification of Nightwing, who is for real this show’s favourite Butt-Monkey) there’s still plenty of fun to be had, and some pertinent points made when it comes to female villains being both empowering and exasperating (I mean, they’re demonstrating hard power in great costumes, but also selfishly killing people for a profit). And as ever, there are plenty of great quotes. My favourite would have to be a newbie supervillain who enters the fray yelling: “I don’t have a catch phrase yet, so time for my thing!”