Finally, we have my nominations and
votes in the "visual" categories: comics, tv, and film. (I have linked the titles
if I have written a review elsewhere.)
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
6. Doctor Who, special #3: "The Giggle", written by Russell T Davies, directed by Chanya Button
Of the four episodes of Doctor Who to air in 2023, this is the one I would be least likely to submit for the Hugo Awards. It certainly had some strong moments, and I am not as against the "bigeneration" as some, but it did not come together for me.
5. Loki 2x6: "Glorious Purpose", written by Eric Martin, directed by Aaron Moorhead & Justin Benson
Longtime readers of my Hugo rankings will know of my absolute dedication to my bizarre tendency of refusing to watch any episodes of serialized streaming shows other than the ones that are the actual finalists, which means that I watched this, the twelfth and final episode of Loki, having seen only one previous episode, the fourth, back in 2022. As a result, there were a lot of character beats that totally went over my head, but I was able to (mostly) work out what was going on, and it seemed pretty interesting. I can imagine myself watching more of the show, which is more than I can say for most Marvel stuff on Disney Plus. I struggled to rank this versus "The Giggle" but decided that if this didn't land for me, it wasn't its fault I don't think.
4. The Last of Us 1x3: "Long, Long Time", written by Craig Mazin, directed by Peter Hoar
I gather
The Last of Us is a postapocalyptic show about fungus zombies (I
did copyedit
an essay about it earlier this summer), and that it's pretty serialized, but this one stands on its own fairly well, as most of it is an extended flashback about two side characters, one of them a doomsday prepper played by Nick Offerman, following them from the early days of the apocalypse in 2003 up to the present in 2023. I thought it was a very well done depiction of a lonely man who finally found a situation in which he might thrive—I've only really seen Offerman in
Parks and Rec, so this was my first experience of his (considerable) dramatic chops. Since it stood alone much better, I was happy to place it above
Loki, but I wasn't about to place it above the very good episodes of any of the shows that I actually watch!
(When I uploaded the above screenshot I was reminded of my consistent objection throughout the episode that it was very clearly not filmed in Massachusetts.)
3. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 2x07: "Those Old Scientists", written by Kathryn Lyn & Bill Wolkoff, directed by Jonathan Frakes
I was not surprised to see this as a finalist: a crossover between Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks is exactly the kind of fan-pleasing thing that Hugo nominators love. But it was indeed a worthy finalist; lots of great jokes of course but also some surprisingly dramatic moments. I liked the way Boimler's future knowledge played into the season character arc of Nurse Chapel's attempt to have a relationship with Mister Spock.
2. Doctor Who, special #2: "Wild Blue Yonder", written by Russell T Davies, directed by Tom Kingsley
In one sense, this is a weird anniversary special. The Doctor Who specials on either side of it are celebratory, in the sense that they bring back beloved characters and old concepts from Doctor Who's long history. But I really like that on getting David Tennant and Catherine Tate to come back to Doctor Who, Russell T Davies's instinct was to do a low-key episode that required them to act the shit out of it. This is Doctor Who at its best, and the kind of thing I'd happily see win.
1. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 2x09: "Subspace Rhapsody", written by Dana Horgan & Bill Wolkoff, directed by Dermott Downs
If ever something was destined to win me over, surely it was a musical episode of Star Trek. But this was a particularly good execution of that premise; its placement as the second-last episode of the season means it isn't a fun interlude, but the culmination of several key character throughlines. Christina Chong is a powerhouse singer, and her character of La'an cemented herself as my favorite with this episode; Celia Rose Gooding excels in Uhura's big musical number, which also brought their character into focus for me; Ethan Peck's song as Spock was surprisingly clever and good. Lots of good jokes too, of course, and the final musical number is excellent.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
6. The Wandering Earth II; directed by Frant Gwo; script by Yang Zhixue, Frant Gwo, Gong Geer, and Ye Ruchang
This is a Chinese movie; it's actually a prequel to the first Wandering Earth movie (2019), which is itself based on a Liu Cixin short story. The premise of the movie is that the sun is expanding, so they have to stick giant engines on the Earth and fly it out of the solar system. It's long on spectacle; its 160 minutes revolve around three big crises across decades: a terrorist attack on a space elevator, a solar storm on the moon, and the explosion of the moon. Various characters' stories weave through these crises, most prominently a heroic astronaut (and his family) and a computer scientist (whose dead daughter has been uploaded into a computer). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this latter subplot was the most interesting part of the movie, which was long on (admittedly well rendered) spectacle but short on anything else. I am glad this is a finalist, because it's the kind of thing the Hugos should be recognizing, but it's not the kind of thing I feel inclined to vote for. Very obviously inferior to Barbie and everything else on the list this year.
5. Barbie, directed by Greta Gerwig, script by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach
I feel a bit weird ranking this where I ranked it, and I wonder if I was set up by the buzz around this film—or maybe as a man I am just doomed to not get very much out of it. I mean, I did like it a lot. Amazing visual design, good jokes, and fun songs, plus I particularly enjoyed the performance of America Ferrera. I thought the movie had a lot of great moments when it came to being a woman but I did find the message of the movie kind of muddled in that I didn't really understand what it was trying to say using the Kens. Obviously they were wrong to try to impose patriarchy... but it wasn't very obvious to me that they were wrong to rebel to begin with. Anyway, it was good fun and I enjoyed it but not as much as I wanted to.
4. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor among Thieves; directed by John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein; script by John Francis Daley, Jonathan Goldstein, and Michael GilioAs opposed to Barbie, which wasn't as good as I expected, this was way better than I expected it to be! I thought it was going to be bad, but it was way better than it had any right to be. My favorite movie trope is probably "group of disparate people come together to accomplish something against impossible odds" and this is an excellently executed example of it. Excellent jokes, charming acting (a friend said that Chris Pine is the best Chris and I think she is probably right, but the rest of the cast is also great), good character moments, fun twists and hijinks, and (surprisingly for a modern action movie) no long tedious action sequences. I really enjoyed this movie.
3. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse; directed by Joaquim Dos Santos, Kemp Powers, and Justin K. Thompson; script by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller and Dave CallahamThe first Spider-Verse film was an unexpected pleasure for me. This one is still excellent in some ways... but not quite as good in others. Utterly beautiful, doing amazing stuff with the medium of animation I've never seen anywhere else. Great score. Good jokes (if not as many as I remember from the first one). Neat character work with Miles and also Gwen, really getting a lot out of both visual and voice performances. I was a little skeptical of marrying up Miles's personal plot with a threat-to-the-multiverse plot, but the movie actually did a good job of that. This would easily rank above Nimona... except it's half a story! I had known it would end on a cliffhanger, but I had expected more of a Empire Strikes Back here's-a-hook-to-the-next-one cliffhanger, not a you-need-to-watch-the-next-one-to-get-anything-out-of-it cliffhanger. (That said, it's a very good cliffhanger with a very good twist!) But anyway, I feel compelled to ding it one spot. The next one doesn't even have a schedule release date yet!
This is one of those cases where I begin to doubt my ability to rank things. I definitely think Nimona is better than D&D, and I definitely enjoyed D&D more than Barbie. But is Nimona better than Barbie? That doesn't seem right! But I guess that's the reason I try to think of these things as a series of one-on-one matches (I build the rankings as I watch things, rather than wait until the end), so I just have to make a series of small judgment calls. Anyway, this took me a bit to get into, but once I figured out what vibe it was going for, I found that it was both funny and had some good stuff to say about what we count as "monsters." Good reveal at the end.
1. Poor Things, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, script by Tony McNamaraI think for certain people this is going to be a bit of a "hot take" but I really enjoyed this move. You have an inkling of what is going on from the beginning but only figure out the precise details as you go, so I will avoid too many spoilers, but basically a mad scientist in the 1890s (though, pleasingly to this pedantic Victorianist, no one ever uses the word "scientist") reanimates a woman's dead body. She has the mind of a child in the body of an adult. The film uses this concept to explore ideas about sex and gender. I (of course) kept thinking about John Berger, who tells us that, "To be born a woman is to be born, within an allotted and confined space,
into the keeping of men. The social presence of women is developed as a
result of their ingenuity in living under such tutelage within such a
limited space." Poor Things explores these concepts by giving us an adult woman who has not had the tutelage necessary to understanding. How do others see her and how does she come to see herself?
The whole thing has this veneer of unreality laid on top of it, too; excellent use of visuals that call attention to themselves as visuals, which is of course what you would want in a film about how men see women, and how women come to see themselves. I think what I was most unprepared for, though, was how funny the movie was. I wouldn't categorize it as a comedy, but all the reviews and discourse I'd heard led me to expect it to be fairly po-faced, but it had several excellent laugh-out-loud jokes. The film has a ridiculous premise, but it totally leans into that and manages to use it to posit some serious things. I think this movie probably has a smaller circle of people who would enjoy it than D&D, but for me it was more of an achievement, so I gave it the edge easily.
Best Graphic Story or Comic
6. The Three-Body Problem, #01–14; script by Cai Jin and Kaishu; art by Caojijiuridong and Shuixiongchon
This is the first fourteen installments of an adaptation of Cixin Liu's
The Three-Body Problem, which won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015, and has since been transformed into a
Netflix show. Based on my seven-year-old memory of the novel, it seems to be fairly straightforward and faithful, but I don't know that it ever rises above the level of competence. The art is fine, but I found myself wishing the part focusing on the "Three-Body" game had been weirder. The best part, like in the novel, is the cynical cigarette-smoking cop who thinks the whole thing is bullshit.
5. Saga, Volume Eleven, script by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona Staples
Saga itself is great, of course, but this doesn't feel like one of its greater installments, though it has a lot of nice moments. The world of Saga is pretty complicated at this point—which is one of its strengths—but that means it does not benefit from the fact that my reading has been stretched out across over seven years! Who are all these side characters? I look forward to my inevitable reread when it's completed, but for now I mostly grok the story of Alana and Hazel, which I enjoy but is continually being interrupted. Anyway, all that is to say, I am glad I am continuing to read this, and I can see why it keeps getting nominated, but I wouldn't give it an award.
4. Bea Wolf, script by Zach Weinersmith, art by Boulet
This is a retelling of the first part of Beowulf in comics form, in modernized English with vaguely Anglo-Saxon alliteration—except it's all about kids. The mead hall is awesome treehouse, Grendel is a mean teacher who hates fun, the warriors are all kids playing outside. It's very well done in the sense you have to admire the cleverness of it all... but I feel like my admiration is entirely technical; I was never swept up in this. Like, wow what a good job they did... but why? But still, neat stuff. So, I place it above Saga in that I can see why to someone else it's award-worthy, but below Witches of World War II in that it's not something that grabbed me.
3. The Witches of World War II, script by Paul Cornell, art by Valeria Burzo
This is a very solid comic, the exact kind of thing that you would want to be a finalist in Best Graphic Story, but it seems to me so rarely is. A nice original graphic novel, with solid writing and good art, and an interesting sf&fnal premise. I enjoyed reading this a lot, and I would happily see it win.
2. Wonder Woman Historia: The Amazons; script by Kelly Sue DeConnick; art by Phil Jimenez, Gene Ha, and Nicola Scott
This was the first Hugo finalist I read this year, and as soon as I read it, I felt like it was the one to beat in Best Graphic Story. In my experience, the franchise comics in this category are either excellent (last year's Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow) or excruciating (last year's Dune), with little middle ground. This is definitely in the former category; absolutely beautiful art, with something interesting to say to boot. Transcends its origins easily.
1. Shubeik Lubeik by Deena MohamedThis is an Egyptian graphic novel originally published in Arabic, now translated into English; the title means "your wish is my command." It's set in a version of our world where people can make, sell, and buy wishes (they come in bottles or cans). The wishes are of varying quality: first-class wishes always come true as you want and are very powerful; third-class wishes can backfire on you if the wish takes you literally but doesn't adhere to what you actually want. The book begins with a stall owner trying to sell three first-class wishes he wants to get rid of (he's a devout Muslim, and using wishes is against Islamic precepts), and follows three overlapping stories of the people who come into possession of each of the three. Clever, inventive worldbuilding, good comedy, but also some real pathos and emotion; I particularly liked the middle story, about how wishes might fit in with depression and talk therapy, but was also a good metaphor for how we handle depression in our world. I said Wonder Woman Historia was the one to beat... and this one beat it! While Historia is magisterial, this really resonated with me in a lot of ways. But I'd be happy for either to win!
Overall Thoughts
As someone who watches both Strange New Worlds and Doctor Who, I of course appreciated the finalists in Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form). These are Star Trek's third and fourth nominations since the beginning of the Paramount+ era... will it finally win? I feel like it might have a good shot. "The Giggle" is a bit of a goofy choice, to be honest, but I can't quibble with "Wild Blue Yonder." I liked both Loki and Last of Us well enough. I also thought Long Form was a strong category—an interesting, diverse set of finalists... only one of which was a superhero film! And that is one of the most distinctive superhero films of our time. All stuff I had not seen and was glad to be exposed to.
I also feel like this was probably the best, most interesting Graphic Story ballot probably ever. Again, neat stuff, none of it too similar to each other or to past finalists.
What will win? Well, I think Star Trek for Short Form, Barbie for Long Form, and god knows what for Graphic Story—the voters always manage to baffle me on that one even when the nominations are good.
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