My seven-year-old is a fiend for DC Comics, and it's been making me nostalgic for the way I was introduced to a lot of DC characters, the DC Animated Universe. So I started thinking about trying to get them to watch it with me... which of course meant I wanted to work out a proper order!
Lots of people have made timelines, of course, but the problem with timelines is that there were two series set in the future compared to the others, but watching those at the end doesn't make sense; the assumption of the series is that when Terry from Batman Beyond pops up in Justice League or Static Shock, you know who the character is because you've already seen Batman Beyond. I suppose one could watch in a strict broadcast order, then, but that seemed to have its own downsides; I wanted something that captured more of a chronological flow, where you were moving back and forth between shows that happened simultaneously instead of watching in big chunks as seasons aired.
So here's my attempt:
The first tab shows the broad-strokes organization; the second gives you an episode-by-episode breakdown. Similarly, I'll give a broad-stroke explanation here, and then drill down into the details.
Broad-Strokes Organization
The episodes of Batman: The Animated Series are notoriously confusingly ordered, either as produced or as broadcast. I used this Reddit thread as a guide to a totally new order, with some small tweaks based on the comments. I timed Superman: The Animated Series relative to it and The New Batman Adventures, such that the two crossovers between the two characters ("World's Finest" and "The Demon Reborn") lined up correctly.
Once both shows come to an end, they are replaced by Batman Beyond, Justice League (later Justice League Unlimited), and Static Shock, so at the same time you are following the Justice League and Static in the present, you are following the new Batman in the future; thus when he pops up in both shows, you know who he is. Finally, there's the other DCAU future-set show, the Batman Beyond spin-off The Zeta Project; I timed this to start when Zeta first appears on Batman Beyond and wrap up around the same time JLU ends.
There are obviously some times when there are big gaps between when things aired: for example, B:TAS finished airing Nov. 1994, while New Batman Adventures didn't start until Sept. 1997. Similarly, there was a big gap between when NBA and S:TAS ended (Jan. 1999 and Feb. 2000, respectively) and when Justice League started (Nov. 2001), where just Batman Beyond and Static Shock aired. But in all of these cases, I just had things carry through as continuously as I could.
Detailed Organization
Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures
I used Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures as the organizing spine of the first half of the timeline. I added in the Batman-adjacent DCAU movies based on the Reddit thread above:
Mask of the Phantasm between "Prophecy of Doom" and "Night of the Ninja"
SubZero between B:TAS and NBA
Mystery of the Batwoman after "Sins of the Father"
This gave me 105 installments of Batman, which I numbered sequentially. (I did accidentally leave out "Two-Face, Part II," so it got added in as 15.50. I hope I didn't miss out anything else!)
Justice League and Justice League Unlimited
The two Justice League–focused shows ran the longest of everything that came after B:TAS and NBA, so I used them as the organizing spine of what was left. The regular stories were thus numbered 106 to 167 on my list. Then, at the end we got:
168. Justice League vs. the Fatal Five: released years later, supposedly in continuity with the DCAU, after the end of JLU
169. "Epilogue": the season two finale of JLU, but entirely set in the future timeline of Batman Beyond and designed to function as a coda to the whole DCAU
There's also a Batman & Harley Quinn movie that takes place between seasons of JLU, so I numbered it 154.50.
Superman: The Animated Series
This began during the gap between B:TAS and NBA, and continued in parallel with NBA. S:TAS and NBA crossed over in the S:TAS story "World's Finest," which is set before "Sins of the Father" (80.00), the first episode of NBA. I thus numbered "World's Finest" as 80.50. I decided that prior to that, I'd like it if the shows just pretty much alternated, so I numbered all the preceding stories of S:TAS backwards from there: the one immediately before "World's Finest" ("Father's Day") would be 79.50, the one before that ("Ghost in the Machine") 78.50, and so on. Working backwards, this gets you to the series premiere, "The Last Son of Krypton," as 56.50, so basically, fifty-six B:TAS stories in, you begin alternating the two shows up until you get to the crossover.
The next key story was "The Demon Reborn," which is another crossover with NBA. This story sees Batman and Superman teaming up, and so many place it simultaneously with the NBA episode "Girls' Night Out" (97.00), where Superman and Batman are away on a mission. So I numbered "The Demon Reborn" as 97.50. In between "World's Finest" and "The Demon Reborn," I just distributed stories evenly, which came out to intervals of 0.89. So mostly alternating between NBA and S:TAS, but sometimes you'd get two S:TAS stories between stories of NBA.
That left just one S:TAS episode, the series finale "Legacy." I decided to make both NBA and S:TAS wrap up at about the same time, and thus numbered it 104.50, placing it before the last episode of NBA, "Mad Love" (105.00). This creates a decent gap between the last two S:TAS episodes, but that actually reflects how they were broadcast, months apart.
Static Shock
Static Shock started out totally standalone, but ended up crossing over with the wider DCAU a few times. The first of these is "The Big Leagues," a crossover with NBA, which probably goes after the end of that show according to the fine folks on Reddit.
There are then two Justice League crossovers, "A League of Their Own" and "Fallen Heroes." These both need to go before the Justice League episode "Starcrossed" (130.00), before the league was reorganized as the Justice League Unlimited. So I numbered "Fallen Heroes" as 129.50.
I then decided that I'd like Static Shock to pretty much just start when S:TAS came to an end, so that there wouldn't be a point after the end of S:TAS before the debuts of the other shows where you were only watching NBA. Thus I numbered its first episode, "Shock to the System" as 98.50, picking up right off from S:TAS's "The Demon Reborn" at 97.50.
I then distributed the Static Shock stories between those two episodes evenly, which meant they occurred at intervals of 0.76. So between NBA stories (and later, Justice League stories), you'd typically have one or two episodes of Static Shock. Doing this gave "The Big Leagues" a placement of 108.33, so after the NBA finale (105.00), which was right, and "A League of Their Own" a placement of 120.43, so again, in the right spot.
After Static Shock came to an end, the character appeared in the JLU story "The Once and Future Thing" (142.00). So I set the last episode of Static Shock ("Power Outage") as 141.50, and distributed all the episodes between "Fallen Heroes" and "Power Outage" evenly at intervals of 1.33.
Batman Beyond
In terms of broadcast sequence, Batman Beyond picked right up from the end of NBA, so I set its first episode, "Rebirth," shortly after NBA's final episode (105.00) at 106.50. Batman Beyond had forty-nine stories, plus a movie, Return of the Joker. There is a Static Shock episode where he travels to the future and meets the future Batman, "Future Shock" (127.23). The DCAU wiki suggests that Return of the Joker must take place before "Future Shock," so I numbered Return of the Joker as 126.85.
That meant I simply distributed all Batman Beyond stories evenly between those two points, at intervals of 0.42. So you are watching quite a lot of Batman Beyond in between episodes of the Justice League and Static Shock.
The Zeta Project
The last thing to place was the other DCAU future-set show, The Zeta Project. Zeta first appeared in the Batman Beyond episode "Zeta" (117.30). There actually was a decent-sized broadcast gap between Zeta's first appearance in Batman Beyond and their own show debuting, but I decided it was more satisfying to pick up right away, and thus set the first episode of Zeta Project ("The Accomplice") at 117.51. Zeta Project crossed over with Batman Beyond again in the episode "Shadows," which the DCAU wiki says occurs after the Batman Beyond episode "Countdown" (126.44), so I set "Shadows" as 126.65. I then distributed the intervening episodes at even intervals of 1.31.
Lastly, I decided it would make sense to wrap up Zeta Project before the future-set episode of JLU, "Epilogue" (169.00), so I set its series finale ("The Wrong Morph") to 167.50. I then distributed the episodes in between "Shadows" and "The Wrong Morph" evenly at intervals of 2.40.
Epilogue
I think that's everything! In practice, this gets you the following periods:
fifty-six sequential stories from Batman: The Animated Series
alternating stories from Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series
(roughly) alternating stories from New Batman Adventures and Superman: The Animated Series
(roughly) alternating stories from New Batman Adventures and Static Shock
lots of Batman Beyond, with interspersed stories from Static Shock and Justice League
lots of Batman Beyond, with interspersed stories from Static Shock and Justice League and the occasional episode of Zeta Project (four shows at once!)
(roughly) alternating stories from Static Shock and Justice League Unlimited, with occasional episodes of Zeta Project
Justice League Unlimited, with occasional episodes of Zeta Project
The caveat here is, of course, I haven't watched it this way! And it's been a long time since I've watched any of this; if you have any advice or corrections, I'd love to hear them.
late 2386 It's so... big! This is the first Destiny-era book to come out after quite a long hiatus, the previous one being almost a year and a half prior (Titan: Fortune of War). Goodbye mass market paperbacks, hello trades! I think this is also the first to make references to Discovery;
Georgiou is included among a list of famous explorers. It's also an
important last—this is the last-ever use of the (not my favorite) Rotis Serif TNG logo. (Thank goodness.)
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Available Light by Dayton Ward
Other than that, though, it half feels like business as usual. This book
essentially has two totally separate plotlines. One is very familiar;
this is our fourth Dayton Ward–penned exploring-the-Odyssean-Pass-after-The Fall novel, and so you'll know the vibe by now. The Enterprise
comes across an interesting situation, there's some conflict, T'Ryssa
Chen is in it a lot, Taurik is there. Ward is good at coming up with
premises that feel like lost TNG episodes; in this one, the Enterprise and a group of scavengers come upon a derelict spaceship that seems like it ought to have a lot of people aboard... but where are they? There are some clever concepts here and interesting spins on Star Trek technology.
As I have with almost all of these books, I found myself thinking about how I would adapt it to serve as a Star Trek Adventures
scenario, which is always a good sign. (I say this a lot, but if my
current campaign gets a third season, I think I will actually do it.)
I don't think there's anything bad about these four books per se,
but they have felt a bit... stasis-y. Like, all the characters are
present and correct, but there's not the vibe you got back at the height
of the Deep Space Ninerelaunch or in the early days of New Frontier and Titan,
that you were watching these characters evolve and grow. It almost
reads like a tie-in to a tv show that doesn't exist, like all the
characters have to be maintained as they are. Worf does Worf things, La
Forge does La Forge things, T'Ryssa Chen does T'Ryssa Chen things,
Joanna Faur continues to exist, Beverly isn't in it except as Picard's
wife. I don't think I would say I disliked any of the post-FallTNG novels on their own merits, but unfortunately I do feel like the best one was the first, Armageddon's Arrow; it had a sense that we were moving forward and going somewhere that ended up missing from Headlong Flight, Hearts and Minds, and this book.
The other half of the book is the fallout from Section 31: Control, which is really the fallout from A Time to Heal,
a book that came out fifteen years prior! Section 31's existence is now
public, but along with this, so is Picard's role in the coup that
deposed President Min Zife. This half has its own two halves. In one, we
see what's going on back on Earth: how are the politicians and the
people dealing with all the revelations about S31, particularly that
everything that everything the Federation has ever accomplished in its
utopia-building was really the result of unsanctioned black ops? Mostly
this is told from the perspective of Philippa Louvois (of "Measure of a
Man" fame), now Federation Attorney General, as she begins carrying out
investigations and prosecutions. It's fine; I did have the feeling that
maybe the revelations of Control were a bit too big to
realistically be accommodated into a tie-in book series at all, much
less as a B-plot. The Federation has had yet another existential shock
but I just don't think you can adequately deal with that and maintain
the status quo needed for this to also be a series of books about
people having fun space adventures. At this point, is it even realistic
that the Federation continues to function? Akaar gives like five
different speeches about how human choices do matter but they all feel a bit hollow.
I'm not sure about a couple choices here, like one where a trained
Starfleet officer turns into a cold-blooded killer trying to get Admiral
Ross because her husband died due to a Section 31 op. Also what's up
with all the characters' insistence that Ross was a key player in S31? To
the extent that an organization like S31 has formal members, I never had
the sense that he was one; I certainly didn't feel like he was guiding
policy. He was more just a guy the real players knew they could count on
to throw things their way when needed.
The other half of this half is the personal fallout for Picard himself.
This I found profoundly disappointing. What is the reaction of every key
character finding out that Picard had a role in the illegal takedown of
a democratically elected leader. Basically everyone shrugs and says,
"oh well sometimes you just have to do a coup i guess." I could
buy this of some characters (I can certainly imagine it of Worf, a man
who previously killed a democratically elected leader)... but everyone? No one
is upset to learn that the principled Jean-Luc Picard totally abandoned
his principles? Not Beverly, not La Forge, not T'Ryssa, not Will Riker?
I found this disappointing because 1) so much for Federation ideals,
and 2) it seems a bizarre dramatic choice. This thing happens that could
totally upend your characters' relationships, and you basically just
ignore it?
The book ends with Picard deciding to be accountable for his decision
and return to Earth, which I appreciate, but it feels pretty random; I
wish it had been a natural outgrowth of the way something from this
storyline intersected with the A-plot.
Continuity Notes:
We get a little recap of Phillipa Louvois's
career on p. 43 that tells us she left Starfleet after "Measure of a
Man," then came back later, than left again. Is this a reference to
something? I don't see any likely candidates on Memory Beta, but it seems like a pretty random detail otherwise.
Other Notes:
I didn't totally buy that Nechayev would go
on the run. She comes across as principled to me, not
self-serving—they're just not great principles!
Ward does this thing I'm of two minds about, which is he's always diligently establishing members of the Enterprise-E
crew. I like that the book does this thing that's hard to do on tv,
make it clear that the crew consists of people who aren't main
characters. But on the other hand, most of them are just names on the
page; they don't have personalities or anything, just names (always
human, which is a little boring, though I'm guessing they're mostly
Tuckerizations) and jobs. Sometimes, though, he's a little too
diligent about it; it'll be like, "so-and-so was being covered by the
beta shift Engineering supervisor so-and-so, but she was on the away
team, so she was being covered by the gamma shift supervisor."
(At one point, Šmrhová leaves the bridge to get a rest, but she comes
back before as soon as something interesting happens but we're still
told who covers for her while she's gone.) It's like that bit from Parks and Rec about NPR hosts all substituting for each other.
Gratuitous Recap Watch: We get a recap
of "Paradise Lost" (pp. 51-2), which I can see the relevance of, but
goes into an awful lot of detail for some reason, with characters
wondering whatever happened to Admiral Leyton, but I don't know why.
Also recapped for seemingly little purpose: "The Best of Both Worlds"
(p. 213) and Headlong Flight (p. 287).
The final volume of the Pelican History of England was published in 1965, covering 1914 to 1963; I read that edition many years ago. In 1981, it was updated to cover through 1979, but since author David Thomson died in 1970, one of his former students, Geoffrey Warner, did the update. According to his preface, Warner didn't update Thomson's text very much; instead, he just added two chapters to the end to cover the last fifteen years. The result is somewhat odd, because it takes what was already one of the longest Pelican Histories and makes it even longer—even though it covers the shortest span of time!
I'll say more about the overall design of the series in a future post, but I did think this book had more detail than earlier ones... which wasn't always warranted. Whereas previous volumes would not really go into detail about the movement of foreign wars, this one does. I think probably this is partially because it has the space to do, but also because its author lived through the events in question (Thomson would have been in his thirties during World War II), so they seemed important to him. Additionally, there's more blow-by-blow detail on the politicking and the parties; again, I suspect the dual reason of 1) available space, and 2) recency bias. To me, though, this made the book less effective; the best Pelican Histories (such as Thomson's own volume 8) have given a bird's-eye view of the era in question, but here I felt a bit bogged down in the identities of specific cabinet ministers. (The other consequence of recency is that he's more likely to assume readers already know what something is than other contributors to the series, which I guess is fair enough, but I would have appreciated an explanation of what the "coupon election" was!)
The Pelican History of England: 9. England in the Twentieth Century (1914-79) by David Thomson with Geoffrey Warner
Second edition published: 1981 Originally published: 1965 First edition previously read: August 2013 Acquired and reread: July 2025
The other thing that makes this volume unusual is that it's the only one to be written by a repeat author. Thus, unsurprisingly, Thomson continues the emphasis of his previous volume, focusing on how the government became increasingly invested in the management of society through a variety of means. Though as I said above I did think we got a bit too much detail about specific ministries, Thomson does ably show how the two major political parties, and the succession of prime ministers, attempted to regulate the economy and elevate the welfare of the citizenry in ways that were sometimes surprisingly similar and sometimes very different. By the 1950s, "British society now presupposed full employment, economic growth, mass consumption, and therefore mass advertising" but "[u]like the Welfare State, it cared little about inequalities of wealth" (260).
For example, he points out that what used to be called "departments," "boards," and "offices" largely became "ministries" after the Great War: "The change implied a new theory of government, in which politicians and their 'departments' of expert administrators jointly shaped and pursued policies" (64). The world wars were also significant in that the pyramid-shaped power structures introduced during wartime became a guiding principle for the organization of government after (219). Of particular importance was the growth of education, which expanded significantly across successive generations in the first half of the century: "The national system of education kept pace with – though perhaps several paces behind – the development of modern Britain: its advance helped, in turn, to make possible the next phase of growth" (189).
Fun fact I learned from this book: H. G. Wells was supposedly the first
person to ever use the term "leftism" in print (116). Unfortunately,
Thomson gives a date for this (1927)... but not a citation! I think this
may have been in his lecture Democracy under Revision, which was
published that year by the Hogarth Press, but in a quick online search,
it seems like the text isn't available online. Alas, a Google Books
search for "leftism" with the date filter set to terminate at 1926
brings up a number of hits, mostly from communist periodicals, so it
seems to be untrue. One gets the feeling that Thomson himself is a
liberal if not a leftist, but often disappointed with the actual
execution of leftist policies in practice. There is a funny bit where he
cites a book read at the first meeting of the Left Book Club in 1936:
"Describing future possibilities of artificial insemination, the author
exclaimed: 'How many women, in an enlightened community devoid of
superstitious taboos and of sex slavery, would be eager and proud to
bear and rear a child of Lenin or of Darwin!' Fortunately some of its
successors were more realistic" (163). I'll have to see if I can work
that into my book chapter on left-wing use of Darwinism somewhere.
I was struck by how Thomson described prime ministers Ramsey MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin in the 1930s: "Like a sedate and leisurely firm of comfortable family solicitors, they conducted the business affairs of Great Britain and the Commonwealth with mild, unhurried manners, facing no issue until it was claimant, seeking no decision until it was overdue. [...] History may come, more and more, to see them as Tweedledum and Tweedledee – presiding jointly over British national life in one of its peculiarly unheroic periods" (141). I don't know enough about the reception of British prime ministers to know if this actually came about!
There is a little but not a lot of discussion of the changing social mores of the twentieth century, though I found what there was to be quite interestingly framed; I sort of sensed a young person sneering at how his elders saw as controversial things he had not seen as controversial at all: "one marvels at how restricted they were in their modernity, how lacking in robust dissipations. Even there wildness was brittle, their cult of self-indulgence as synthetic as the cocktails at their interminable parties, or the jazz played in the night-clubs. [...] It was not long before they got tired of themselves" (87). C'mon, David, just how boring were your parents, really?
We see a combination of Thomson's critique of the left and his issues with twentieth-century social mores when he claims that "[t]o all those who, before the war, had
held the materialist view that crime was caused largely by slums,
poverty, and bad economic conditions, it was disconcerting to discover
that the Welfare State brought a steep rise in crime," especially among teenagers, whose incomes had risen the most! (276) "The conclusion seemed to be that crime is determined not by material conditions alone, but by the whole social environment, including such intangible factors as the ethical standards and values prevalent in society as a whole, the personal and collective anxieties to which men were subjected, and even the effectiveness of humanistic or religious teaching about human relationships" (276-7). If Thomson mentions him, I didn't catch it, but it seems very much not a coincidence that Thomson supports this point by citing statistics from 1959-61 and that Anthony Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange in 1962.
In volume 8, Thomson discussed the monarchy a bit; surprisingly, there's less discussion of the abdication crisis than you might expect, but I found what Thomson said about Edward VIII's father, George VI, charming: "He had perhaps, as his successor remarked, waged 'a private war with the twentieth century', but his very old-fashionedness had been his strength" (151).
I wonder if I would have registered it if I hadn't been cued by the preface, but Geoffrey Warner's two chapters at the end are noticeably different, and I'm not just talking about the fact he breaks them up into fewer but longer sections than Thomson. While Warner maintains Thomson's focus on specific ministries and politicians and parties, he largely moves away from Thomson's focus on the "social state"; we get a lot more detail here about Britain's foreign policy during the era in question, especially issues surrounding decolonization and the Commonwealth. This is interesting but didn't really seem to be of a piece with the book I'd just read.
During my summer 2024 mini-campaign, I ran the prewritten STA mission "Abyss Station." One of the components of this story is an alien species called the Ithik; they initially seem to be a prewarp civilization, but when the players beam down to talk to them, they learn the Ithik know of other societies and civilizations. The Ithik are quite funny; they are obsessed with games and self-centered. They believe their planet to be the center of the universe, and themselves to be the most advanced civilization in the universe. Some of them even go so far as to claim they are the only civilization in the universe, and that all aliens are figments of their highly advanced imaginations. Despite having a population of only thousands, they have a huge government consisting of dozens of ministers and similarly, they have hundreds of religions.
What the players eventually learn is that the Ithik are artificial, incredibly advanced living machines; instead of mitochondria, they have tiny machines, and their DNA contains an artificial element. They were made by advanced aliens my players dubbed the "Engineers" to construct a moon-sized facility, and then left on a planet when they were done. Their planet is doomed, but the players have to convinced them to evacuate by playing games with them.
My players seemed to have fun with them, and during our fourth episode (when they needed to get more information on the alien facility the Engineers had built) called them up. On the fly, I established that the Federation was working to resettle them, but struggling because the Ithik weren't focusing on that, being too into all the incredible new experiences they were finding in the wider universe, particularly gin and tonics.
This scene cemented in me a desire to bring them back if my campaign got a second season. Once it did, I realized there was a suitable prewritten mission out there, "Game Night" from the Lower Decks Campaign Guide, where the players encounter the game-obsessed Wadi from the Deep Space Nine episode "Move Along Home." Its comedic focus would make a good contrast to the last few episodes I had done (which had featured apocalyptic threats, brutal warfare, and prisoner torture and Obsidian Order agents).
"Captain’s Log, Stardate 53950.1. A month into our renewed mission of exploration in the Ekumene sector, and the Diversitas has been summoned back to Deep Space 10 at the request of Consul Vrossaan. The upside to this is that a Federation mail tender has recently visited the station, allowing our crew to pick up some packages that have been shipped all the way out to the frontier…"
Planning the Mission
Wadi hologram (screen capture from DS9: "Move Along Home")
The premise of "Game Night" is that the player ship is assigned to transport a Wadi delegation. Knowing of the dangers of the Wadi love of games, the players need to hide every game on the ship and disable the holodecks. The Wadi, however, bring aboard one of their game boxes anyway. First the players are transported into the chula game from "Move Along Home"; once they escape that, it turned out that one game was missed, a copy of (what is not said to be but clearly is) Dungeons & Dragons. This causes the whole ship to be plunged into a D&D scenario that the players need to escape from.
Overall, it's a fun one, but I made some adjustments. Most obviously, I substituted the Ithik for the Wadi, though the technology the Ithik were using was still the Wadi game box from "Move Along Home"; the idea here was that following the Dominion War, some Wadi ships were among those that came through the wormhole to the Gamma Quadrant once normal travel was resumed. In the scenario as written, it's an NPC who has the D&D gamebook that gets missed, but I thought it would be more fun if it was a player, so before we ran it, I approached Kenyon who plays Nevan, and asked him if 1) he thought Nevan could be a D&D fan, and 2) if Nevan might be faintly embarrassed by it. He was game for it.
I also tightened up some aspects of the scenario as written; the crew needs to lock up all the games on the ship, but there's also a bit about them needing to lock up weird artifacts, which involves them finding out that someone on the ship has an alien sex candle from TNG's "Sub Rosa," and I felt like this seemed 1) not terribly relevant, 2) maybe going too much into an area I wasn't comfortable with, 3) taking too long to get to the meat of the episode, and 4) a callback to an episode my players might not even remember. Also, the scenario as written assumes the players are lower deckers, of course, but mine aren't, and thus it doesn't make as much sense for them to do a bunch of ridiculous tasks.
Allamaraine! (screen capture from DS9: "Move Along Home")
Act II of the scenario as written is all about the players being stuck in the chula game, but I feel like the fun thing in the scenario is the D&D riff, so I wanted to get there faster. So I also cut the chula game down a lot, to just a single encounter, so that Act I would end with D&D taking over the ship, not Act II. (The idea here being that, while the players were trapped in the chula game, the Ithik were ransacking the ship for games to connect to the Wadi box.)
Mostly I really liked the scenarios the mission has for D&D on the ship: orcs take over Engineering, a necromancer builds a tower in sickbay, and a dragon attacks the ship. The necromancer-in-sickbay challenge includes an Extended Task, but commits a mistake that an annoying number of prewritten STA scenarios do: the Extended Task has no limiting factor as written. Let me walk you through it in detail:
Navigating the spire, recovering the security chief, and finding a way to eject the necromancer from their body is an extended task (Magnitude 3, Difficulty 3, Work Track 15, Resistance 1). Three breakthroughs are required: identifying that phasic temporal energy influx would forcibly evict the necromancer entity from the security chief, completing an energy output device which can be attached to an emitter, and navigating the interior of the labyrinthine tower.
This is a perfectly fine setup, but the thing about Extended Tasks is that there has to be some kind of limiting factor, or they just don't make any sense. The difference between Extended Tasks and regular Tasks is that Extended Tasks need multiple attempts... but if the players are allowed to make infinite attempts, then there's no way they can ever fail!
a necromancer tower in sickbay (image rendered by ChatGPT)
There are lots of different ways you can handle this. One is to say that the Extended Task must be completed in a certain number of intervals, otherwise there's some kind of bad thing or other kind of external event that takes place. For example, in "Nest in the Dark" (see #4 in the episode list below) your players need to beat a logic puzzle before the air runs out for one of their crewmembers. You can otherwise set an Extended Task during an action scene. This is the case in "Signals," for example; the players need to disable the self-destruct sequence on an alien artifact, but are also being attacked by Romulans. The longer it takes them to do this, the more damage the Romulans can do.
I'm a big fan of just limiting the number of attempts the players can make. For example, in "Biological Clock," the players are trying to reconfigure a transporter component to use in a device, but as written it suffers from the "infinite attempts" problems. I added the stipulation that "this Extended Task may only be attempted 5 times before the phase coil resonator burns out" because it's a finicky component that can only take so much tweaking. That Extended Task required four breakthroughs, so it really only let them have one wasted attempt.
One other limitation I use sometimes is that each player can only contribute once. I used this for the climax to "A Thousand Miles from Day or Night"; the players were chasing an Obsidian Order agent, and each was allowed to do one thing. If they had all done something, and they hadn't completed the Extended Task, the guy would have just gotten away.
Inspired by the note in the description that this Extended Task had Resistance 1 and the visual that the necromancer was escaping up a tower, I came up with a new limited factor this time: after every attempt the players made, the Resistance would increase by 1, basically representing the idea that the necromancer was climbing the tower and getting further and further away from them, making it more difficult to track him down. So, Resistance 1, then 2, then 3, and so on. If it took them too many attempts, eventually the Resistance would be so high it would be impossible for them to accomplish any Work. Mostly I liked this but I think I inadvertently made it too hard (as I will discuss in more detail under Playing the Mission below). If I did something like this again, I'd start at Resistance 0, and work up from there.
This is a pretty long explanation of a pretty minor problem, so sorry! Overall, I liked "Game Night" as written a lot, and it made me a little nostalgic for the days of my own lower decks campaign; I think this one would have worked well there, and I would have been able to do more of it as written.
Having compressed Acts I and II into one, and turned Act III into Act II, what was Act III going to be? Well, going into the first session, I had no idea, but was confident I'd come up with something. I am getting more comfortable with this approach than I used to be!
And, of course, I made the episode title more pretentious. (It comes from a They Might Be Giants lyric: "When I get through this part, / will the next one be the same?" In this case, it's supposed to represent the players' frustration with the levels of the game, but it also describes the malaise the Ithik are experiencing.)
Playing the Mission
mail call on Deep Space 10 (image rendered by ChatGPT)
I have seven regular players, plus one who steps in if we're below six. It took two and a half sessions to get through the episode. This is how it broke down:
Ryan as Rucot, captain (session 1)
Debi as T'Cant, first officer/science officer (1-3)
Kenyon as Nevan Jones, engineer (1-2)
Claire as Mooria Salmang, pilot (1-2)
Cari as Jor Lena, security officer (1-3)
Austin as Frector, Intelligence analyst (1, 3)
Andy as Gurg bim Vurg, medical officer (2-3)
Toren as Tronnen, counselor (3)
I began the mission with the Diversitas at its home base of Deep Space 10, summoned to a meeting with Consul Vrossaan of the Federation Diplomatic Corps, an NPC the characters became acquainted with in the previous episode. I wanted to seed the idea that Nevan collected D&D gamebooks, so I began the episode with a mail call, and I turned it into a role-playing moment by having all the players imagine what kind of packages their characters might have receive (this I sent out in advance, so they could ponder a bit). This was pretty fun; this is what people came up with:
Rucot's parents had been trying to warn him about the Obsidian Order plot in the previous episode, but he had totally missed their hints; they sent him a note about listening to your parents, but also some isolinear rods featuring Cardassian music.
T'Cant, whose parents were Vulcan artists, sent her a Thomas Kinkade print.
Mooria got Trill books on telepathy and translation (two things her character is interested in), plus some gin (because I had the players review mission notes from their previous Ithink encounters, and she'd noted their interest in gin).
Jor received Bajoran tarot cards.
Frector (who is a Ferengi woman) received gold-pressed latinum from her brother, since he's always worried about her in the currency-less Federation.
Consul Vrossaan (image rendered by ChatGPT)
The characters were warned by Consul Vrossaan that the Federation Agency for Refugee Transition had gotten nowhere in resettling the Ithik, because Ithik just wanted to play games and drink. In frustration, they'd handed the Ithik off to the Diplomatic Corps, who had similarly gotten nowhere, who were thus handing them off to Starfleet, in the hopes that the Diversitas's rapport with the Ithik would let them succeed. The Diversitas's job was to show the Ithik some candidate planets for resettlement and get them to pick one. But, she stipulated—get rid of every game on your ship: "Turn the holodecks off, and tell the Ithik they’re broken or something. Get the 3-D chess set out of your ship’s bar. If there’s a dart board, recycle it. If someone has a board game in their quarters, box it up and seal it in the cargo bay. If an Ithik finds a game somewhere, they will start playing it and you will get absolutely nowhere. Oh, and no gin and tonics either!”
The players thus carried out the clean-up tasks in Act I; I enjoyed getting to roleplay the crusty old NCO who didn't trust Jor to safely stow away his family's prized chess set.
But my players surprised me during this act. One of the Mission Directives is "Ensure all dangerous artifacts onboard the ship are contained"; there was one thing about my own worldbuilding I had not totally thought through the implications of! The Ithik were created by the mysterious digital intelligences called the "Engineers," but back in episode 4, one of those intelligences, named "Mercury," had uploaded a copy of itself onto the Diversitas's computer. We hadn't done much with this yet, but the players were justifiably worried about what would happen if the Ithik essentially met their god! Somehow I hadn't even thought of this, so it was very gratifying to realize the players were thinking through the lore we'd built up. They went and talked to Mercury, who assured them it wanted nothing to do with the Ithik; it just wanted novelty, new experiences, the kind of stuff it wasn't getting as part of the Dyson swarm it called home.
The players clearly knew I was up to something with Kenyon/Nevan but happy to play along with it. At one point someone asked Kenyon if Nevan had anything to disclose, but he assured them he didn't in not very convincing terms.
the Diversitas's lounge ready for a reception (image rendered by ChatGPT)
The players surprised me again when, before the Ithik delegation came aboard, they brainstormed ways to interest the Ithik in picking a planet to resettle. I had just intended this as an adventure hook, but they took it seriously. They decided to make picking a planet to settle on into a game itself, a sort of Project Runway of planets. Members of the Ithik delegation would get assigned one of the four planets to develop, and each would be assigned some members of the crew to help them; Consul Vrossaan would be the neutral judge, picking for settlement whichever planet they developed the best proposal for.
Thus, when they meet the Ithik, who came aboard hoping to play more games (“Tell me, Rucot… what excitement do you have planned this time? I have read about your Cardassian strategy game kotra, but not yet found anyone to play me. Or where is your T’Cant—I would love to play her in kal-toh. Or Frector—let us play dabo!” Turns to Jor. “I do not know you or your species—what is your game of choice? If this universe be imaginary—and my Minister of Philosophy says the evidence for this mounts all the time—I must have quite the imagination, for I did not know of so many games! Do your human colleagues know of Settlers of Catan or Mind or Terraforming Mars or Twilight Imperium? Truly hours of delight!”) at a shipboard reception, the players pitched them this instead. I made it a D5 task to win over the Ithik but of course they succeeded.
The players had had fun with some of the absurd Ithik ministerial positions in their previous appearance, so I leaned into that even more this time. I brought back the Minister of Astronomy (blind, so cannot actually see anything) and the Minister of Philosophy (convinced that the Federation is but a figment of Ithik imagination), and added on the Minster of Dream Licensing (authorizes and deauthorizes dreaming), the Minster of Cosmic Indifference (issues monthly memos that read "The universe remains ambivalent. Carry on."), the Minster of the Aesthetic Sublime (once fined a mountain for being "too breathtaking without a permit"), and the Minister of Ministerial Administrations (responsible for adding more ministers to the government—never enough!). We got some good comedy out of this; I had told the players at the beginning of the episode that this one was going for a Lower Decks vibe, and they responded appropriately.
I had been a little worried the players might react and try to stop the Ithik when they produced the Wadi box, but thankfully, they let me do it all, and ended up in the game realm, along with Consul Vrossaan. (I found it useful to have her around, as basically a character who really could die.) When the girl popped up singing "Allamaraine, count to four, Allamaraine, then three more, Allamaraine, if you can see, Allamaraine, you’ll come with me!", thankfully a few of them recalled the episode, which I gave them a bonus for on a later roll. My players mostly have notoriously low Fitness scores, so the Fitness + Security Task you have to undertake in this part of the game proved quite taxing!
a dragon attacks the Diversitas (image rendered by ChatGPT)
Once the players beat the first challenge, I had them return to the ship's lounge, just as the Minister of Astronomy proudly ran into the room bearing the D&D sourcebook he found in Nevan's quarters, which the Ithik mayor connected to the Wadi box, causing the three D&D threats to attack the ship.
I said I cut it down, but I actually cut it down too much, because all of this left us almost an hour from the end of session one, but I'd only planned out Act I in detail. Thankfully, the players decided to get the Wadi box away from the mayor before they did anything else, and spent lots of time debating the best way to do this. Often I cut them off when they get into the weeds like this, but I was thankful for it this time! In the end, they decided to have Jor challenge the Ithik mayor to a game of darts, which also meant having to recover the dartboard from storage. Jor has a Focus in darts, so of course she won even though I spent 6 Threat to give the Ithik mayor three extra dice.
I knew Ryan and Austin wouldn't be present for the second session, so I covered this narratively. When the players scanned the Wadi box once it was in their possession, it reacted by causing Rucot, Frector, and Consul Vrossaan disappear in the flash of light. An embrassed Ithik mayor informed them that their tampering with the Wadi box had made it potentially lethal. “Not totally our fault, sorry. We don’t really understand this technology to be honest!”The Minister of Philosophy: “I don’t see why it matters—none of them are real anyway!”
Session two thus covered all of Act II (which I dubbed "Dungeons & Diversitas"). There are three problems; the players split up into two groups, so I cut back and forth between them. Jor and Mooria went to join Gurg in sickbay to battle the necromancer, while T'Cant and Nevan tried to retake Engineering.
an orc in Engineering (image rendered by ChatGPT, based a couple reference images I provided)
Gurg had antagonized the necromancer by demanding scientific explanations for his powers and criticizing his skull motif. The players had the smart idea to try to evacuate sickbay, but unfortunately failed the roll to do it. This meant that when Jor shot the necromancer, killing him instantly, his spirit just possessed one of the orderlies (dubbed "Ensign Brad") and teleported away. The Extended Task I think worked pretty well, but the players made some weak rolls at first, which made it harder than I intended; I think they failed to get a Breakthrough on their first Task, which really made it tough. Like I said above, if I do something like this again, I'll start at Resistance 0, not Resistance 1. But they made it there in the end!
The scenario as written has a couple ideas for how the players might handle the orcs, but Debi and Kenyon came up with their own, suggesting that if they impersonated the orc god Gruumsh and asked the orcs to build an altar, they could lure them all into one central space and trap them in a forcefield. But they needed gold to bait the trap, and the replicators were offline. Thankfully, the mail call at the top of the episode proved the perfect seed for this moment; with Frector trapped in the Wadi box, they had to break into her quarters, find her safe, and crack it open to use her gold-pressed latinum. This was good fun, Kenyon's real-world D&D knowledge bleeding over into Nevan's in-character D&D knowledge.
Those two crises taken care of, the characters united to go to the bridge and defeat the dragon. The scenario as written has them taking a purely lower-decks role for obvious reasons—while the senior staff battles, the characters need to realign the conn, reroute the weapons, and cycle the shields. I kept all this, but then added a final Conn Task for Mooria to line up a shot, and then a final Security Task for Jor to stun the dragon.
They then locked it into a tractor beam. The scenario as written specified that the necromancer and the orcs disappeared when defeated, but I had the dragon persist, which led into the third act. (Once again, they got there with a decent amount of time left.)
Wadi game box (image rendered by ChatGPT*)
As written, the episode ends with the players winning by defeating the D&D challenges. But I had a scan show that there was still an energy trace running from the dragon—though not to the Wadi box, but to the mayor. The problem here is that an RPG doesn't necessarily end the way a board game does; the mayor is still the DM and thus the game hasn't ended. When they went and talked to him, he just ranted about other quests he could send them on.
The climax was thus about coaxing the mayor away from his interest in games, which the players realized that he was using as a way of coping with the trauma the Ithik experienced from the one-two shock of their planet being destroyed, and learning they were artificial beings who had outlived their designed purpose. I made this a D5 Task; they went and talked to Mercury again, who gave them some advice about how it was learning to make its own purpose. This reduced the Difficulty to 4, and they succeeded. This, finally, deactivated the game, and returned Frector, Rucot, and Consul Vrossaan to reality.
That left us with just two scenes to play out in the final session. (I established that any players absent this week were simply busy repairing the ship.) I designed a game for the players to play against each other, where four teams consisting each of one player and two Ithik ministers (except one, which was two players and the mayor) would work on Extended Tasks simultaneously, representing them coming up with settlement plans for each of the four candidate planets. I was pretty proud of this; here is an edited version of one of my handouts:
The incentive for trying hard was that the player(s) whose team won would get an extra point of Determination for the next episode. I think the main downside of it was that players had to decide a lot of stuff right off, and that they had to roll a bunch of dice: for themselves, their assisting NPCs, and the ship. But they had fun, and threw themselves into it. Gurg rolled badly on the first round, but reacted appropriately in character, getting into an argument with his teammates that all enjoyed more than the actual game. Austin had the clever idea to have Frector roll by herself, and her assisting ministers to work by themselves, so he could get two Tasks done in a single round.
Jor and Tronnen (on a single team), Frector, and T'Cant all managed to get a fourth breakthrough during the third round; for a tiebreaker, I had each team do a presentation to Vrossaan about their planet, drawing on the stats given on their sheets, as a three-way Opposed Task. There was then a two-way tie between Frector and Jor/Tronnen, so I made it into an arm-wrestling contest that Frector won by spending a point of Determination. Our Klingon crewmember was suitably embarrassed at losing to a Ferengi woman! I think they were suitably touched that I made up a whole game for them based on their ideas from the first session.
We then had a brief coda that tied up some threads. It was nice that we ended an episode halfway through a session, because it meant we could let things breathe a little. (Usually we wrap up at 10pm, and everyone wants to get home!) Frector sent a strongly-worded memo to T'Cant about how dare the crew use her gold-pressed latinum, and then immediately felt embarrassed about her Ferengi greed peeking through, and so invited T'Cant to tea to apologize; Gurg went to Mercury but found himself rejected; Jor did a Bajoran tarot reading for the Ithik mayor. Tronnen hit the gym.
Overall, I enjoyed this one a lot. It's funny, and it was a surprisingly good fit for our own campaign. The D&D stuff and the Ithik was a hit with the players (Debi wrote a personal log from T'Cant's perspective complaining about the illogic of adults playing "make-believe" in these "role-playing games"). I am already brainstorming ways to bring back the Ithik if I get a third season!
I was particularly impressed by how much my players are embracing the details and spirit of the stories in ways I wasn't expecting. That's what makes these things worth doing!
* I was surprised to find no good images of the Wadi box on the Internet; they all show it from a distance in long shot. But on rewatching the episode myself, I realized that was because despite its importance to the story, it's never featured in close-up, weirdly. So I set about trying to get ChatGPT to render me one. This proved to be quite difficult, because it would often miss either that 1) the box has large bevels, that are almost small faces in themselves, or 2) that it's actually a rectangular prism, not a cube. After three different chat threads and lots of different kinds of prompting (including having ChatGPT take the intermediate step of making an orothographic projection, which it got right, and using that as a basis for a 3D image, which it still got wrong), I decided I was putting much more effort into this than it was worth, given literally none of my players would remember the correct dimensions or even vague appearance of the Wadi box, and I gave up on it, settling on this image as the closest I would get.
The fifth Mistborn novel and second Wax and Wayne novel is fairly different from the previous one; while The Alloy of Law was a short, fun adventure that largely stood alone, Shadows of Self is longer and more invested in the "lore" of the Mistborn world in a way that Alloy of Law was not.
Shadows of Self: A Mistborn Novel by Brandon Sanderson
Consequently, I liked it less. As soon as an omnipotent voice turned up and began narrating to Wax stuff about the conflict between Preservation and Ruin, I knew that this one wasn't going to do the stuff I enjoyed. I think the weird thing about the Mistborn novels is that Sanderson sets up this incredibly complicated system about allomancy... but seems largely uninterested in it, it's just background to all this other stuff that makes my eyes glaze over. Imagine if the Avatar shows had all this stuff about bending as background but the benders weren't even main characters in the show. I just don't get it.
People praise Sanderson for his worldbuilding, but I feel like that mostly comes down to the "magic systems" themselves; what the books don't really do, I think, is compellingly explore how the magic would change the world. Here, the Mistborn world has advanced to the nineteenth century... but it's basically our nineteenth century, just some people are allomancers. I don't really see how allomancy has actually affected the structure of their society, and as a result, the magic rings hollow.
Wayne is great, though. I love Wayne. Wayne keeps me going.
Every nine months I read another novel of the Cosmere. Next up in sequence: Mistborn: The Bands of Mourning
Pick of the month:Late Star Trekby Adam Kotsko. I found this an interesting and very engaging analysis of a key period of Star Trek, despite some occasional limitations. Glad a TrekBBS thread alerted me to its existence and that I got it from the library.
Young Avengers Presents by Ed Brubaker, Brian Reed, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Paul Cornell, Kevin Grevioux, Matt Fraction, Paco Medina, Harvey Tolibao, Alina Urusov, Mark Brooks, Mitch Breitweiser, Alan Davis, et al.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Available Light by Dayton Ward
Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World by Michael Freeman
Life on the Bridge: linking my world to yours as an autistic therapist by Kaelynn Partlow
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Collateral Damage by David Mack
The Pelican History of England: 9. England in the Twentieth Century (1914-79) by David Thomson with Geoffrey Warner
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
JLA: Year One: The Deluxe Edition by Mark Waid, Brian Augustyn, Barry Kitson, et al.
July is almost always a good month for me, and this year was no exception; in fact, it was my best month in over two years (I read seventeen books in June 2023). My annual family trip gives me more time to read (someone else plays with my kids), and I'm usually able to keep my momentum from Hugo reading going into items from my reading list.
Wow! I got more books than usual for my birthday (usually I tend to get a lot for Christmas, but not my birthday): #1-3 from my sister, #4-5 and 7 from my mother, #6 and 8 from my wife, and #9-10 from my mother-in-law. On top of that, I had some books I bought at a deep discount months ago finally come in (#13-16), I completed my collection of Legion of Super-Heroes Archives on eBay (#17-18), and I had various other books I picked up as part of projects I'm already working through (#11, 19-20).
Currently reading:
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Enigma Tales by Una McCormack
Up next in my rotations:
Star Trek: Coda, Book I: Moments Asunder by Dayton Ward
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
Books remaining on "To be read" list: 686 (up 13!)
My largest single-month increase since January 2018. So much for getting that number under control.
I found this book at a used bookstore, when I was but a baby graduate student with a budding interest in Victorian science, and it was only six years old. Me being me, it took me fifteen years to get around to reading it. It's published by Yale University Press, but clearly aiming at a broader market; it's an oversized hardcover, richly illustrated, chronicling different aspects of how the Victorians (broadly construed, as the book goes back to the late eighteenth century) engaged with the prehistoric world.
Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World by Michael Freeman
I wish I had read it much earlier! But if I ever do finish my book manuscript, I will work in some citations regardless. The book is dense with detail, but pretty readable anyway, in that the details matter less than the overall story that Freeman is building. Freeman is a professor of geography, and the book apparently emerged from a previous project about railways:
The task of railways excavation brought surveyors, engineers and navvies face to face with a perspective on earth history that was as raw as it was vast. As contractors' gangs cut their way through successive bands of rock to try to make for a level permanent way, they exposed not only sedimentary formations in all their rainbow-like hues... but fossil beds by the score. Just as the speed of railway travel turned the Victorians' everyday time-world upside down (what once seemed quick became slow in comparison), so the view from the track-bed opened their eyes to a succession of long-lost time-worlds, hitherto the province of fable and fairy story. (vii)
(Freeman does briefly discuss Thomas Hardy, and you can see both of those new time worlds in his work; in novels like Jude the Obscure, the countryside is criss-crossed so quickly in a way not possible in earlier Hardy novels, while in A Pair of Blue Eyes, you have the immensity of all time embodied in a trilobite.)
It was appropriate that I read the book so soon after finishing the anthology of nineteenth-century apocalyptic fiction, The End of the World, because the kind of perception of "deep time" that made those stories imaginable came from the scientific advances that Freeman chronicles here. There's a lot of good stuff in this book, but Freeman is at his best when discussing that change in the "time-worlds," how in the nineteenth century we went from seeing the world as six thousand years old to untold millions, and how the new vision of the past was filled with a constant stream of upheavals and extinctions and apocalypses. (Of course, H. G. Wells—also briefly discussed by Freeman—gave us the greatest Victorian depiction of deep time of them all in The Time Machine.)
There's some great artwork illustrating the new imagination. I was particularly struck by J. C. Bourne's sketch of the Blisworth cutting from 1838 (scroll down a bit here to see it), which really uses perspective effectively, and juxtaposes the new technology of the train with the antiquity of the strata. I also really liked John Martin's The Great Day of His Wrath (1852); surely there is a straight line from this to the kind of apocalyptic fiction that emerged in the 1870s and '80s. Freeman effectively chronicles how popular this all was; these were no abstract scientific debates, but bestselling books. Geology was a popular pastime. I found his discussion of how Darwin's ideas about time emerged from this new geological understanding particularly effective.
Overall, I found this a quick, easy read, and I wish I had read it going into my dissertation rather than nine years after finishing it! But still, I can find Freeman a place as I (supposedly) finish up my book.
Finally! While I finished my Hugo reading earlier than ever, I was watching stuff right up to the deadline, having made it difficult for myself by deciding to not just watch the actual finalists, but also Mad Max: Fury Road, the rest of Agatha All Along, and the last two seasons of Lower Decks (I was very behind). During the last week in particular, I watched so much stuff... but I did make it, finishing my last movie (Wicked, Part I) just past midnight on Wednesday, when ballots were due at midnight. Thankfully in Pacific Time!
Anyway, here are my notes on the visual categories: (I don't remember what I nominated for certain, but I think I nominated "73 Yards" and "Dot and Bubble," both of which made the ballot).
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
6. Fallout 1x8: "The Beginning", written by Gursimran Sandhu, directed by Wayne Yip
I was excited when I saw this episode was called "The Beginning," because if there's anything that makes Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) stink, it's watching season finales to shows you don't watch, and surely this would not be the case of an episode called "The Beginning." But the writers of Fallout are being obnoxiously clever, and "The End" was the first episode while "The Beginning" was the last. Hence, I pretty much cared about nothing that was happening here. (That said, it doesn't seem to be my thing as a show; I doubt I'd have ranked it higher even if I had seen it all.)
5. Star Trek: Lower Decks 5x09: "Fissure Quest", written by Lauren McGuire, directed by Brandon Williams
I have very much enjoyed Lower Decks for most of its run... so it was a little disappointing to get to this episode and realize that it was seemingly more nominated on the basis of fan service than quality per se. This is the first part of the two-part season (and series) finale, bringing an end to a story arc about mysterious fissures popping up across the multiverse. Alternate versions of many classic characters appear, including T'Pol (Enterprise), Garak and Bashir (Deep Space Nine), Lily Sloane (First Contact), and a whole cadre of Harry Kims (Voyager). Probably the best part, though, is when Boimler contains about the overdone pointlessness of making every story be about the multiverse. Anyway, it's basically fine.
4. Star Trek: Lower Decks 5x10: "The New Next Generation", written by Mike McMahan, directed by Megan Lloyd
The season finale to Lower Decks was well done, if a bit of a trope at this point: the Cerritos is somehow called upon to save the Federation, and proves itself despite being a California-class. It has some good moments and some excellent jokes, but I found it less successful than some previous iterations of the concept. I get that these particular episodes were probably nominated because they had good fan service, but there are a number of 2024 episodes I would have ranked higher than these two: "A Farewell to Farms," "Fully Dilated," and "Upper Decks" were all stronger.
3. Doctor Who 1x04: "73 Yards", written by Russell T Davies, directed by Dylan Holmes Williams
I don't think the return of Russell T Davies to Doctor Who has been an unabashed success, but this episode really shows what he does at his best. Oh, you don't have your lead actor available for every episode? Well, let's do a creepy folk horror thing about the companion living the rest of her life never seeing him again but eternally being stalked by a figure always exactly 73 yards away from her. Utterly captivating, thanks in no small part to Millie Gibson as Ruby, but really it's one of those episodes where everything comes together. Plus... the first episode of Doctor Who to ever be inspired by A Swiftly Tilting Planet? I think not up to quite as much as Agatha All Along, but clearly in a class above the two Lower Decks episodes.
2. Agatha All Along, episode #7: "Death's Hand In Mine", written by Gia King and Cameron Squires, directed by Jac Schaeffer
Though I have been enjoying Agatha All Along (as of this writing, I haven't gotten to the finale yet), I would say it does kind of suffer from the same thing as many serialized streaming shows, in that probably it has about seven episodes worth of content but is nine episodes long. That said, I did really enjoy this one, which follows one of the side characters, Lilia, a seer who jumps through her own life out of order, not just putting together a mystery, but also coming to better understand herself and the nature of friendship. I thought it was very well done.
1. Doctor Who 1x05: "Dot and Bubble", written by Russell T Davies, directed by Dylan Holmes Williams
This episode is partially social media satire, the kind of contemporary pop culture stuff Russell T Davies can do in his sleep... but he does so well. But the episode has an extra substrate to it that only becomes apparent at the very end, which is really well done, and leads to what might be the very best scene Ncuti Gatwa recorded as the Doctor.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
6. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, directed by George Miller, script by George Miller and Nico Lathouris
I did not care for the previous movie in this series, and I cared for this one even less. I think the first probably accomplished what it set out to perfectly, but I didn't actually care to see it accomplished. The second is brought down by some weird choices: the focus on the gruesome baddies seemed more gratuitous in this one, and why on Earth is her name "Furiosa" when she's a little girl??
5. Dune, Part Two, directed by Denis Villeneuve, script by Denis Villeneuve and Jon Spaihts
I feel like whenever I have watched previous versions of Dune, by the time you get to the second half of the story, I have very much lost steam, and so the second half I am usually pretty bored during. Splitting the second part into its own movie means you can conceive it as its own story, and thus I think this is the most I have ever cared about the second half of Dune. Still, I didn't care a lot; I feel like Paul's arc here is interesting in the abstract, but I was never really pulled into it. Some neat visuals, and I'm broadly sympathetic to it in a way that very much wasn't true of Furiosa.
4. Wicked, Part I, directed by John M. Chu, script by Winnie Holzman and Dana Fox
I am an Oz fan who has successfully spent over twenty years of my life avoiding Wicked, but that streak finally came to an end. I thought this was basically fine so far but also feel like I can't really judge it; there are a lot of balls in the air and how good Part I is will really depend on the the extent to which Part II can pay them off. There were some good songs, and I liked the dopey Winkie prince character a lot; also I hope Boq gets it together in Part II. As an Oz fan, I found some of the choices made distracting; why does the map of the four quadrants use the the five colors from the books... but make the Munchkin Country tan and the Winkie Country blue? (Also as much as it's in dialogue with the MGM Oz film, obviously, it struck me that you also can't make a film in 2024 about a magic school that doesn't in some way owe something to Harry Potter, and this very much does.) So, I am ranking it above the two things I didn't really care for, but under the films that were complete in and of themselves.
3. The Wild Robot, written and directed by Chris Sanders
My wife read all three Wild Robot books aloud to my kids, the first two twice in fact; I haven't read them, but absorbed a lot of it from overhearing. When the movie came out last fall, they went and saw it but I didn't make it with them. So I enjoyed finally getting to experience a version of story for myself. I found this charming and entertaining, with some decent visuals and some excellent performances, especially Lupita Nyong'o, Pedro Pascal, and Bill Nighy.
2. I Saw the TV Glow, written and directed by Jane Schoenbrun
This is a horror film about two high school kids who grow up watching a cheesy 1990s tv show that isn't great art but speaks to them. (It's very much based on Buffy, to the extent of using the same font in the opening credits and including a cameo from Amber Benson.) As a child of the era, I thought it did a good job of capturing the 1990s vibe in general, and that specific feeling of stumbling across something late at night that belongs to you and no one else—something kind of lost from our culture of algorithmic discovery. Really sad, really well done; the lead cast were great. I don't know that this would work for everyone, but it very much worked for me. A great movie with important stuff to say.
1. Flow, directed by Gints Zilbalodis, script by Gints Zilbalodis and Matīss Kaža
If you want to watch two movies this year about groups of animals coming together in the face of rising sea levels, watch The Wild Robot too, but if you only want to watch one, then Flow is the one. This movie has no dialogue, and does a beautiful job of capturing the visuals and behaviors of animals. Lots of really striking sequences, lots of heart. I would have never heard of this without the Hugos (though I see it did win an Oscar), and it easily takes the top place on my ballot.
Best Graphic Story or Comic
[UNRANKED] Monstress: The Possessed, script by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana Takeda
I very much enjoyed the first volume of Monstress when I read it back in 2017 (the fact that I ranked it fifth is more a testament to the quality of that year's other nominees)... but by volume two, I found it impenetrable and ranked it last! I have kept up with the series, even continuing to buy it, in hope that I might someday enjoy it again, but I have failed to do so. Every one of the first seven volumes has been a Hugo finalist, and I almost always rank them last. Finally, last year, volume eight was not, and I used that as an opportunity to finally jump off the series. No volume nine for me! This means I am just leaving it off my ballot, though I think that's functionally the same as listing it in last place.
6. We Called Them Giants, script by Kieron Gillen, art by Stephanie Hans
This short graphic novel tells the story of strange, mostly unexplained, events on Earth from the perspective of a teenage girl in foster care: first the majority of humans disappear, causing humanity to degenerate into gangs, then mysterious giants appear. It didn't do much for me; it felt more like a high-level summary of the events in question. I never got interested in the events or characters.
5. The Hunger and the Dusk, Vol. 1, script by G. Willow Wilson, art by Chris Wildgoose
This is a fantasy adventure comic from the pen of G. Willow Wilson (of Ms. Marvel fame); it starts with orcs and humans at odds, but then it turns out that both factions are under assault from a fearsome race from across the ocean and must learn to put aside their differences. The two main threads follow an orc healer with a human adventuring party, and two orcs from different clans entering into an arranged marriage. The art by Chris Wildgoose is good, and the writing is fine. Like, you've read better comics from Wilson but certainly many people produce worse comics and they even become Hugo finalists. I think I would have liked it more if the six issues collected here had built to some kind of climax, but it felt to me like it just stopped, and not in a way that left me eager to read on; there's no big resolution or even a cliffhanger to chew on.
4. My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, Book Two by Emil Ferris
The first half of this story came out way back in 2017; it was a finalist for the 2018 Hugo Awards. Book two was originally supposed to come out in 2018, but didn't materialize until 2024, after an acrimonious lawsuit between Ferris and her publisher. I used to look and see every now and again if it had been released, but eventually I gave up, so I was thankful for the Hugos reminding me to actually get it! The story is about a young girl named Karen growing up in the 1960s, struggling with her growing realization that she's a lesbian versus her Catholic upbringing—not to mention the fact that her mother just died, her father abandoned her family, and her brother is probably a gangster. The story is told in the form of drawings from Karen's looseleaf diary, and it looks beautiful. Karen draws herself as a monster because that's how she sees herself, and the story explores what different kids of monstrousness actually mean: violence versus sexuality vs prejudice. Great read, though I found the end a little frustrating. I don't see any indication of a book three coming, though there certainly is space for one. This book is definitely doing something much more interesting and much better than We Called Them Giants or The Hunger and the Dusk...
3. No Award
...but it's not actually science fiction or fantasy, even if it is about someone who reads those genres! Karen isn't a monster, she just draws herself as one. It seems to me that the Hugo ought not to go to a work that's not actually sf&f, so I have to place No Award above it... even if I would rather see My Favorite Thing win than a bunch of the other finalists.
2. The Deep Dark by Molly Knox Ostertag
This is a YA graphic novel about a high-school age Hispanic lesbian in rural California who reconnects with a childhood friend who moved away years ago. Only she doesn't want to reconnect, because she doesn't want that friend to discover her secret—a dark one in the basement that her family has hid for generations. This is one of those fantasy stories that does a good job working on two levels, there's a literal monster, but of course it's also a metaphor. Ostertag's characters are well-drawn, and she especially does a great job with the main character's yearning for connection but also pushing of other people away. This is the kind of thing I really like about reading for the Hugos; I never would have come across this I'm sure, but ended up really enjoying the experience a lot.
This was my first Best Graphic Story finalist, and it surprised me by feeling like the one to beat: it's a choose-your-own-adventure comic that uses Star Trek technology to cleverly explain the form of the entire genre. Never before has a Star Trek tie-in been a Hugo finalist, but very rarely do Star Trek tie-ins do anything interesting with their chosen medium and genre, which is exactly what I want an award finalist to do.
Overall Thoughts
Like last year, I thought Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) was good; only one real dud. Yes, I would have picked other episodes of Lower Decks, but it's a solid show and I'm happy to see it on the ballot.Long Form was also pretty good; sure, I didn't like Furiosa or Dune very much, but also they clearly have their adherents, and I wouldn't be embarrassed if they won (as I was when The Old Guard won). Three whole non-franchise films!
Best Graphic Story was kind of meh this year but I guess you can't win them all.
What will win? I am typically very bad at calling these categories. I'm guessing Star Trek won't win in Dramatic Presentation; it hasn't done so since 1995, despite making the ballot fairly consistently. If "Those Old Scientists" or "Subspace Rhapsody" can't win, I don't see what can! But I actually do feel like it might have a shot with Warp Your Own Way. (Who'm I kidding, though... it'll probably be Monstress again.) I don't think there's an obvious favorite in the Dramatic Presentation categories. Dune, Part One won, but I don't think the sequel will have the same oomph. I Saw the TV Glow is too queer to win, Wicked too girly, and the others too kiddy. So who knows! Maybe one of the Doctor Whos for Short Form?
During my summer 2024 mini-campaign, I ran the prewritten STA mission "
