Devil's Due by: Philip LaZebnik from a story by: Philip LaZebnikk and William Douglas Lansford and directed by: Tom Benko

 

“Devil’s Due” is written by: Philip LaZebnik, from a story by: Philip LaZebnik and William Douglas Lansford, and is directed by: Tom Benko.  It was produced under production code 187, was the 13^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4, the 87^th episode overall, and was broadcast on February 4, 1991.

 

Like “The Child” before it, “Devil’s Due” is an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that started its life as a proposed script for Star Trek: Phase II.  Unlike “The Child”, it is coming from a production team that is far more competent in what an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation should be.  “Devil’s Due” is also not an episode that forces a character through an assault and childbirth of sorts, instead taking a fairly straight deal with the devil as the con that it is.  The devil is initially couched in the science fiction language of a godlike alien who has purchased an entire planet’s souls and society after a millennium of prosperity, now returned to arbitrate the deal with signs and wonders.  These are the aspects of the episode that feel the most reminiscent of Star Trek from the 1960s, although it has been updated for the then present of 1991.  Marta DuBois plays Ardra, the devil in guises of the many devil figures of various planets.  There is a Klingon devil that makes brief appearances with a particularly unsettling makeup design.  It’s just a Klingon with a mouth that is split almost into a beak which is effective with its creep factor.  Ardra as a character is also just a particularly fun portrayal, director Tom Benko clearly telling DuBois to channel John de Lancie as Q.  DuBois is not playing a devilish character as a temptress outside of a select few scenes, but as an agent of chaos, taking advantage of the letter of the contract over the spirit of the contract.

 

The back half of the episode is a courtroom drama to untangle the contract that this society signed a millennium ago in the hopes of finding a loophole as Ardra is working to the letter and not the spirit of the contract.  The running theory is that Ardra is actually not the devil figure, but somebody else taking advantage of a contract put on a society.  Again it is DuBois’ performance in this sequence that is particularly fun as there is rightly the question of whether or not the devil would have to use mystic powers to give this society prosperity and perform her actions or technology.  It is eventually revealed that she is a con artist and whatever deal this society made was not with her, if a deal was made at all.  The ending is a nice little subversion of the original series trope of a godlike alien being responsible for an episode, again this script being structurally and philosophically close to an episode of the original series.  Where the episode really succeeds is adding itself to the large pile of episodes focused on Data as a character.  It opens with Data performing an excerpt from A Christmas Carol on the holodeck and Brent Spiner playing Data playing Ebeneezer Scrooge is this fascinating layered performance of someone who would be a good Scrooge play Scrooge far worse than he could to keep in character as Data.  Data is actually giving a good performance as Scrooge, he is imitating the emotions and those imitations are what acting is all about according to certain schools of thought.  This connects to the trial in the back half of the episode where Data is the arbiter due to his impartiality.  This is a small element and clearly meant to put Data at odds with his own sense of justice, using his own ability to approximate emotion to give Picard and company time to find the loophole for the conclusion.

 

Overall, the biggest drawback to “Devil’s Due” is the clear fact that it was meant to be an episode of Star Trek: Phase II.  While the performances across the board are great and Tom Benko’s direction focuses on the chaos and the character, the script is one that feels often from a different time brought thirty years into the future.  It’s different from what Star Trek: The Next Generation has become but that does not make it a bad episode, it just does not make it particularly notable when compared to the episodes around it.  On its own merits “Devil’s Due” is a good time, a pastiche of a story archetype that has been around for centuries.  7/10.

Star Wars: Darth Plagueis by: James Luceno

 

“Did you ever hear the tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?  I thought not.  It’s not a story the Jedi would tell you.  It’s a Sith legend.”  These are the opening lines from a monologue given in the film Revenge of the Sith to break Anakin Skywalker with the hope that he can save the woman he is unhealthily obsessed with.  It is what Palpatine needs to make a man fall to the Dark Side with a false hope sealing his doom.  It is a lie.

 

Darth Plagueis by James Luceno proposes that Plagueis was the Sith who took Palpatine as apprentice, passing on his mission for immortality when, as is the cycle of the Sith, he is killed by his apprentice.  The tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise is not a lie.  It is what manipulated Palpatine to become the charming but manipulative senator seen in The Phantom Menace.  Darth Plagueis is a demystification of a scene that hinges on that exact mystery being ambiguous to work.  Providing answers to questions that don’t need answering and yet for two thirds of the book Luceno makes those answers at worst satisfying and at best an engrossing character study.  The cycle of apprentices killing masters is integral to Luceno’s ultimate point.  The first six Star Wars films were always going to end the way that they end, Darth Vader is doomed by the narrative to be an apprentice killing his master and the cycle is broken through acts of mercy.  That is perhaps why the first third of Darth Plagueis is devoid of mercy, Plagueis’ master Tenebrous laughs in the face of his own death at Plagueis’ hands.  He dies with pride as the cycle continues.  Luceno characterizes him as broad and comic, villains from their own perspective are often portrayed that way.  Clive Revill and Ian McDiarmid as Palpatine in The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi respectively have their own understated camp in their performance of cackling villainy.  Tenebrous’ camp villainy is an overstated death, Plagueis’ is a sinister observation of how it is to die and then pick up the pieces as a respectable capitalist.

 

Palpatine, given no first name in the previous canon, becoming Sidious under Plagueis’ tutorship is a man fully sold by the same temptation to which he will give to Anakin Skywalker.  While Luceno puts truth into the lie of Plagueis the Wise, Plagueis does still die by the end in a manner to parallel Sidious’ own end.  Plagueis and Sidious have had their fun in the end: convincing several others that they are the true apprentices of Plagueis and Sidious only in sequences that make the rule of two utterly ridiculous.  There is a jovial quality to the middle of Darth Plagueis, the sequences which stand as the strongest in the novel.  Luceno is an author whose strengths lie in these types of dissections of villains, his later novel Tarkin being equally interesting because of how it gets into the head of a villain.  Darth Plagueis is a novel, however, that loses sight of the cycle by the end.  In demystifying the lie of Darth Plagueis the Wise, James Luceno devotes far too much of the novel to being a prologue to The Phantom Menace and the prequel trilogy as a whole.  There are sequences of podracing because people enjoyed the podracing sequence of The Phantom Menace and by the final act of the novel the events of the film are happening.  Luceno keeps the focus on Palpatine, however, outside of killing his master Palpatine’s narrative is asking the audience to conjure the key moments of the film.  This does not add context to The Phantom Menace, it simply summarizes the plot from the perspective of a different character.  It leads to approximately 100 pages of the novel to be unnecessary.  Luceno spends two thirds of the novel side stepping the problem but as it creeps in slowly and weakens the whole greatly.

 

Darth Plagueis is a novel built upon proposing the truth to a lie.  James Luceno sells the lie as truth quite well almost entirely through the cyclic framework.  He knows how to get the audience entertained by a villain without making the villain sympathetic.  For Plagueis and Palpatine they would always have ended up villains, their respective masters just accelerated the process, reflected with Anakin’s fall being through manipulation.  It is just the obsessive devotion to rehashing elements of canon that weakens the novel in the end as the epilogue’s direct quoting of The Phantom Menace for closure, accidentally ripping the closure that came several pages earlier.  Darth Plagueis is a novel whose single misstep nearly unravels all of the work Luceno had done and leaves the book struggling with its identity.  6/10.

The Wounded by: Jeri Taylor from a story by: Stuart Charno, Sara Charno, and Cy Chermak and directed by: Chip Chalmers

 

“The Wounded” is written by: Jeri Taylor, from a story by: Stuart Charno, Sara Charno, and Cy Chermak, and is directed by: Chip Chalmers.  It was produced under production code 186, was the 12^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4, the 86^th episode overall, and was broadcast on January 28, 1991.

 

“The Wounded” is about what happens after war.  Scriptwriter Jeri Taylor introduces the Cardassians, a reptilian race previously engaged in war with the Federation.  Peace is an uneasy one, compromises made on both sides and wounds not allowed to heal.  They have been hastily plastered over with hopes that nature will take its course.  The inciting incident is a Federation starship going rogue and attacking a Cardassian ship, pursuing and destroying a supply ship, and the Enterprise are sent as peacekeepers.  War must be avoided at all costs.  The Federation could not afford another extended conflict after The Best of Both Worlds.  The underlying question of “The Wounded” is whether or not these attacks are a man scarred by his experiences in war have gone rogue or if the Cardassians are preparing their own attacks.  The man in question is Captain Benjamin Maxwell, played by character actor Bob Gunton, whom we are told is a rational and emotionally stable man.  Transporter chief Miles O’Brien, played by Colm Meaney, served under him for a number of years during the war.  Representing the Cardassians is Gul Macet, played by Marc Alaimo, who is equally insistent that they only want peace and the outposts are for scientific research.  There are a number of elements that make “The Wounded” stand out as an examination of war’s aftermath, however it’s the final twist of the episode that despite acting outside of protocol and on no evidence, Maxwell is correct.  The Cardassians are preparing for war, slowly but surely, obviously for a future episode to pick up, but in doing so it means that the episode still keeps Maxwell’s decisions in a framing of morally abhorrent.  Gunton gets a monologue about how bureaucracy will not move nearly fast enough to stop the war from coming earlier in the episode, and with that ending his framing is not justified.  The Federation likely would not have gone to war anyways even if the proper channels were used as they are bleeding.

 

Taylor structures “The Wounded” as an incredibly dialogue heavy episode, steeping the events in this melodrama all while dedicating several scenes to showing characters existing in their lives.  It’s almost the opposite structure of the previous episode “Data’s Day” as the daily life becomes background, yet integral background, to the events of the main plot.  The decision is made to hang the emotional weight of the episode on Miles O’Brien, pushing him closer to becoming a major player in Star Trek: The Next Generation.  O’Brien’s experiences in war scarred him emotionally, while he knows that the current peace with the Cardassians means he should not fear them he still becomes cautious with them around.  There is an excellent scene between O’Brien and one of the other Cardassians in Ten Forward examining how much self-loathing the war had imposed on O’Brien.  Meaney plays it as a man desperately attempting to be the better man and believe that since despite the self-loathing, Maxwell must be a stronger man than he is and equally avoids the temptation.  Meaney later plays opposite Gunton as Maxwell equally well, singing and Irish song to eventually talk the man down.  O’Brien finds the peaceful resolution to a situation that had already killed 650 Cardassians.  These scenes would not work nearly as well if Taylor hadn’t given O’Brien’s character a much needed exploration in some quiet if humorous scenes opposite Keiko, played by Rosalind Chao.  It’s already surprising that Keiko returns immediately after her introduction, as surprising as O’Brien being given a plot, but Chao and Meany have excellent chemistry.  The scenes are simple, mostly discussions of food from their respective cultures which are particularly great, but they are enough to further them as a couple in the early days of their marriage.  This is the most humanization O’Brien has gotten in the series thus far, while he had been given several larger scenes in the previous season giving the character a plot is a leap of faith in Meaney’s ability and further cements “The Wounded” as an episode of groundwork for later plans.

 

The Cardassians from a production standpoint feel ever so slightly like a replacement for the Ferengi.  The Ferengi despite appearing multiple times in Star Trek: The Next Generation do not really have enough presence to make an intimidating villain, largely because of how their episodes were both intentionally and unintentionally given a comedic bent.  It also likely did not help that their designs and the direction their actors had been given were laughable.  The Ferengi’s two bulbous lobes protruding from their heads are a piece of design that look far too much like buttocks to be taken seriously with their rather strained voices.  In designing the Cardassians, by contrast, are far more subtle.  There is clear inspiration for what made the redesigned Klingons work quite well with head ridges that almost outline the upper skull in a way to make them look more reptilian in nature and a particularly pale makeup work by Michael Westmore.  Like the Klingons, there’s something intimidating about where the ridges are placed and unlike the Ferengi, director Chip Chalmers allows the Cardassian actors to speak closer to their normal voices.  Marc Alaimo as Macet is equally responsible for establishing the threat of the Cardassians, his performance flipping on a dime depending on whom he is speaking with from concern to charm, to an understated hostility.  He is the reason the twist at the end of the episode works.  For the bulk of the episode while Alaimo puts cracks in the mask that Macet is putting up for everybody, but they are subtle.  The character has clearly put his underlings up to investigate the Enterprise under enough plausible deniability but clearly speaks out of both sides of his mouth.  Alaimo never makes the character outright antagonistic, but the sinister undertones are there from the beginning and clearly are providing a base for a much bigger story to be told.

 

Overall, “The Wounded” makes a near perfect inversion of “Data’s Day”.  It rewrites several of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s past mistakes in introducing potential new villains and in introducing potential new characters.  Miles O’Brien feels like he is given a proper introduction here despite appearing as far back as the first season, Colm Meaney taking the material he is given in both hands and establishing the character as all too human.  “The Wounded” is a story about all too human hurt while having to close old wounds even if they will leave scars that are ripe for reopening.  9/10.

Loving the Alien by: Mike Tucker and Robert Perry

 

Ace is dead, long live Ace.  Mike Tucker and Robert Perry are for all intents and purposes the architects for the Seventh Doctor novels in the Past Doctor Adventures line.  From writing the debut to penning most of them (with Tucker taking Prime Time solo), their direction formed the basis for a story arc not only for the Seventh Doctor and Ace as an alternative take on Season 27 but also tying into the continuity changing hijinks of the later Eighth Doctor Adventures.  Loving the Alien is the culmination of that arc in this range, Dale Smith’s Heritage being a lead into this final showdown.  The Doctor fails.  Ace is shot dead after falling in love.  The Doctor can barely keep it together with added medical torture.  The rest of the novel plays out with the idea that she is not actually going to come back, or at least not in the way that we think.  There is explicitly a shift in the timelines, the reason for resurrection left vague and the Doctor not caring because his best friend is back  He is not going to question the gift, even if deep down he knows that this is not the Ace he met in Dragonfire.  Tucker and Perry structure so much of Loving the Alien around this central event yet what propels the first half of the novel is setting up for the reader the idea that Ace’s own decisions: rebelling against the Doctor and falling in love with a boy called Jimmy, is going to somehow subvert her death.

 

There is a world where this is a television story, and Sophie Aldred has decided to leave Doctor Who.  Being a novel, the timeline is corrupted somewhat and there is a slight uncomfortableness with the Ace that we have here because the Past Doctor Adventures won’t return to this arc.  Tucker and Perry leave the reader on this implication on where the Doctor and Ace will go from here, though there is an argument to be made that their story is going into its own new, adventurous territory.  After all, Ace has already left in Set Piece.  She even died in “Ground Zero”.  Tucker and Perry’s portrayal of the Doctor in Loving the Alien is particularly excellent.  The Time Lord is taken by the grief of losing Mel in Heritage and the very real possibility of losing Ace, bringing to the surface his worst impulses.  His decision to plant a bug on Ace so he can track her is the final straw to push her away.  Loving the Alien is a look through the Doctor’s past mistakes, with several footnotes reminding readers to check the other Past Doctor Adventures that have been leading to this moment.  Tucker and Perry examine the Doctor as over planning, the sequences in the TARDIS where he is emotionally distant from Ace are great as are the haunting description of his autopsy of her corpse.  The Doctor is planning for something far bigger than him but Loving the Alien despite being explicitly a sequel to Illegal Alien, isn’t actually all that big in terms of stakes.  Yes, there are timestream diversions that need to be put right, and they are put right at the end, but the extent of the diversions still leaves the setting of the late 1950s London looking like the late 1950s London.

 

Above everything else Loving the Alien is Mike Tucker and Robert Perry’s tribute to the atomic monster genre of film with a particular love of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass serials.  While not taking the plot from a Quatermass serial, instead using giant ants as our primary “monster” threat until Cyber technology can reenter the plot as the book becomes more of a sequel to Illegal Alien over anything else.  The British Rocket Group and the space program seen in The Quatermass Experiment and its subsequent film adaptation take center stage in the plot for the first half, there even is a character named Kneale as tribute.  Tonally this is great for the novel, Tucker and Perry setting it in a very specific period of history and the pacing of the book takes on the pace of a very early science fiction serial with flashes of film noir.  Cody McBride and George Limb are our two major returning characters, McBride now being an older private detective being hired by American reporter Rita Hawks to investigate a classic case of adultery that isn’t adultery.  The book keeps the film noir elements until the timeline slipping becomes slowly more and more apparent but having McBride and the Doctor both fill a detective role leads to some of the lighter moments of the novel which are particularly great.  George Limb doesn’t fare as well.  He works well as the villain of the novel being run on survival instinct and an accrual of political power.

 

This is where the larger issues of Loving the Alien comes through.  Itis packed to the brim with ideas and plotlines that are constantly shifting and twisting.  The atomic monster plot of the giant ants is resolved so it can shift to explicitly use Cyber technology for political gain that is incoherent.  The explanation of the Waverider as being responsible for everything is also far too quick after a lot of buildup.  Loving the Alien does set up its many twists and turns, however, outside of the central Doctor/Ace conflict it becomes a mess.  The most egregious is Ace becoming pregnant with James Dean’s child.  Yes, that James Dean who slipped a timeline and didn’t die in the 1955 car crash.  The actual pregnancy happens almost too quickly and Ace’s own feelings on potentially having a child are not explored before her death and when resurrected it is undone.  Jimmy as James Dean is a twist that feels more like an idea that Tucker and Perry had without thinking it through.

 

Overall, Loving the Alien works best in the first half with the mounting sense of dread in the reader as Ace goes slowly to her death.  This is a novel where Mike Tucker and Robert Perry take some big swings that really do pay off by the end, even if that ending becomes all too cluttered with the resolution not entirely involving the Doctor’s actions enough.  The characterization is fantastic, and it does feel like a season finale to the several books leading up to this.  It’s also a book that is begging for Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred to star in an adaptation as a pair with Illegal Alien.  8/10.

Stairway to Heaven by: Paul Cornell and John Freeman with art by: Gerry Dolan and Rex Ward

 

“Stairway to Heaven” is written by: John Freeman and Paul Cornell with art by: Gerry Dolan and Rex Ward.  It was released in Doctor Who Magazine issue 152-155 (December 1989) and is reprinted in its original form in Doctor Who: Nemesis of the Daleks by Panini Books.

 

“Stairway to Heaven” is a one and done comic story all about modern art.  Okay, the modern art in question is basically the miniscope from Carnival of Monsters because this is the first commission for Doctor Who fan and now legend Paul Cornell, with editor John Freeman getting co-writing credit in the end.  You can certainly tell that a Doctor Who fan wrote this story, outside of the general idea of an art instillation having its own living society being allowed to evolve on its own.  The goal of the instillation is for the inhabitants to climb out of the instillation to meet their maker, genetic artist Garg Ardoniquist.  Honestly, the idea here is great, the underlying satire of a society that uses people as spectacle, only giving them delusions of grandeur that they might rise above their station is one of those things that screams Cornell and perfectly in line with what Doctor Who was doing on television at this time, this being the first story of the wilderness years.  Doctor Who is gone from television and the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip is making a story read as explicitly anti-capitalist.

 

Or at least it would be if it wasn’t for the sense that Cornell, or possibly Freeman, fell into the trap of portraying contemporary art as inherently highbrow and representative of capitalism.  Ardoniquist as a character is lauded by society, even in his death he is praised for getting involved in his own art.  It’s this weird, almost out of touch segment of the story.  “Stairway to Heaven” does at least characterize the Seventh Doctor’s anger quite well, even if this is still on his solo travels wandering into these situations.  Cornell is a writer who has so many ideas that like Grant Morrison’s “Culture Shock!” before it does not have enough time to really explore the ideas.  The ending of the strip is still quite effective at conveying the cycles of history, Cornell clearly wishing to play with the idea that even as technology advances society may not catch up, there just isn’t enough time to really get to the bottom of the ideas.  This is also the only strip drawn by Gerry Dolan and Rex Ward which is a shame because their work is quite good at feeling like a sophisticated piece of science fiction.  They’re particularly good at adapting Sylvester McCoy’s face into the strip, it’s very expressive but not enough to be a complete clown.

 

Overall, “Stairway to Heaven” struggles because there is not enough time to tell the story it wants to tell.  At the very least it does have something to say even if the deeper implications are actively contradictory to the surface satire being done with yet another short comic strip.  6/10.

Data's Day by: Harold Apter and Ronald D. Moore, from a story by: Harold Apter, and directed by: Robert Wiemer

 

“Data’s Day” is written by: Harold Apter and Ronald D. Moore, from a story by: Harold Apter, and is directed by: Robert Wiemer.  It was produced under production code 185, was the 11^th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4, the 85^th episode overall, and was broadcast on January 7, 1991.

 

“Data’s Day” is an example of what TV Tropes names ‘A Day in the Limelight’, an episode where a secondary character of an ensemble will be the focus but in a way that is largely atypical to a story’s established format.  Data has been the focus of several episodes before, they are often excellent, but they are also structurally standard episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  “Data’s Day” is presented as lower stakes despite the background plot of a secret diplomatic mission inside the Neutral Zone to rendezvous with the Romulans.  This is just one spear of the plot as there are multiple subplots circling around the marriage of transporter chief Miles O’Brien, played by Colm Meaney, and the other interactions through a day in the life of Data.  There is the obvious juxtaposition of high and low stakes being given the same weight in the eyes of Data by several small scenes where Data interacts with other characters.  Brent Spiner narrates the episode with Data’s personal logs in the always measured tone that sets the tone and atmosphere more than anything else in the script.  This makes “Data’s Day” such an effective episode, the breaking of the typical format means that we thoroughly examine who Data is while not tempting a viewer with a more interesting episode happening just off-screen.  The Romulan plot is the closest thing to a B-plot the episode actually has and Data does become important to discovering the twist that the Vulcan ambassador was actually a Romulan agent who had infiltrated the Federation.  The tension of faking her death using the transporter is perhaps a bit too brief, but the plot also isn’t the point of the episode as the reveal comes about through exploration of Data’s own love of the works of Arthur Conan Doyle.

 

Much of the episode is presented as examining Data’s lack of emotions in situations, however, underneath the text there is the idea that Data’s emotions are just experienced a different way from the way human beings experience emotions.  There is a scene early in the episode where he attempts to joke with Geordi La Forge, outright insulting him, and Geordi immediately recognizes what Data is doing and does not chastise him for it.  The interesting bit of logic is that Data realizes that he could only attempt what he sees as good-natured ribbing with someone like Geordi and not, for example, Captain Picard.  As much as he would deny it, Data has deep personal connections.  He has friends.  The episode posits he is the character on the Enterprise with the most friends because of how different he processes and displays his emotions.  There’s a clear reason why he has earned the trust of everyone on the ship because of the way he experiences the world, not despite it.  His part in O’Brien’s wedding is to walk the bride, Keiko played by Rosalind Chao, down the aisle, an honor that would only be given to someone akin to family.  Ending the episode on the wedding followed by Data taking command of the Enterprise for a night shift is a particularly beautiful image about humanity.

 

Data’s own internal conflict around the wedding is twofold, the one most important to the episode is his anxieties of ruining Keiko and Miles’ big day.  There is a sequence in the episode where Data learns to dance from Dr. Crusher, Gates McFadden getting the chance to show off her skills as a dancer and choreographer.  There is a miscommunication, and the initial dance is not a slow, ballroom, but an energetic Broadway style tap dance.  In the hands of a lesser writer or two lesser performers, this is a scene that should be superfluous and drag the episode down, but from both McFadden’s choreography and the fact that for his part Brent Spiner’s history on Broadway means he can keep up.  They are both keeping the characters’ deep trust and friendship present throughout this dance and the explanation as to why Data cannot easily pick up the simpler steps of ballroom dancing.  Data’s literal minded thinking means that he can easily copy the complicated steps of tap dance, but the spontaneity and connection inherent in a slow dance is a skillset that Data blocks himself from having.  It’s a skill he has to learn, paralleled with his own interactions with Chao as Keiko.  Harold Apter and Ronald D. Moore introduce Keiko as a bride having jitters on her wedding day and while they do not give her as explicit an arc as they could, they do use her to examine how rigid Data is.  Like his emotions, Data experiences love differently and cannot understand exactly how cancelling the wedding the day of is something odd.  Meany as O’Brien equally gets time to shine with Chao, both having chemistry in their brief scenes together.  It’s the wedding resolution that coalesces the thesis statement of “Data’s Day”, despite our differences, people belong to the world in their own way and nobody deserves to be relegated as outsider.

 

Overall, “Data’s Day” works so well because we adhere to a different storytelling format than the rest of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Even with the sheer amount of Data focused episodes, this being the third episode this season after “Brothers” and “Legacy” to center the character, “Data’s Day” finds something new and exclusively humanist to say about where society needs to be.  Much of it gets away with it by simply showing how these different people exist with one another and are inarguably drawn closer because of this.  It’s a day in the life and that can be the happiest thing in the universe.  9/10.

The Dresden Files: Twelve Months by: Jim Butcher

 

The Dresden Files’ routes in classic pulp noir fiction mixed with the 1990s sense of fantasy was what drew me to it six years ago.  The series changed, gradually, never quite outside of its urban fantasy roots but closer to an epic that by Peace Talks and Battle Ground there were several pieces on the board and the internal world had changed: the supernatural revealed, a main character killed in a rather emotional but sexist manner, and Jim Butcher continued a streak of five year gaps between the books in limbo as to how to continue.  Twelve Months is a book that by Butcher’s own admission was not part of the initial plan, yet it’s The Dresden Files novel that feels the most personal.  The Law, released in 2022, almost reads in retrospect as the catalyst for Butcher writing Twelve Months, not as a stopgap but with real intention to examine the new world pushing the series forward.  In his personal life it becomes clear reading Twelve Months that the pain Harry Dresden is going through is at the very least semiautobiographical.  The conclusion of Twelve Months is an obvious one, but one that everyday people sometimes just need to hear again, that healing from grief takes time and is a different process for everyone and that one’s community is more important than anything.  People may become scared in the face of disaster, those selfish enough will stoke them into violence, but in the end it’s the people that are why we do what we do.  It is not for me to speculate as to whatever hardship Butcher experienced in writing Twelve Months, but this is the novel of a man who has also changed in the time between books, as we all must.

 

Let’s get the major criticisms of the novel out of the way.  While the time span of the novel being a year allows for more time and a deeper focus on the character work, Butcher does not adjust to the pacing of a year in approximately 450 pages for the first 100 pages.  There are points, especially early on, where editorial mistakes have slipped through the cracks: Harry having the same internal expositive narration which is very likely a mistake that was not caught in editing as the most egregious example.  The emotional climax of the novel also happens approximately 50 pages before the final action sequence acting as a second climax instead of a falling action.  This is a perfectly fine action sequence, but it does read more as a tease for things to come with what it represents, and it releases some dramatic tension between Harry and Thomas almost too quickly, but this might be part of Butcher’s own reconciling of issues with himself.  It does at least thematically fit within Twelve Months’ thesis of people coming together.  What may have incorporated it more would be if the subplot of citizens in unrest and protesting Dresden and the now revealed supernatural had more of a presence.  Again, Butcher expresses this subplot as repetitive scenes instead of developing it within the narrative.  The attempt is to make the protesters seem normal, scared people who just wish to go back to something they could never get back, but it reads as if Butcher is not really making a stance or giving enough of their perspective.  Not giving any of them individual identities is particularly weak, they are not characters but a means to an end to have the secondary climax occur.

 

Where Twelve Months really succeeds is the examination of Harry Dresden as a man becoming less and less human.  In covering a year in Harry’s life, Butcher draws on the entire tangled web of being the Winter Knight, Murphy’s death, the destruction of Chicago, and Thomas being in a coma.  Practically every character Butcher has introduced throughout the series somewhere and introduces several new characters as setup for the end of The Dresden Files which is clearly approaching including a new apprentice in Fitz, a bodyguard Valkyrie Bear, and several gargoyles, but it is use of Molly Carpenter as Harry’s anchor to humanity that is fascinating.  They are both under the power of Mab and the Winter Court, making them equals of their own sort.  Molly has grown as a character, Twelve Months casting off any remaining shackles of her attraction to Harry, instead the pair find solace in friendship.  While the conclusion of the novel is that Harry has several friends, he does push several of them away.  Molly is the one who tells Harry that he needs to be a father to his own daughter, and much of the novel hangs on Harry taking those little moments to do that.  Maggie becomes the one aspect of Harry’s life that he can keep his agency with, the twists of Twelve Months being specific to how both Lara Raith and the White Court of vampires and Mab and her Winter Court have their own machinations.  The engagement between Harry and Lara is the other major subplot of the novel.  Butcher is restrained here, this could easily have fallen back into misogynistic tropes with Lara as the femme fatale, but the growing platonic relationship between Harry and Lara has its own type of sweetness.  It’s sweet enough that when Winter’s plans are revealed, the betrayal feels as horrific as it should as stealing agency from the cogs in the machine that is society is an idea at the heart of Twelve Months.  While there is occasional power fantasy involved, mainly in Harry building towards getting exactly what he wants, Butcher does remember to put a price on things, an obvious price for any genre savvy reader, but still a price to add at least some bittersweet weight among the novel’s generally happy ending.

 

Overall, Twelve Months is close to a return to form after the underwhelming regression found in The Law.  The Law feels more like a prelude to what Butcher was working through with Twelve Months as something almost entirely different to what The Dresden Files has become.  Different is actually what the series needed to put pieces in place and really allow for development of the characters as an endgame comes slightly clearer into view.   It’s a novel emblematic in the change of the last six years, weakest when elements from earlier drafts and ideas slip through the cracks, but Butcher brings just enough of the charm to make it one of the stronger entries in the series.  8/10.