The Squire of Gothos by: Paul Schneider and directed by: Don McDougall

 

“The Squire of Gothos” is written by Paul Schneider and is directed by Don McDougall.  It was filmed under production code 18, was the 17^th episode of Star Trek Season 1, and was broadcast on January 12, 1967.

 

While Paul Schneider’s other episode for Star Trek “Balance of Terror” was a hard science fiction tale, “The Squire of Gothos” leans more heavily into science fantasy as a genre, though not without forgetting that this is a series on a cosmic scale.  The plot sees the Enterprise travelling through a star desert only to find an oasis of sorts, a single planet which is plagued by hostile winds and acidic rain.  This is just the setting, something we don’t learn until the episode has really started moving forward.  The pre-credits sequence is great.  It’s a snappy introduction of first Sulu disappearing from the bridge, followed by Kirk and immediately after the credits we stay on the Enterprise until Spock can get some crewmen, mainly McCoy and two others, down to the planet to investigate.  The small buildup to the reveal that this planet has one inhabitant, Trelane, a mysterious being who cannot be detected as alive and has the powers to warp reality.  Escaping from the clutches of Trelane is the plot of the episode.  It’s a very simple plot that mainly runs on character interactions, the big ones being between Kirk and Trelane.  The supporting cast is there essentially to be put in danger once the episode really gets going, once the focus is away from Spock at command.  These early scenes with Spock are a great way to investigate things on the planet from the Enterprise and quickly build up mystery: Trelane sends up greetings on screen in calligraphy and several sweeps do not detect any life on the planet.

 

Once we actually meet Trelane we get director Don McDougall’s wonderful shots of this historical set which is gorgeous.  Trelane as a character is obsessed with the planet Earth, having observed it 900 years in the past due to the speed of light bringing those images to Gothos, his planet.  He stiles himself as a general, squire, and gentleman, introduced in the episode as playing the harpsichord and surrounded by classic Earth artifacts.  He does not care that the people he has captured has autonomy and just wishes to play out this fantasy of capturing people, getting increasingly annoyed as Kirk’s determination to leave.  He brings more crewmen down after invading the Enterprise leading to some genuinely uncomfortable scenes involving Uhura, whose race is directly referred to and is forced to play the harpsichord, and the yeomen of the week, who is forced to dance with Trelane.  William Campbell, a character actor, plays Trelane with this utter delight and glee, never going quite over the top and relishing the chance to put up these historical airs and graces.  William Shatner also is the perfect sparring partner, this episode being the first time, at least for me, where Shatner’s acting choices feel like William Shatner acting choices.  There is this rage bubbling to the top and there are line deliveries from Shatner with very odd pause choices.

 

So if there’s so much praise I can heap on the main point of the episode, why is this not stacking up to “Balance of Terror”?  Well, that’s essentially two-fold.  First, the minor point of Don McDougall’s direction as the episode goes on just starts to feel uninspired, especially on the Enterprise itself.  The shots are by no means bad, but they aren’t doing something interesting and it is the script and performances from Nimoy, Kelley, Doohan, and Nichols in these early scenes which build the mystery.  Second, it really doesn’t help that this is an episode that doesn’t quite tie everything up nicely in the end.  Trelane as a character doesn’t actually have an arc or is forced to change and see the validity of life that he has deemed lesser, the episode ends instead with a deus ex machina of others from his people taking away his power.  While not an awful ending, it comes after this trial sequence which feels like it’s meant to lead to some sort of catharsis and as it stands we don’t actually get that.  To play devil’s advocate you do get the great sense of cosmic power and mystery in the ending since Campbell plays the role in a way that you think Kirk may genuinely die and not get out of things alive, plus his temper tantrum at the end is great, but it undercuts an otherwise great episode.

 

Overall, “The Squire of Gothos” is an episode that not only has a lot of good ideas but contains some genuinely amazing performances dialing the camp to perfect levels.  It’s sadly one that is let down by a third act that almost runs out of steam as if Schneider had more to say but the runtime would not allow it.  Plus it’s from a director who at points is meticulous while at others is a bit sloppy which is a genuine shame.  It does however excel at showing the mystery and wonder that space may hold.  7/10.

Why Didn't They Ask Evans? by: Agatha Christie

 

So, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?  It’s honestly a good title for a murder mystery and it’s the central mystery keeping all the puzzle pieces from coming together for Lady Frankie Derwent’s and Bobby Jones’s investigations into the death of a man who mysteriously fell off a cliff while Bobby was playing a game of golf.  His dying words are “Why didn’t they ask Evans?” and that’s only in the first chapter.  Agatha Christie is incredibly intelligent in how she structures the novel, as if this were a Poirot or Miss Marple story there probably would be much more investigation and the book would be at most half the length.  Since the main characters are two people who are not detectives when the denouement happens you see just where the characters ended up going wrong.  Luckily in going wrong they actually were going nearly right throughout so much of the novel but since they have no idea who Evans is, when they eventually solve it the final reveal becomes almost a punchline because it makes everything so very easy to solve.  Christie excels at executing this as a twist which is a very difficult twist to pull off, a lesser author would make it feel hollow.  It’s an eleventh hour twist as well after the murderer has revealed themselves, even gloating that the two hadn’t figured out who Evans was.

 

The first chapter of the novel is among Christie’s best.  Bobby Jones shares his name with a golfer of the time which Christie uses to juxtapose hat this Bobby Jones is more than a bit of a dope, stumbling upon a murder that he doesn’t know was a murder, and immediately trusting the first person who comes once the doctor he was with goes to get help.  It takes a while for the murder to be suspected to be a murder.  A lot of the rest of the novel keeps up the intrigue while laying out this odd humor.  Bobby and Frankie, while not dumb, have that naïve charm to them as they concoct several plans to get in the good graces of the people they are convinced must be responsible for this man’s death, accidentally coming upon a conspiracy that they really shouldn’t be wrapped up in.  Despite reading several novels by Christie before, I hadn’t really come across a book like this where there is a lot of humor baked into the text.  Some of it may be because these are two essentially upper class characters coming from an upper class perspective that’s very British.  It’s also the fact that these characters are somehow finding their way in and out of danger throughout, the humor deriving from the fact that the reader is going to be genre savvy enough to realize what the wrong decision in certain situations would be, making very logical decisions and deductions to give information to the grieving family of this man.  There’s also this sense of mistaken identity and disguises done by everyone that are played for both comedy and drama, the final third of the book turning into a very good thriller as the pieces begin to fall into place.

 

Overall, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? is a question that has a very simple answer that manages to be a final piece that explains the puzzle despite not needing to answer a mystery whose solution is explained, but once it’s revealed there’s just another layer to what makes this genuinely one of Christie’s best.  It’s genuinely a shame that this one is kind of overlooked, though I wonder why the American market retitled it The Boomerang Clue.  9/10.

Arcanum Unbounded Part I: The Emperor's Soul and The Hope of Elantris by: Brandon Sanderson

 

Arcanum Unbounded is a 2017 collection from Brandon Sanderson collecting all of the short fiction that had been written and published for the Cosmere to that point.  This means there are short stories, novellas, and novelettes featured, all generally longer than one may expect from a typical piece of short fiction.  As such I have decided to split the review for the collection into four separate reviews, generally splitting up by systems, three connected to previously released series and one covering the miscellaneous pieces of standalone short fiction.  This first covers ‘The Selish System’ section of the collection, containing the novella The Emperor’s Soul and the short story “The Hope of Elantris.”

 

The Emperor’s Soul is one of those Sanderson stories that you hear quite a lot about.  It was originally published in 2012 by Tachyon Publications and has its reputation among Sanderson’s best as it won the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 2013.  Needless to say as this was the first time reading any of the works in this collection, I had some prior expectations that it would at least be very good.  This novella follows a format that I wasn’t quite expecting, acting as one of Sanderson’s more spiritual works asking questions about what it might mean to have one’s life reconstructed by magic.  The Emperor Ashravan has been left comatose due to an assassination attempt upon him and his wife, who sadly perished, but this sad circumstance buys the court 100 days to find a solution.  The solution they come to is to conscript Shai, a woman who was condemned after stealing the emperor’s scepter, to delve into the Emperor’s life and reconstruct his mind using her skills as a Forger.  This is a story that is quite simple, it clocks in at just under 200 pages in its original format, about 130 in Arcanum Unbounded, but honestly it’s the simplicity that makes it work.  Shai is our main point of view character and Sanderson explores her relationship to Forging, something that she regards as an art but in larger society it is detested.  Part of the fear is that the Emperor’s soul cannot be changed, but a simple copy of the soul wouldn’t be enough for Shai and her art.  The task seems impossible which is perfect for the stakes and as the clock ticks down, the narrative skipping several days as research progresses and the Forging begins, the tension increases.  The conclusion heavily implies that Shai’s influence changes who the Emperor has become, bringing suppressed memories and genuinely breathing new life.  Sanderson doesn’t quite delve into the harsher implications with this, but The Emperor’s Soul is brilliant at exploring the nature of art and how society often overlooks art that doesn’t fit into the confines of a certain dominant worldview which is refreshing.  As a novella, you can see why it won the Hugo Award in 2013, although there are places that are itching to be expanded upon in a way that a sequel wouldn’t necessarily be able to accomplish.  8/10.

 

“The Hope of Elantris” is an honest to goodness short story from Brandon Sanderson and is an example of some of his earlier work.  It was originally published in 2006 as an Amazon exclusive ebook.  Since this is a relatively early work it’s heavily connected to Elantris, his first novel, mainly because that was the only book he had published at this point and the way the story came about because Sanderson’s wife, Emily, had a student who excelled at a book report on Elantris not knowing that her teacher was dating the author.  Sanderson didn’t even really have the idea for the story and you can kind of tell.  It’s a very quickly paced story set during the climax of Elantris, though with a new characer, Matisse, who looks after children in Elantris.  She’s a fun character and this is a story of her building courage and standing her ground in the face of danger and honestly that’s about it.  It’s not very deep, and you can tell that it’s an early work for Sanderson as it feels more like a couple of chapters taken out of Elantris for good reason (they’d stop the narrative dead introducing new characters).  Obviously, that wasn’t the case but as it is it’s a fine enough read. 6/10.

The Galileo Seven by: Oliver Crawford and S. Bar-David, from a story by: Oliver Crawford, and directed by: Robert Gist

 

“The Galileo Seven” is written by Oliver Crawford and S. Bar-David, a pseudonym for Shimon Wincelberg, from a story by Oliver Crawford, and is directed by Robert Gist.  It was filmed under production code 14, was the 16^th episode of Star Trek Season 1, and was broadcast on January 5, 1967.

 

There have been episodes of Star Trek which excel at exploring human drama and that’s exactly what makes “The Galileo Seven” work.  Penned by Shimon Wincelberg writing as S. Bar-David, who contributed “Dagger of the Mind”, and Oliver Crawford, a prolific writer for television, it feels like an outsider from the previous 15 episodes of the series since it isn’t one that’s exploring a science fiction scenario.  It’s shockingly modern in the way it places character over plot, the plot seeing Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and four other crewmembers stranded in the shuttlecraft Galileo at the center of Murasaki 312, a quasar formation that has blocked communication with the Enterprise.  Luckily this planet has an atmosphere to support life, so it’s just a matter of time for Kirk and company to come and rescue them, or it would be if the Enterprise hadn’t been on the way Markus III with medical supplies for plague victims and this planet is inhabited by giant ape-like creatures who are out for blood.  The plague victims create a countdown clock to the point where the Enterprisie has to leave, managed by Commissioner Ferris, played by John Crawford, consistently reminding Kirk that they have to leave at this exact time and he will be taking command away from Kirk.  Crawford’s performance is earnest and genuinely interesting to watch, but it’s also a character who really doesn’t need to be there.  He creates an outright antagonist where the episode would have been better served having the decision be Kirk’s.  William Shatner as Kirk doesn’t have many scenes, but when he’s on screen here there is this intense contemplation that would only have been enhanced if he was the one to make the call and didn’t have someone taking command away.  It would have also added impact when time ran out and Kirk clawed onto leaving as slowly as possible, in the vain hope that his missing crew had survived.

 

The actual plot on the planet is simple: it’s one of desperation as Spock logically deduces any possible way to leave the planet and get everybody back to the Enterprise.  Star Trek has meticulously set up Spock’s adherence to logic over his more human side incredibly well in previous episodes and the script in this one is excellent at giving subtle bits of humanity to Spock.  This is the first time Spock has full command of a team of people and Nimoy’s performance is perfect from the beginning, showing the character’s very human flaws throughout.  There is this subtle wish for approval and belonging along with everyone else, McCoy being there to convince him to make more human decisions.  When the ape creatures start killing the crew and not acting logically, Spock essentially freezes.  Nimoy plays it as a man clearly affected by the death but suppressing that beneath the fact that he was wrong and that led to someone’s death.  Spock as a character throughout this episode should be making all the right decisions, but they each go wrong.  His final act which saves them is one of desperation when there is genuinely nothing left to do, playing it ambiguous as if it’s his human heritage showing through (as the final shot implies) or if he genuinely had no other options and was going to die with everyone else anyway.  Robert Gist’s direction also should be praised for avoiding showing the creatures in full for the majority of the episode.  Yes, they are clearly men in furry costumes, but they are rarely fully seen in the shot with their weapons seen and they are shot from behind allowing the audience to build the terror themselves.

 

Overall, “The Galileo Seven” is another more atypical episode of Star Trek which not only breaks up the monotony of the episodes in the season but also really allows several characters outside of Kirk a time in the spotlight.  It works because it’s a character drama at its core and the science fiction elements are just the trappings, something that Shimon Wincelberg did in his previous script, making this genuinely a great episode and probably overlooked since it doesn’t have any famous Star Trek imagery.  9/10.

Children of Time by: Adrian Tchaikovsky

 

It’s fascinating to read a book that runs two plots in perfect reverse parallel yet somehow manage to pull off a happy ending.  Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky is the first in a trilogy dealing with the remnants of humanity’s attempts to survive after leaving a destroyed Earth, largely following generations of humans surviving on the Gilgamesh in parallel with the rapid evolution of spiders on Kern’s World, an experiment world where a manmade virus has accidentally been unleashed on the budding planet instead of surviving in a barrel of monkeys.  Okay, so the science behind Children of Time is clearly not meant to be taken as literal scientific exploration like classic examples of science fiction, nor does it entirely give itself over to modern character driven storytelling.  The time of the title is incredibly important for what Tchaikovsky’s entire point with the novel is, an examination of generations and the evolution of culture and society when specific pressures are applied to both positive and negative effect.  The human characters don’t progress through the generations since they are able to enter suspended animation while the spiders progress through thousands of years in real time.  The way Tchaikovsky characterizes the spiders is fascinating, as the novel essentially alternates chapters between the humans and the spiders, though there are only ever four names assigned to the spiders.  This means that you see four strains of evolution with the spiders based on dominant characteristics each would display.

 

The first chapter from their perspective introduces them as spiders in the way that the reader would know and understand.  Tchaikovsky’s prose here and the other early spider chapters emulates the style of nature documentary, being clinical yet strangely inviting.  There is some genuine scientific explanation for how spiders and ants create a society based on collectivism and needs.  The four spiders Tchaikovsky uses are designated Bianca, Portia, Viola, and Fabian.  These names come from their genetic genus and species but it is more interesting to compare to the Shakespeare references which feel intentional: Bianca coming from The Taming of the Shrew, in the play a character with a number of suitors, while Bianca the spider is often characterized as responsible for species propagation; Portia coming from The Merchant of Venice where the character is known for intelligence, while Portia the spiders are generally the warriors and our spider “point of view” characters.  Viola and Fabian don’t quite work, both names coming from Twelfth Night and both being more minor spiders, Fabian being the only male spider given a name.  Tchaikovsky excels at making the spider society evolve technologically and societally only in was that spiders could, while reflecting developments of bigotry and oppression that would have had some biological advantage which is an interesting angle.  There is a portion in the middle of the novel where male spiders are attempting to build themselves up as equals to the females which is utterly fascinating.  There is also this genuine buildup of intelligence until the actual first contact with humanity occurs right near the end of the novel and an understanding is somehow managed.

 

The human plot is one for desperate survival, and near ultimate destruction of the human race.  The setup for humanity is an ark ship with plenty of people in suspended animation, but since the experiments on Kern’s World went wrong by evolving spiders instead of monkeys, Dr. Avrana Kern was placed in suspended animation and the problems snowballed from there.  There is almost a danger of sufficiently advanced technology baked into the novel, but never so much that you feel as if Tchaikovsky is speaking of technology on the whole, more warning against hubris and exploring the short sightedness of humanity.  Kern as a character, along with her ‘sister’ Eliza, is the human’s primary threat for the first third of the novel, or so.  The characters on the Gilgamesh enter several gambits and at almost every step of the way, something goes wrong.  The commander, Guyen, is also a perfect example of the spiral into an almost adamant madness in his attempts to keep everything together.  Once again his arc is not one of Tchaikovsky so much as decrying technology, but exploring the issues with it.  This is a society where artificial intelligence has been adopted and treated which is fascinating.

 

Overall, Children of Time wasn’t so much as a pleasant surprise, but more of what I was expecting since it’s a book that grabs you and lures you in with a mix of genuinely interesting science fiction concepts plus some genuinely existential horror.  The spiders aren’t even the scariest things as they are a dangerous society, the reader being more interested in wanting to see their society develop interesting ideas and technology.  Yes, he gives the spiders their own technology that kind of makes them an unstoppable force.  It also helps especially that while there’s a trilogy, the ending of the book is a complete story so there isn’t a pressure to continue if you absolutely don’t want to, yet there is still so much more potential that can be explored in this universe.  10/10.

Shore Leave by: Theodore Sturgeon and directed by: Robert Sparr

 

“Shore Leave” is written by Theodore Sturgeon and is directed by Robert Sparr.  It was filmed under production code 17, was the 15^th episode of Star Trek Season 1, and was broadcast on December 29, 1966.

 

This episode was certainly a trip.  There’s a great premise here, the Enterprise finding a seemingly lush and peaceful planet to take some much needed shore leave, but upon initial inspection McCoy sees a white rabbit in a waistcoat followed by a young girl and the episode spirals from there.  The plot becomes a collection of scenes of classic literature, stock characters, personal regrets, or a random tiger and airplane for some reason coming to life to terrorize the crew.  That’s kind of really the only plot point, McCoy and Angela from the last episode die at one point, McCoy gets randomly resurrected and given two showgirls to ogle over.  Angela may or may not still be dead.  I don’t think the intention was to kill her off here, but you don’t actually see her again so it’s very possible that she doesn’t get resurrected by the magic aliens who run the planet.  The planet is revealed to be a pleasure planet and everything’s okay in the end as the crew gets their leave.  The episode is really surreal, and not just because the premise of the script is absolutely insane.

 

The direction and editing that went into the episode doesn’t follow what’s become the standard for Star Trek or really any sense of television episodes, instead going from set piece to set piece with a pace that feels like that’s what we were able to shoot today so it has to go into the episode.  There is a moment early on in the episode where Sulu gets a pistol and just decides to start shooting it in a scene that is utterly camp, Kirk is menaced by a tiger and his bully from the academy which feels perhaps the most like a fever dream, and a yeomen character clearly meant to replace the unjustly fired Grace Lee Whitney is menaced by several heroic men.  The yeoman character is perhaps what brings most of the episode down whenever she’s on screen mainly because she becomes victim tot several sexist tropes adding to a more stilted performance as Emily Banks isn’t really given much direction as to how she’s to be characterized.  You can tell that the episode had production troubles, but nowhere as badly as they apparently were.  According to cast and crew recollections, Gene Roddenberry took it upon himself to rewrite the script during the filming of the episode after being unhappy with Sturgeon’s original script and script editor Gene L. Coon’s initial rewrites.

 

“Shore Leave” is an episode that honestly feels like it’s had any sense of surrealism surgically removed because Gene Roddenberry didn’t get it.  It’s an episode that’s genuinely complicated to score as the performances from its cast are all aware that they’re working with something without its own identity so bring in over the top performances leading to a very camp episode.  Robert Sparr’s direction is trying to make sense of a pieced together script, the score is working overtime to communicate some emotions from subplots that have seen several iterations, and the end result is not a particularly great episode (nor a bad episode) but one that you’ll at least enjoy the utter camp absurdity of the proceedings.  6/10.

Consider Phlebas by: Iain M. Banks

 

While I attempt to write in the third person, I feel like for this review including some first person since this was a book that I had recommended by multiple people when requesting books to take a look at.  As far as I am aware, Iain M. Banks while prolific is no as well known here in the United States, most likely because of the USA’s tendency to ignore many writers who don’t push their way into the pop culture.  While Consider Phlebas is not his first novel, it is the first installment in his long running, science fiction series exploring the idea of the Culture.  The Culture is an intergalactic society that seems to have an almost utopic outlook which is honestly a fascinating idea that still intrigues me after reading this novel.  Banks is clearly talented at worldbuilding, but throughout Consider Phlebas there isn’t enough to really explore what the Culture is, possibly because this first novel is told from an outsider’s perspective from the Culture.  The perspective of this book is from an enemy agent while the Culture is at war with the Idrians and Banks to his credit goes into how this war came about as well as worldbuilding for the setting.

 

Consider Phlebas takes its title from “The Waste Lands” by T.S. Elliot which should give you insight into the tone Banks is going for but it’s a novel that I honestly struggled with for its first half.  There are some incredibly evocative opening scenes of torturing someone for information in a very gruesome detail, but after about 30 pages Banks slows down to an almost glacial pace until just over the halfway point of the novel where it picks up and feels like Banks realizes what kind of novel he is writing.  The ending of the book in particular somehow manages to pull something great, reflecting on the nature of war and an almost nihilistic outlook on the influence one person can have.  This nihilism is tempered with quite a few instances of amazingly wry, British humor that seems tailor made to work for my particular tastes.  The main character of Horza suddenly becomes fascinating to follow when he’s actually put into a high pressure situation, and the plot is allowed to move along.  There is some rather regressive portrayals of sex which I think Banks was attempting to do as a genuinely sex positive thing, but in retrospect it's very “men writing women.”  This is the one thing that brings the back half of the book down.

 

Overall, Consider Phlebas is not bad enough for me to completely write off the Culture as a setting nor is it enough for me to write Bnaks off as a writer, however, I do think that it may not really work as an introduction to the series or Banks despite being the first book in the series.  The first half just dragged itself out far too much and while the second half massively improved things and nearly pulled something good out of the depths there still isn’t enough exploration plus some supplementary material before the epilogue that didn’t need to be there as it kind of spells out the themes of the book which wasn’t subtle to begin with.  5/10.