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From: Season 1

The Matthews family are confused when they drive through a small town only to find themselves repeatedly driving back through it again, whatever route they attempt to take. The locals tell them they are trapped in a snowglobe, a town which is normal enough during the day but at night is besieged by strange, human-looking monstrous creatures who only want to torture and kill. The family, and the locals, decide to try to find a way to escape.

Back in the late 2000s, every other show on television was a supernatural mystery thriller, inspired by the runaway success of Lost. Most of those shows crashed and burned without a trace, with the arguable biggest success - Fringe - both using some of the same creative firepower as Lost and also doing enough differently that it didn't come off as a lame cash-in. 

The last few years have seen a resurgence of such shows, most successfully with Showtime's Yellowjackets. From is in a similar vein, but taps some of the original team, with Lost producer-director Jack Bender and Fringe writer-producer Jeff Pinkner (who also wrote a few episodes of Lost) acting as producers on this show, along with first-time showrunner John Griffin.

From, at first glance, resembles some of those older shows in its construction. The central mystery is where the hell the town is (people stumble across it from all over America), why and how it keeps people trapped, and how people can escape, not to mention the nature of the creatures that keep attacking it. The show balances exploring these mysteries with more character-driven stories about both the town's existing residents and the newcomers. The Matthews family - father Jim, mother Tabitha, daughter Julie and young son Ethan - act as our eyes and ears in this world, sharing their confusion over how they got stuck in the town and how it should be possible to flee.

The show stumbles a little bit compared to early Lost, which remains a masterclass in how to deliver a huge amount of interesting character introductions and exposition in a pilot, attached to a well-crafted story. From's characters are less immediately compelling and it takes a few episodes for them to become anywhere near as interesting. It doesn't help that ostensible co-lead Jim Matthews (a game but under-challenged Eion Bailey) is a little bland as a character. More compelling are Catalina Sandino Moreno (Oscar-nominated for Maria Full of Grace) as his wife Tabitha and genre stalwart Harold Perrineau (also of Lost, but also the Matrix films, Oz and Romeo+Juliet) as the town sheriff Boyd. Perrineau in particular gives a very strong performance as Boyd's desperation to protect the people and find a way to escape is palpable, and later flashbacks show the horrible decisions he's had to make along the way to keep people safe.

The town is split into two groups, with one group living down in the houses in along the main road and another living in Colony House, a very large house atop a nearby hill, which is a bit more hippy-ish. The Matthews family becomes divided between the two locations due to family drama, which the show maybe leans a bit more into than it should.

From's biggest early problem is trying to feel fresh whilst indulging in over-familiarity. One character has a crush on another but cannot articulate it. Other characters are having visions and weird dreams which may be clues to the mystery or might just be the logical outcome of stress. One brilliant but socially ill-adjusted character (with shades of Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica) is trying to find a way out but is constantly frustrated by the stupidity of everyone around them. There is tension between the people who've been in town for a while and made a life for themselves (albeit one that's dangerous), and the latecomers who are more focused on escape. There's only so many shows with psychic kids that one can take. A late-season obsession with erecting a radio tower to send out a mayday makes one think of Lost's first season obsession with a raft, and both shows have something odd happening underground.

Still, if From is ploughing a familiar field, at least it does so entertainingly. Once the first few episodes, with their clumsy exposition and stodgy pacing, are out of the way, the show does a better job of rotating between the character dramas and the mysteries. A devastating late-season event does a great job of raising the tension, whilst the finale builds up to a nice series of cliffhangers (and, as the second season is already available, it's not a major issue to roll straight into the next batch of episodes).

Scepticism over the show's long-term viability is natural, and certainly From (***½) doesn't start with the verve and confidence of either Lost or Yellowjackets, but give it a few episodes to heat up and eventually a reasonably interesting horror-mystery drama emerges. The show airs on MGM+ in the USA and on NowTV in the UK. A second season is already available, and a third season has been commissioned.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Grounded

You're having the definition of a bad day: you've woken up with a severe case of amnesia in a stranger's backyard. And you're also about 70mm tall. Surviving the myriad hazards of the giant backyard and finding a way of getting back to your proper size is not going to be easy.

Obsidian Entertainment, and their preceding incarnation as Black Isle Studios, have spent a quarter of a century crafting intricately-designed, well-written roleplaying games. They created the Fallout franchise as Interplay's inhouse CRPG team, crafted Planescape: Torment (still often cited as the greatest CRPG of all time) as Black Isle Studios, and as Obsidian delivered the critically-acclaimed (if janky) Knights of the Old Republic II, Alpha Protocol, Neverwinter Nights 2 and Fallout: New Vegas, among others. In the last decade they have been heavily involved in creating retro-style CRPGs with the Pillars of Eternity universe and the chronically underrated Tyranny, as well as returning to full 3D, first-person CRPGs with the decent-but-unspectacular The Outer Worlds.

It's therefore a surprise to see Obsidian turning around and making a survival and crafting game, especially a somewhat cartoony-looking one, apparently designed to appeal to children. But, first impressions aside, Grounded ends up having more in common with their previous roster of games than you'd think.

Grounded plays like many such games in the genre, but its mix of accessibility and a strong focus on story makes it feel like a spiritual successor to Subnautica, the previous "survival game for people who don't normally like survival games". Like that game, you start off in a highly precarious position, effectively abandoned in a hostile landscape with no food, no water, no weapons and no real idea of what to do. Fortunately, you quickly discover miniaturised shelters and supplies scattered across the backyard, confirming you're not the first victim of the shrink ray (and, if playing in co-op mode, Subnautica's ace card for gameplay, that quickly becomes obvious). You also soon find a friendly miniature robot who quickly sets you on the road to success. As wit Grounded's aquatic predecessor, it's impressive seeing how quickly you can go from having nothing to living in a massive base protected by tough defences.

Grounded deviates from that game in one very major way: combat. The yard is crawling with hostile wildlife, including mosquitoes, wasps, bombardier beetles, stinkbugs, and angry little mites. There are other creatures who are indifferent or even friendly to you, but their bodies can be harvested for essential supplies or for food, including ladybugs, ants, aphids and weevils. Combat plays out like a simpler version of a Soulslike, with each creature have a distinct attack pattern heralded by animations and sound effects. Periodically you encounter larger boss creatures, who require much more work to defeat.

How much you like Grounded may depend on your attitude to combat in a survival game. If you see it as a good thing, Grounded is a great game with lots of varieties of enemies and how to handle them. If you see combat as a distraction from base-building and crafting, then the amount of combat in the game will likely get on your nerves.

Building and crafting is fun, but not massively necessary to complete the game. I constructed a very small, modest base with just the essentials for getting food, water and creating new weapons, equipment and armour. Later on I did erect a large tower and built ziplines from the tower to distant corners of the garden, allowing relatively rapid transit from a central base to other locales, which made the latter part of the game easier than might have otherwise been the case.

Graphically, the game is superb. This was the first game I played on my new nVidia 4090-powered system and the result is a glorious riot of colour and foliage, rendered impressively in 4K. I did experience occasional CTDs without an obvious explanation, which encouraged regular saving (you can also set the frequency of autosaves). Controls were responsive, and base-building was pretty easily accomplished. Inventory management could be a little better, with the sheer number of useful tools and the need to carry different armour loadouts (some armour renders you invisible to the creatures that armour is made from) making it easy to max out the three hotbars the game gives you, but it's not a major problem. The game is also playable from both first person and third person perspectives, which is very welcome.

The game's narrative provides a good sense of direction, and the story (initially unfolding via audio logs but later through more direct interactions with NPCs) is bittersweet, with some harsh decisions and character twists being revealed. There's also some branching to the narrative: going off-mission and exploring remote parts of the yard can open up new storylines or impact the main quest, leading to a better (or worse) outcome. There's one optional boss hiding in a remote corner of the yard whose defeat reveals major information about the story that otherwise you'll never encounter.

The yard itself is brilliantly-designed and one of the most entertaining recent game worlds. The central grasslands give way to the mysteries of the impenetrable hedge (with an important base located high up in its twisted branches) and the depths of the koi pond. If you can avoid the indestructible koi guardian of the pond and work out how to preserve your oxygen supply, massive underwater rewards await. Later, you can travel to the sandpit, a vast desert realm suffering an inconvenient antlion infestation, and once you can access to explosives you can penetrate the rockwall to the upper yard, a punishing new biome that will tax your fighting and survival abilities to the maximum. There is a good 50 hours of entertainment here for a focused playthrough aimed at completing the story as efficiently as possible; for those who want to build incredible bases or towers higher than the house, or grind for the best weapons and gear to fight the horrific broodmother optional boss, that enjoyment will easily last for multiples of that time.

Grounded (****½) is a big swing from Obsidian, far outside their normal wheelhouse, but one that pays off handsomely. The game is fun, colourful, good-natured but not without its grim moments, and constantly challenging. It is available now on PC and Xbox consoles, via the usual vendors and Game Pass.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

BALDUR'S GATE 3 becomes one of the most popular Steam games ever

Larian Studios launched the extremely long-awaited third video game in the Baldur's Gate series last week on PC. The follow-up to BioWare's Baldur's Gate (1998) and Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (2000), the game is another fantasy roleplaying epic drawing on Dungeons & Dragons rules, with the player taking control of a motley crew and setting out to save the world, or at least to start with, their skulls.

The game had a lengthy three-year gestation period in Early Access, during which time over two and a half million people played the game and Larian received extensive feedback on how to improve balancing, combat, classes and characters.

The extensive Early Access period and pre-release hype seems to have paid off. In the four days since release, the game has peaked at just under 815,000 concurrent players, making it the ninth-most-played game in Steam's history. Larian have not disclosed how many additional sales were notched up in the release period, but the game has sat at the top of Steam's sales charts for a considerable chunk of that time. The game has likewise been the biggest-selling title on GoG for the past week or so.

Baldur's Gate 3's sales are restricted to the PC format only for the time being. The game will launch on PlayStation 5 on 5 September and an Xbox release is planned for later, although Larian have encountered technical difficulties in getting the game to run well on the lower-specced Xbox Series S console. They hope to resolve the problem soon.

For myself, I'm a dozen hours into the game and so far it's been a satisfying fantasy adventure. It may be some considerable time before a review, however. This is a very, very big game.

Wertzone Classics: Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

Sam Vimes, Commander of the City Watch and Duke of Ankh-Morpork, is having a very bad day. His wife is in labour with their first child, and it is the thirtieth anniversary of the Glorious Revolution of the Twenty-Fifth of May. But rather than spending his day toasting fallen friends and greeting his child into the world, Vimes is instead chasing down Carcer, a notorious murderer and sociopath with a taste for killing Watchmen. The inadvertent combination of a lightning strike with the standing magical field of Unseen University transports both Vimes and Carcer back to the week of the Glorious Revolution, and Vimes has to stop Carcer and ensure that history unfolds precisely as it did before...which is a bit difficult when their arrival brings about the death of Vimes' old friend and mentor before his time.

There is nothing, or at least very little, as glorious in the world as Sir Terry Pratchett (RIP) on his best form. Released in 2002, the twenty-ninth Discworld novel holds a strong claim to be the series' very best, although it is a crowded field.

As with the other (arguable) leading candidate for that title, Small Gods, Night Watch is a book that is both funny and angry. In the earlier novel, Pratchett was furious over religious fundamentalism and how personal faith could and can be perverted into a force of oppression and evil. In Night Watch he studies paranoia and fear, how crowds and masses can be moved by propaganda and oppressed by their own rulers because they fear them. The tone is darker and bleaker than most other Discworld books by design: this isn't the cosmopolitan, successful Ankh-Morpork of the later series, but an old, rough, poor and paranoid city ruled by a lunatic despot. There's a sinister secret police force, there's torture chambers and inquisitions, and there's casual racism (as usual in the series, filtered through the lens of speciesism) that takes even old-skool, dyed-in-the-wool copper Vimes by surprise. There is still humour here, but it's grimmer and blacker than in most of his books.

One of the novel's most impressive achievements is evoking such ideas and reaching such quality in the middle of one of the series' most tightly-woven sub-series. Small Gods was a complete standalone set long before the rest of the series, but Night Watch is a key book in the "City Watch" arc, with frequent continuity references to what's been going in that storyline. However, Night Watch's fish-out-of-water setting does render that somewhat moot: you really just need to know that Vimes is a successful, reforming police commander with a pregnant wife and an ambiguously motivated boss.

The book is dealing with a lot of inspirations: the cover (Paul Kidby's first regular cover for the series following the passing of his more idiosyncratic predecessor, Josh Kirby) is a riff on Rembrandt's "Night Watch," whilst the revolution itself plays on everything from France to Russia and even Bloody Sunday (the deployment of the military to deal with a civil order issue is uncomfortably on the nose, as it means to be). Pratchett is not really interested in a 1:1 copy-past of the real events, though, and is more interested into delving into the rationales for civil disorder, for popular rebellions and mass uprisings, and if revolutions ever really change anything, other than just swapping the name on the door of the top office, and if today's heroic revolutionary leader is tomorrow's tyrannical despot.

Night Watch (*****) is still funny, but Pratchett wraps the comedy around more serious, even grimmer themes than in many of his books. The story is excellent, the characterisation - especially of Vimes, who by this novel has become maybe Pratchett's richest protagonist - among Pratchett's best and the villain is one of the most genuinely hateful in the entire series. It's also an interesting morality play on political states, the meaning of power, and how the masses can be harnessed for good and ill.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

Wertzone Classics: The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

The lands of Middle-earth are threatened by the forces of the Dark Lord Sauron, who only needs to find the missing One Ring to become unstoppable. Through an unlikely chain of events, the Ring has fallen into the possession of Bilbo Baggins, an unassuming hobbit of the Shire. After Bilbo retires, the Ring falls into the possession of his cousin Frodo. Finally realising the true nature of the Ring, the wizard Gandalf tells Frodo he must travel to Sauron's stronghold of Mordor and climb the volcanic Mount Doom, the only place where the Ring can be destroyed.

Reviewing The Lord of the Rings is a bit like reviewing oxygen, or Star Trek. People are probably already going to have read it, or decided not to. I can't imagine there's too many people sitting on the fence over it. Still, having just reread the whole thing, reviewing it is only polite.

The Lord of the Rings began life as a sequel to J.R.R. Tolkien's children's novel, The Hobbit, originally published in 1937. The book rapidly spiralled out of Tolkien's control and foresight, becoming longer, darker and more epic. In truth, the book became more of a sequel to Tolkien's massive myth-cycle, the then-unfinished and unpublished Silmarillion (eventually published posthumously in 1977), adopting its epic themes but using the accessible relatability of the hobbits to make the book easier to swallow for a large audience. The Lord of the Rings was eventually published in three volumes (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King) in 1954 and 1955.

The impact of The Lord of the Rings cannot be overestimated. It codified the entire category field of modern epic fantasy, and Tolkien's imitators and successors are legion, as are those consciously rejecting his influence and doing something completely different. With sales estimates running from around 150 million to almost 400 million (the confusion caused by the novel's division into one-volume, three-volume and even seven-volume editions, and vast numbers of pirate editions published globally since the book came out), The Lord of the Rings is one of the biggest-selling individual novels of all time and has spawned a multimedia empire of radio, film and TV adaptations (of wildly varying quality).

Cutting through all of this chaff, what of the novel itself? How does it hold up in 2023? The answer is very well indeed, and in some respects the novel has aged better than expected. The explosion of massive epic fantasy series with individual volumes sometimes longer than The Lord of the Rings in its entirety (achieved by Tad Williams and Brandon Sanderson, and almost so by George R.R. Martin and Patrick Rothfuss) has inverted the old criticism of the novel. Rather than overlong and ponderous, as it was felt to be by many in the 1960s and 1970s (when most SFF novels clocked in at well under 300 pages), it now feels spry and economical with its pacing. The fact Tolkien delivered a single novel that tells a massive, sweeping and complete story (even reading The Hobbit is not necessary) with almost a dozen POV characters and spanning difference races, countries and an entire war, with incredibly detailed worldbuilding (most of it created just for this book; relatively little was inherited from The Silmarillion, which took place in a different region of Middle-earth), is pretty remarkable by modern standards.

The book opens in the bucolic Shire and, despite later rewrites, this section never shakes off its origin point as The Hobbit II: Somewhere Else and Back Again, Probably. There's laughter and good cheer and a lot of light and humour. But the book switches almost on a dime when Gandalf tells Frodo of the One Ring and sinister dark-hooded Riders arrive in the Shire. The initial flight from Hobbiton to Bree, with Frodo accumulating his loyal friends and allies Samwise, Merry and Pippin, remains a masterclass of building tension. The book takes a longueur at Rivendell, but it feels earned and is important for establishing the stakes of the story and establishing the Fellowship. The remainder of the first part is Tolkien delivering one epic set-piece after another, from battling wolves on the slopes of the Misty Mountains to almost dying on the slopes of Caradhras to the transition through the Mines of Moria to the battle on Amon Hen that leads to the splitting of the Fellowship.

As Tolkien himself acknowledged many years later, The Fellowship of the Ring is very different to The Two Towers and The Return of the King. The first instalment is lighter, pacier and more focused on a small, likable band of heroes engaged in an adventure. The latter two parts split the Fellowship into smaller sub-groups and sees them allying with larger powers (the nations of Rohan and Gondor) to fight Sauron's armies on the battlefield, at Helm's Deep and the Pelennor Fields. Tolkien is superb at building tension and delivering epic speeches but seems disinclined to dwell on the horrors of warfare up-close: those used to Peter Jackson's multi-hour action sequences based on those battles may be surprised by how concisely Tolkien deals with them on the page. He is more interested in the story and what happens to his characters than filling his pages with carnage. These latter two volumes remain fascinating and enjoyable, but they are drier. The moments of humour and cheer become sparser and Tolkien's prose becomes more academic, higher and more remote.

Tolkien is also an underrated master of horror. Throughout The Lord of the Rings he adeptly deploys horror tropes to scare the bejesus out of the Fellowship and the reader. This can be seen with the Black Riders in the Shire, the barrow-wights near the Old Forest and the descent through the Black Pit of Moria, and in the later confrontations with the great spider, Shelob, and the Army of the Dead. As China Miéville once said, Tolkien also gives great monster. Between Shelob, the balrog, the cave trolls and wargs, the book is replete with excellently-designed terrors.

Ultimately our heroes achieve their goals but the novel continues for another 100 pages after that, with the hobbits returning home to find that the war has not spared the home front and they have to undertake a final quest, this time by themselves without their powerful allies. For Tolkien, the Scouring of the Shire was a vitally important part of the novel about how, after taking part in a war and experiencing trauma, you can never quite go home again. This gives The Lord of the Rings its bittersweet complexity: the war is won but the damage it wreaks on the winners - or survivors - is palpable.

The novel has its weak points. Tolkien is a skilled poet in the short form but a more awkward one at length, and the novel features several verses that go on for several pages. Whilst the novel overall packs a ton of story, character and theme into a thousand pages, it does have moments where it slows down dramatically and takes a few pages to get going again. In-depth psychological characterisation is not something that Tolkien is really interested in, along with modern ideas about when to signify POV switches. This is not to say there is no characterisation, and indeed the hobbits in particular go through impressive character growth as the book develops, but it's less obvious than in many modern novels. The greatest exception is Gollum, who is torn by competing internal forces through the book as he strives for redemption but is tempted by a return to villainy.

A more valid criticism (both modern and contemporary) is almost the complete lack of female characters: Tolkien himself had already (by this point) developed important female characters in The Silmarillion who have impressive agency and play important roles in the story (such as Lúthien, Morwen, Nienor and Melian), but in Lord of the Rings the sole female character of almost any note is Éowyn. Tolkien did write more material for Arwen, but removed most of her story to the appendices. Other female characters (Galadriel, Goldberry, Rosie Cotton) appear only fleetingly. This does add to the WWI-esque atmosphere that develops, with women as a symbol of aspiration and home, but it's probably the area where the novel has aged the most poorly.

The Lord of the Rings (*****) is a titanic presence in the field of fantasy: no other single novel is as influential in its genre, even if it's perhaps less dominant these days than it used to be. It's easy to dismiss or write it off as old-fashioned or outdated, but this would be a mistake. Tolkien delivers a huge story about fighting the forces of darkness, both the overt and the subtle, and overcoming internal trauma, in a manner that remains compelling. At its best, his prose is rich and engrossing and his descriptions impressive, although the prose does become drier as the novel proceeds and some later sections lack the flair and energy of earlier chapters. But overall The Lord of the Rings remains a towering achievement of the genre and one that is worth reading.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

BABYLON 5 to get long-requested Blu-Ray release

Seminal epic space opera show Babylon 5 is to finally get a release on Blu-Ray, after many, many years of campaigning by fans. The set will be released on 5 December this year in the USA, UK and some other territories.

Babylon 5 aired for five seasons and five TV movies, airing from 1993 to 1998. An additional TV movie and a direct-to-DVD film followed in 2002 and 2007, along with a 13-episode spin-off show, Crusade, in 1999. Babylon 5 was reasonably successful on its first airing, becoming the first non-Star Trek space opera to last for more than three seasons in American television history. It won two Hugo Awards for Best Dramatic Presentation (for the episodes The Coming of Shadows and Severed Dreams, in Seasons 2 and 3 respectively), along with an Emmy for visual effects. Babylon 5 helped pioneer the use of both CGI and long-term, serialised story arcs in a television series. The series was hugely influential on its contemporaries (such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and succeeding shows, including Lost, which borrowed ideas from its story arc structure.

The show had a somewhat complex technical issue which has made re-releases problematic. Babylon 5 was one of the first - if not the first - American TV shows to be protected for widescreen shooting, with the plan to release the entire show in 16:9 widescreen ratio at a later date, after its original 4:3 airing. However, due to technical issues and communications mixups, the show's then-cutting edge CGI was only produced in 4:3. For the original TV release this was not an issue, but for the DVD release in 2002, this created a technical headache, as fans and the studio wanted a widescreen release. Unable to afford the cost of recreating all the CGI and composite scenes in 16:9 from scratch, the decision was made to use the widescreen live-action footage but to crop and zoom in on the CGI shots. This created a widescreen presentation which lost detail and sometimes important CGI elements from those shots. For composite scenes, this also meant occasional but noticeable rapid zooming in and out of scenes as they alternated from pure live-action shots to CG composites.

In 2021, Babylon 5 was released in a new "remastered" format. To create the best compromise version, Warner Brothers remastered the live-action-only footage in HD and also carefully upscaled the CG shots via an algorithm. As these things go, this was not too terrible, and the improved live-action footage is impressive. However, to achieve a uniform presentation, they made the decision to crop the live-action shots back down to their original 4:3 presentation, and then keep the CG shots intact. As a compromise, this was reasonable, although frustrating for fans who wanted to see the show in HD and in widescreen.

The only alternative is to completely re-render all of the show's CG elements from scratch and in 16:9. This is likely prohibitively expensive, as Babylon 5 sometimes had 100 or more CG shots in a single episode, and also requires all of the original greenscreen footage to have been preserved perfectly. 

A stopgap idea has been pursued by B5 fan Tom Smith for several years, involving taking the original shots, ship models and scene files and re-rendering them in 16:9 and in HD (or even 4K) using modern PCs. This produces a visually identical image to the original, but with a lot more detail (the original models were very exactingly built for the standards of the time) and looks very nice today. However, this is only possible where all of that material has survived, either in the WB archive or in the archives of the various animators and teams that worked on the show. Smith tracked down a lot of that material for Seasons 2 and 3, but for Season 1 only the models have survived, and for Seasons 4 and 5 it appears that very little has survived, so this is not a viable solution for the entire show.

It also appears that the "complete series" title might be something of a misnomer. Based on the 2022 re-release and some of the initial release info, it looks like the set will include all five seasons of the original show, remastered, plus the pilot movie The Gathering, which was not remastered (due to issues with the original source film). The other TV movies - In the Beginning, Thirdspace, River of Souls and Call to Arms - plus the spin-off show Crusade and the later TV/DVD movies Legend of the Rangers, The Lost Tales and soon-to-be-released animated movie The Road Home, do not appear to be included at this time. If it is confirmed that some or all of them will be included, this news will be updated.

Wertzone Classics: Star Trek: The Original Series

Space, the final frontier. And so forth. In the mid-23rd Century, the Federation starship Enterprise explores strange new worlds under the command of Captain James T. Kirk, making discoveries both wondrous and terrifying.

Reviewing the original Star Trek is a bit like reviewing oxygen (you're not going to convince too many people about not using it), or Lord of the Rings. People are probably already going to watch it or have decided not to. I can't imagine there's too many people sitting on the fence over it. Still, having just watched the whole thing, reviewing it is only polite.

Perhaps the most succinct review of The Original Series, as it is now doomed to be called, came from Futurama back in 2002: "79 episodes, about 30 good ones." This is maybe a little harsh but also not entirely untrue. Airing from 1966 to 1969 (with an unaired pilot produced in 1964), Star Trek was a product of 1960s American assembly line television, producing a mind-boggling 29 episodes in its first season alone. Episodes were not so much carefully written as thrown together in a mad rush, with location filming being a rare luxury and decent visual effects an even rarer one. If anything, it's remarkable that the OG Star Trek holds together as well as it does, and when it works it's still excellent television.

The core of the show is the regular cast, particularly the triumvirate of William Shatner as Captain Kirk, Leonard Nimoy as Spock and DeForest Kelley as Dr. McCoy: the action hero, the logical analyst and the emotional heart. This trio works extremely well, with consistently outstanding performances from Nimoy and Kelley across the entire show (Kelley is easily the most underrated performer on the show and in the following movies, and is always a delight to watch; Nimoy's brilliance has been extolled so much over the years it's almost redundant to repeat it now). This focus on the core trio detracts somewhat from the wider cast: George Takei as Lt. Sulu, Walter Koenig as Ensign Chekov, Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura and James Doohan as Chief Engineer Scott (with frequent guest appearances by Majel Barrett as Nurse Chapel, and a rotating cast of recurring actors as crewmen, some of whom play multiple characters). The wider group gets relatively little time in the sun compared to the core three, which feels a bit weird from a modern lens but was relatively normal practice at the time.

From a performance perspective, William Shatner is a fascinating study. He is, for the first half of the show, consistently very good. Kirk is authoritative, moral and decisive, balancing the logic of Spock with the humanity of McCoy to good effect. In the latter half of the series, starting late in Season 2, it feels like he's checked out a little. The much-lampooned cliches of over-enunciation, attempts at dramatic pauses (which just feel like he's forgotten his lines midway through a speech) and occasionally wild over-acting become much more pronounced. When he has a good day, or is in a good episode with good material, he is still great, but that does become less common as the third season goes on (his worst performance is easily in Turnabout Intruder, which mercifully is also the last episode of the series).

From a writing perspective, the show is often inventive, intriguing and relatively smart, at least in the early going. Later episodes tend to emphasise action and develop tropes that are so rapidly reused they become tedious: the godlike entity who can crush the Enterprise and its crew any time they want, but first they have to use Kirk and the crew as pawns in some game, and are eventually defeated either by semantic trickery or (less commonly) some kind of technological breakthrough. The Enterprise mysteriously loses the use of its weapons, shields and transporter so often that your eyes may roll into the back of your head. Kirk talks sentient computers into self-destruction frequently enough that you wonder why an anti-Kirk firmware update isn't in circulation in the sentient evil computer club.

But the show is also remarkably adept at employing metaphor: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield's commentary on racism is so subtle it flew over the heads of some people, who wrote into the studio to complain that the near-identical aliens hating one another on the basis of skin colour alone was stupid (right in the middle of America's Civil Rights period). It also sings when it moves away from the all-powerful aliens trope to more even engagements: Balance of Terror's WWII submarine-inspired tension is superb, and Space Seed's battle of intellect and wills between Kirk and genetically-engineered warlord Khan is excellently portrayed. The battle between two Federation starships and a powerful (but not unbeatable) planet-killer in The Doomsday Machine is outstanding. The Devil in the Dark is possibly the show's best statement on how to respect and treat sentient life even if it looks and acts nothing like you are used to.

Like most shows of the period, the idea of "worldbuilding" is absent as a conscious idea, but when it strays into it, it is excellent, such as with our first visit to Vulcan in Amok Time and the Federation conference in Journey to Babel. The Klingons and Romulans are both intriguing enemies, although the portrayal of the Klingons lacks depth (maybe aside from Michael Ansara in Day of the Dove); the Romulans appear less frequently but more memorably, with both Balance of Terror and The Enterprise Incident being series highlights.

The show also gives good comedy, with both The Trouble with Tribbles and A Piece of the Action emerging as comic powerhouses (and The Naked Time having its moments). Gene Roddenberry was definitely less keen on comedy episodes, feeling they encouraged people to mock the show, but it's something Trek has been consistently pretty good at over many different shows and episodes. The show is also adept at existential horror, particularly in the early going through episodes like Where No Man Has Gone Before and Miri which make you wonder how the hell Trek got its reputation as a family show with a lot of charm: these episodes are cold, bordering on the bleak at times. That concept doesn't really emerge until the latter part of Season 1 and really sings in Season 2. It's been said so many times as to be redundant now, but Season 3 sees a marked slump in quality, with some of the worst episodes of the show and the franchise like Spock's Brain. Excellent episodes still crop up amongst the dross, like The Enterprise Incident and All Our Yesterdays, but it can be hard going.

Production value-wise, the show is obviously almost sixty years old so doesn't look fantastic. Location shooting is a bonus, hugely enhancing episodes like Shore Leave and Arena, but most episodes are forced to rely on sets (of wildly varying effectiveness) to portray exterior locations. Makeup and prosthetics are mostly underwhelming, but imaginative design can help overcome that: the Gorn looks weak, but the drama of the script helps overcome these deficiencies. Modelwork and space shots are often decent, and the 2006 remastered version of the show is excellent for updating the space shots whilst staying true to the original design intentions. In a similar vein, the show has some wince-inducing dialogue and ideas about the treatment of women and minorities compared to modern shows, but in other respects, and especially by the standards of the day, the show is remarkably progressive (and later Trek shows aren't always fantastic in this regard either).

Star Trek: The Original Series (****) is, in some respects, dated. But in many others it is remarkably watchable, with frequently great performances. It mixes horror, comedy and SF action-adventure to good effect. It set the scene and groundwork for the most successful TV SF franchise of all time. Sure, there's a fair number of episodes which are poor and don't work very well, but when the show does work - such as in City on the Edge of Forever, Balance of Terror, Amok Time, The Doomsday Machine, The Trouble with Tribbles and more - it remains excellent entertainment. The show is available right now in most territories via Paramount+ and on DVD and Blu-Ray.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.

RIP Manny Coto

News has sadly broken that television writer Manny Coto has passed away at the age of 62. Coto was best-known for his work on the Star Trek franchise, 24 and Dexter.

Born in Havana, Cuba in 1961, Coto studied at the American Film Institute. He began his television writing career in 1988 with an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and became a regular writer on MTV's Dead at 21. Inbetween, he and Brian Helgeland wrote a script called The Ticking Man, which became the first-ever script to sell for over $1 million. His first show as creator and showrunner was Odyssey 5 (2002-03), about a group of people who witness the destruction of Earth and time travel back to avert the disaster.

In 2003 he began working on Star Trek: Enterprise in its third season. His first episode was Similitude, an ethically complex episode about cloning. The episode was hailed by both critics and cast as one of the best episodes of the series. Coto's next several episodes were well-received, and he was quickly promoted to a producing role.

For the show's fourth and final season, Coto was effectively promoted to showrunner, taking the creative reigns of the series (although Rick Berman and Brannon Braga remained technically the executive producers in charge). The final season used a number of short-form story arcs to tell stories tying into the Star Trek mythos, particularly illuminating stories about the Mirror Universe, Klingon history and the ancestor of Data's creator. Despite a warm reception, the change was too late to reverse the show's commercial fortunes and it was cancelled.

Coto went on to write extensively for 24, penning twenty-seven episodes from 2006 to 2010, and Dexter, penning ten episodes from 2010 to 2013. He returned as a writer on 24: Live Another Day in 2014 and co-created and wrote 24: Legacy in 2017. Coto went on to become a regular writer on American Horror Story and its anthology spin-off show, American Horror Stories.

Coto was a lifelong Star Trek fan with an encyclopedic knowledge of the franchise. It is interesting that he did not return to the franchise after its return to television in 2017, and also did not work on Trek homage show The Orville, which his colleague Brannon Braga worked extensively. Coto's other interests included model trains and wine-making.

Coto passed away on Sunday 10 July from pancreatic cancer, which he'd been fighting for over a year. He is survived by his wife, mother, four children and eight nieces and nephews.

TV Review: Corporate (Seasons 1-3)

Matt Engelbertson and Jake Levinson are junior executives working at corporate mega-behemoth Hampton DeVille. Their preference is to take things easy and enjoy their paycheques; unfortunately, their bosses Kate and John discover they can use Matt and Jake as their dogsbodies for whatever crazed money-making idea they are entertaining, to impress their bosses. HR representative Grace is decidedly unhelpful. Meanwhile, CEO Christian DeVille is trying to guide his corporation through perilous waters as he pivots from weapons manufacturing to getting in on the TV streaming wars.

Corporate is a now-complete comedy series that ran for three seasons and 26 episodes on Comedy Central from 2018 to 2020. The idea of a show mocking American work culture is not particularly new, with the likes of The Office lampooning the lives of many people working in middle-end jobs. Corporate takes a different approach by going inside the skyscraper headquarters of a particularly morally dubious corporate super-entity, and also going in for tonal bleakness. A lot.

In fact, when Matt once again opens an episode of Corporate musing on the existential soullessness of a life spent behind a computer screen tapping buttons, you might be wondering where the jokes are coming from. Isn't this just a statement of life? But the show quickly escalates its musings on humdrum boardroom meetings and corporate buzzspeak to a more insane level, mainly thanks to the characters coming to the notice of their supreme leader, Christian.

Christian is only in 18 of the episodes, but he is played by the late, fantastic Lance Reddick. Reddick often plays law enforcement or military roles, and comedy is not one of his regular fortes. But in Corporate he is allowed to absolutely cut loose and he clearly relishes every second of it. Scenes where he begs on his hands and knees for a fellow corporate boss to licence him the rights to an older sitcom to bolster his flagging new streaming service, or castigates his executives for instituting "casual Fridays" without his knowledge, meaning he unexpectedly caught site of some of his male employees' knees to his distress, are played brilliantly. Reddick manages to steal every scene of the show and sometimes even scenes he isn't even in, when you can imagine his character's reaction to whatever mayhem the rest of the team has set in motion.

The show is at its weakest when it's merely saying, "corporate culture isn't great, right?" but absolutely at its best when it takes that idea and illustrates it through extremes. An episode where the corporation tries to co-opt a radical artist protestor without interfering in his vision, leading to them confusedly funding adverts making themselves look terrible, is a great example of corporations trying to be hip and failing hard. Even better is the streaming episode, which ends with Lance Reddick making a nightmarish speech about acquiring IP and draining every bit of creativity from it and never letting it die, even if it means making spin-offs "about characters who cannot possibly sustain their own series." If there as ever a moment American television got self-aware about itself, this was it.

"There will be sequels, prequels, reboots, remakes and ill-advised spin-offs with side characters that cannot possibly carry their own series. We'll give the fans everything they want, and much, much more. We'll use an algorithm to churn out hundreds of scripts a day at virtually no cost. And sure, you'll complain about how it used to be better, but that anger will unite you. And you'll keep watching, hoping it will end, begging for it to end, and then you'll all die. And your children will watch it too, and so on. We're going to milk that creative IP until the UDDER RUNS DRY!

"This is the future of content, and CONTENT WILL NEVER DIE!"

The show doesn't always knock it out of the park. John doesn't have much characterisation beyond, "hey, he's weird, and every episode we'll make him weirder," and a lot of the secondary supporting cast doesn't have much to do. But the central cast (Reddick, Matt Ingbretson as Matt, Jake Weisman as Jake, Adam Lustick as John, Anne Dudek as Kate and Aparna Nancherla as Grace) all give good to great performances and, mostly, the ideas work well. The funniest episodes are genuinely hilarious, and the occasional tonal shifts into melancholy or even nihilism are effective.

Corporate (****) is an incisive, cutting and dark comedy that rarely stumbles and, in Lance Reddick's vainglorious CEO monster, it has a comedy character for the ages. The show is available to watch on Paramount+ in most territories.

Thank you for reading The Wertzone. To help me provide better content, please consider contributing to my Patreon page and other funding methods.