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The Wertzone
SF&F In Print & On Screen
Saturday, 16 January 2077
Support The Wertzone on Patreon
After much debate (and some requests) I have signed up with crowdfunding service Patreon to better support future blogging efforts. You can find my Patreon page here and more information after the jump.
Wednesday, 27 January 2021
OBLIVION remaster inching towards completion
Tuesday, 26 January 2021
A semi-HD version of BABYLON 5 has been released to streaming services
Monday, 25 January 2021
Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman confirm new DRAGONLANCE trilogy
Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman have confirmed that a new Dragonlance trilogy is to be published by Random House, starting this year.
The news comes after a lawsuit between the authors and Dragonlance IP owners Wizards of the Coast (and their parent company Hasbro) in October revealed the existence of the trilogy. The authors, Random House and Wizards had negotiated a deal for three new Dragonlance books and were halfway through writing the three volumes when Wizards put the series on indefinite hold. According to the filings, Wizards were experiencing problems with PR and image after a string of controversies and had decided that pursuing another legacy project was something they didn't want to deal with. However, this meant them breaking their contract with Weis and Hickman.
With Weis and Hickman suing for $10 million and Wizards in hot water with various other controversies going on, the two parties reached an out-of-court agreement in December and the lawsuit was dismissed without prejudice (meaning that Weis and Hickman could renew the lawsuit later on if there are further issues; usually a sign that the other party has surrendered without argument).
Dragonlance is a campaign setting for the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game, which has seen a huge resurgence in popularity in recent years. Many of the basic Dragonlance concepts were created by Tracy Hickman and his wife Laura in 1983, then fleshed out by a team of writers and editors who turned the basic idea into a series of adventure modules for the D&D game. Hickman teamed with editor Margaret Weis to write the original Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy novels, followed up by numerous more books in the same world. The Dragonlance Chronicles (1984-85) and Dragonlance Legends (1986) trilogies sold over four million copies before the end of the decade, making them one of the biggest-selling fantasy series of the decade. To date, the Dragonlance novels penned by Weis and Hickman have sold over 30 million copies worldwide, making them the second-biggest-selling authors of D&D fiction (only slightly behind R.A. Salvatore and his Legend of Drizzt series) and among the top fifty best-selling SFF authors of all time. Weis and Hickman have also worked widely in other settings and with original material, including the Death Gate Cycle, Rose of the Prophet Trilogy and Darksword Saga.
The setting has previously seen some controversy. In 2008 urban fantasy author Jim Butcher was approached by WotC to spearhead a full reboot of the entire Dragonlance saga, including rewriting the original trilogy as a five-book series. Butcher would only proceed with Weis and Hickman's blessing and, when that was not forthcoming, the project was abandoned.
Dragons of Deceit (working title) by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, will be published this year. Although ordinarily a new Dragonlance book or trilogy might not attract a huge amount of attention (the last few books were not well-reviewed), the combination of the lawsuit and a dearth of recent official D&D fiction (this will be only the fourth D&D-branded novel to be published in the last five years) should mean that this does rather well.
Ron Howard returns to direct WILLOW
Ron Howard has stepped up to replace Jon M. Chu as the director-producer of the upcoming Disney+ series Willow, based on the 1988 fantasy movie of the same name.
Chu, the director of Crazy Rich Asians and Now You See Me 2, is stepping away from the project after repeated delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic caused scheduling conflicts. Ron Howard, who directed the original movie, has agreed to take on the project at short notice. It marks the second time that Howard has stepped in to help out a Disney project that had lost its directors, after his work on the 2018 movie Solo, although this time around at least shooting had not already commenced.
The new Willow TV series is set thirty years after the original movie and once again stars Warwick Davis as Willow Ufgood. Jonathan Kasdan, the writer of Solo, has written the pilot and is working as showrunner with Wendy Mericle (Arrow).
Howard will now direct the opening episode and potentially several more instalments of the first season. It is unclear if the other surviving stars of the original film, Joanne Whalley or Val Kilmer, will appear in the series, although Kilmer has suffered extensive health issues in recent years which may preclude an appearance.
Willow is expected to start shooting in the UK in the coming months and will debut on Disney+ in 2022.
Saturday, 23 January 2021
Star Trek: Lower Decks - Season 1
2380. The California-class USS Cerritos is a Starfleet vessel specialising in second contact: turning up to fill out the paperwork and pick up the busywork that more prestigious ships don't have time for as they are on their way to their next adventure. A group of "lower decks" ensigns on Beta Shift are assigned to the most tedious jobs on the ship, but find themselves becoming indispensable to the operation of the vessel.
When a new, animated Star Trek series was announced a couple of years back, some serious grimacing took place among the fanbase. Alex Kurtzman's resurrection of the franchise with the live-action series Star Trek: Discovery had been a mixed bag, at best, and the fear that the new show might be Rick & Morty with a Star Trek rebranding was high. Rick & Morty head writer Mike McMahan being put in charge of the project did little to alleviate those fears.
Fortunately, those fears have been proven groundless. Star Trek: Lower Decks is, genuinely, a fresh and enjoyable take on the Star Trek mythos whilst also paying its dues to the shows and movies that have come before it. Whilst Discovery and Picard have served up some solid instalments and had good ideas, they have also more frequently felt like shows whose writers have never watched a single episode of Star Trek in their lives, serving up generic and all-too-often lifeless adventures which are a disservice to their talented casts. Lower Decks avoids these pitfalls.
There is still much here that the Star Trek hardcore purist will recoil from - the very idea of a comedy series taking place in this universe is enough for that - but on almost every level Lower Decks is a winner. The writing is sharp and funny, the storylines benefitting from the shorter, more focused run-times and, despite the gags, the tone and atmosphere is much more in line with The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine (shows which managed to frequently produce, very successfully, comedy episodes like Qpid and In the Cards).
Most episodes feature classic Trek set-ups, such as the crew clashing with an alien race who have claimed salvage rights over Federation technology or a cultural misunderstanding leads to hostility with a race the Federation is trying to diplomatically win over. The twist here is that the adventures are not told from the POV of the pioneering and brave bridge crew of the Federation flagship, but from the perspective of the lowest-ranking four ensigns on a ship dedicated to paperwork and bureaucracy. The USS Cerritos is an old, ill-maintained vessel which has the dirty job of popping along to planets after much more glamorous vessels have already made first contact and headed off to their next adventure.
The core castmembers are excellent: Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome, Space Force), an experienced officer with good instincts who has been promoted several times, but demoted again due to her irreverent attitude; Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid, The Boys), a stickler for the rules who has excellent book knowledge but is inexperienced in the field; D'Vana Tendi (Noël Wells, Master of None), an enthusiastic fan of Starfleet with an irrepressible appetite for adventure; and Sam Rutherford (Eugene Cordero, The Good Place) a human engineer adjusted to life with a new cybernetic implant. This foursome is key to most of the adventures, either together or divided into two teams (usually Mariner/Boimler and Tendi/Rutherford). A subplot also usually follows the bridge crew of the Cerritos as they also try to deal with whatever crisis is going on, usually with less success.
The upstairs-downstairs dynamic between the bridge crew and the lower deck officers is entertainingly handled and used as a way to comment on Star Trek tropes. So yes, the show confirms that "most" people use the holodeck for sex, not for playing poker with Stephen Hawking and Isaac Newton, and that whilst some officers might like to do a jazz or classical recital in the bar, some other crewmen want to form a 1970s punk rock band instead. The show also reveals that the adventures of the most powerful and advanced ships sometimes leak out to the rest of the fleet, Starfleet Security be damned, leading to confused crewmen on other ships learning about Lore teaming up with the Borg or Dr. Crusher having a relationship with some kind of space ghost.
There is a tension in Lower Decks between self-referential humour for hardcore Star Trek fans (the sort of people who jump up and cry "WE NEED ENGINES TO MAKE US GO!" when the Pakleds show up) and making the stories and humour work for people who've never seen an episode of Star Trek in thier life. I suspect people in the latter category may occasionally be left behind by rapid-fire references to the the joggers of Rubicun who murder people for walking on the grass, cameo appearances by Q and debates over the racial stereotyping of the Ferengi (a reference to the heated, real-life debate about the Ferengi being racial stereotypes of Jews or not). But the show also does a good job of rooting the conflict of any episode in contemporary issues related to characterisation: Boimler's perfectionism, Mariner's fun-loving hyper-competence being undermined by her lack of confidence in pursuing a Starfleet career and so forth. This allows episodes to stand alone even when they are fair to brimming with references to quasi-obscure episodes of a TV show that aired the better part of forty years ago (or even to the original series more than fifty years ago).
Aside from the self-referential tics, there aren't too many negatives. A few of the episode premises are stronger than others, and a few gags threaten to feel tired: a holodeck version of Microsoft's Clippy feels like a gag unearthed by archaeologists and carefully chiselled free, although it does then result in one of the show's finest, extended comedic sequences, so it's hard to be too down on that. The show also makes the Discovery/Picard mistake of feeling a little too reliant on bringing in characters and events from other Trek shows to save the day rather than letting our heroes stand alone. These minor issues are offset by the entertaining tone of adventure and exploration.
The first season of Star Trek: Lower Decks (****½) is easily the finest slice of Trek to emerge since the 2005 hiatus, and the most enjoyable season of Star Trek to air this century. With breezy writing, fun characters and a comedic tone set over genuine Star Trek ideals, it shades its recent live-action siblings. The season is available to watch now on CBS All Access in the USA and on Amazon Prime in much of the rest of the world. A second season is currently in production and should air later this year.
Friday, 22 January 2021
Seinfeld: The Complete Series
RIP Mira Furlan
In tragic news, actress Mira Furlan has passed away at the age of 65.
Furlan was born in Zagreb, Croatia, in the former Yugoslavia. She became interested in acting as a teenager, and learned English due to being a fan of American and British music. She studied acting at college and made her TV debut in 1976 in a TV movie, Knez. She became a regular on television in the series Velo Misto in 1980-81 and gained acclaim for her performance in the 1985 movie, When Father Was Away on Business.
Furlan married her Serbian husband, director Goran Gajić, in the late 1980s and commuted between Zagreb and Belgrade where he was directing plays. She appeared in productions in both cities. Although Furlan considered herself a Yugoslav first and foremost, this became an unpopular position as the country was riven by fierce nationalism between its constituent parts. In 1991, after the civil war that would lead to the break-up of Yugoslavia began, she was fired from the Croatian National Theatre for refusing to stop acting in Serbia. After some discussion, she and her husband fled the country and moved to New York City.
A year later, they relocated to Los Angeles when Furlan was cast in her most famous role, that of Minbari Ambassador Delenn in Babylon 5. The role was challenging, as Furlan had to act through significant prosthetics. In addition, she had to play a character whose gender was indeterminate, who would undergo a metamorphosis at the end of the first season to become female. Although she was fine with the prosthetics, she was less happy when she learned her voice was going to be electronically distorted to hide her gender as well. It was decided to drop this idea for the pilot. When the show was renewed for a full season, it was also decided to modify her makeup to be less restrictive. The metamorphosis saw the makeup reduced further, which helped make Furlan more identifiable with her character.
Furlan played Delenn in all five seasons of Babylon 5, becoming one of the show's leading players, and in several spin-off TV movies based on the series, as well as an unreleased video game.
She also voiced the role of Silver Sable on the Spider-Man animated show and was a guest star on several other shows.
In 2004 she was cast on the television series Lost, the biggest show on American TV, playing the role of French castaway Danielle Rousseau. She appeared in twenty episodes spanning the whole show; her character was killed off in the fourth season, but she was able to reappear in the final season thanks to flashbacks, time travel and parallel universes.
In addition to acting on stage and screen, she did voice work for several video games: Payday 2 (2013), Elite: Dangerous (2014), Uncharted 4: A Thief's End (2016) and Mafia: Definitive Edition (2020). Her recent roles include Vonn Odara on Space Command and the Traveller on Just Add Magic. During recent years, Furlan was a frequent attendee at Babylon 5 fan conventions.
Furlan had been ill for some time, although there had been hopes of improvement recently. Babylon 5 showrunner J. Michael Straczynski confirmed her passing on social media. She is survived by her husband and son. An intense and skilled performer, she will be missed.
Thursday, 21 January 2021
GAME OF THRONES prequel series based on Dunk & Egg in development at HBO
In surprising news, Variety has learned that HBO are developing another Game of Thrones prequel series, this time based on George R.R. Martin's Dunk & Egg series of novellas. This is in addition to House of the Dragon, which is currently in pre-production and casting, and the Long Night pilot, Bloodmoon, which was shot in 2019 but HBO declined to pursue to series.
The Dunk & Egg stories begin eighty-nine years before the events of Game of Thrones (or the first Song of Ice and Fire novel, A Game of Thrones) and chart the adventures of Ser Duncan the Tall, a newly-minted common or hedge knight, and his squire, "Egg," a young boy who is more than he seems. George R.R. Martin has so far written three novellas about the characters: The Hedge Knight (1998), The Sworn Sword (2002) and The Mystery Knight (2010), with these three stories combined and released as A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms in 2015. Martin had planned for around twelve stories in total spanning some fifty years, with the next two, The She-Wolves (not the final title) and The Village Hero, already sketched out and partly written, but on hold until he completes the next Song of Ice and Fire novel. He also alludes to Dunk and Egg's further adventures in his companion book, The World of Ice and Fire (2014), as well as seeding mentions of their adventures in the mainline series novels. Duncan is also mentioned several times in the Game of Thrones TV series.
The Dunk & Egg stories are extremely popular with fans and have seemed ripe for adaptation for many years. Martin has downplayed such a possibility due to his disappointment that HBO overtook him with the main TV series and did not want to repeat the process with Dunk & Egg. Martin has reiterated this many times over the years, to the point of refusing even to hear pitches about the idea. Martin's contract with HBO gives Martin veto over future Game of Thrones spin-offs that do not meet his approval (at the cost that he cannot take material set in the same world to other networks or studios).
The fact that a series is now in development indicates that Martin has changed his mind. It may be that Martin has concluded that with The Winds of Winter already nine years in the works and a further novel to follow, it will simply be far too long before he is able to focus on Dunk & Egg and the stories will not get written in a reasonable timeframe if he continues to wait. This way, he can provide outlines for each of the twelve stories and have other writers develop them into scripts, and they can reach fans much more quickly.
From HBO's point of view, there is tremendous value to the project. It is much closer to the timeframe of Game of Thrones itself and characters from the earlier series can actually appear (the notorious Walder Frey actually appears as a baby in The Mystery Knight). The stories are more straightforward, eschewing the high-budget magic and massive battles of the parent series in favour of more focused adventures on the roads of Westeros. A more episodic road-trip of a series would also contrast favourably with House of the Dragon, which is likely to be very expensive and complex in its storytelling.
The project is in very early days at HBO and HBO have not yet made a pilot or series order, and it may yet not make the grade. However, it sounds like HBO are very keen to get the ball rolling on a series. If so, we should hear more news later this year.
Meanwhile, House of the Dragon is currently knee-deep in casting. It recently added Matt Smith as Prince Daemon Targaryen, Emma D'Arcy as Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen and Olivia Cooke as Lady Alicent Hightower, along with Paddy Considine as King Viserys Targaryen. Shooting is expected to begin at the Warner Brothers Studios, Leavesden, in the next few weeks for a 2022 debut.
EDIT: James Hibberd at Entertainment Weekly has added more information, confirming that a number of other Game of Thrones-related pitches are currently circulating at HBO and that the network is looking to woo back Bruno Heller, who created and ran the series Rome for them in 2005-07, to get involved. Apparently one pitch under discussion is a show based on Robert's Rebellion, the civil war that brought King Robert Baratheon to power, and is set only seventeen years before the events of Game of Thrones itself, with younger versions of characters like Ned Stark, Littlefinger, Ser Barristan Selmy and Jaime and Tywin Lannister playing key roles. George has been much more vociferous that a Rebellion-era series is unnecessary, which makes me wonder if all these reported pitches are actually pitches to George rather than having already consulted with him. If so that may cast the likelihood of a Dunk & Egg series in some doubt (although I could see George relenting on D&E long before the Rebellion).
Hibberd reports that HBO are looking at Game of Thrones as a streamer-establishing franchise for the HBO Max service, hoping to replicate the huge success of the various Star Wars and MCU shows (so far) on Disney+ and the multiple Star Trek shows on CBS All Access, and it sounds like projects are also in development.