Saturday, 16 January 2077

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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.




Tuesday, 4 February 2025

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER legacy sequel series in development

A new Buffy the Vampire Slayer project is in development at Hulu. This is not really surprising, with multiple attempts to resurrect the franchise having been discussed since not long after it concluded the first time around in 2003. However, this attempt appears to be closer to a pilot deal than any of the others, and is the first to have Buffy herself, Sarah Michelle Gellar, attached in an official capacity.


Buffy the Vampire Slayer started as a movie script written by Joss Whedon. The resulting film, released in 1992 and starring Kristy Swanson and Donald Sutherland, did poorly at the box office but found a dedicated cult fanbase on home video. This led to a TV show being picked up by Fox in 1996, for airing on The WB starting the following year, with Whedon as showrunner and Gellar in the starring role. Buffy the Vampire Slayer ran for seven seasons (ending in 2003) and 144 episodes, winning both critical and commercial acclaim for its canny mixture of supernatural fantasy, horror, drama and light comedy. Its spin-off show, Angel, ran for five seasons and 110 episodes from 1999 to 2004.

Although the story continued in comics, attempts to resurrect the franchise in other formats failed. Spin-offs focusing around the characters of Spike (James Marsters), Giles (Tony Head) and Faith (Eliza Dushku) were in development at one time or another, but none made it off the ground.

In 2010 an attempt to reboot the franchise as a new movie series foundered, whilst a 2018 attempt at a total reboot with Whedon producing and Monica Owusu-Breen showrunning also failed to gain traction. Whedon's subsequent fall from grace for alleged toxic behaviour on the sets of his various projects seemed to stall any further development on projects closely associated with his name.

Sarah Michelle Gellar distanced herself from the show after its conclusion, not attending conventions and gently discouraging speculation over a reboot or sequel with herself involved. She starred in two Scooby Doo movies with husband Freddie Prinze Jr., as well as Cruel Intentions and The Grudge, and occasional TV work, most recently Paramount+'s Wolf Pack. She has mainly focused on business interests outside of television and film. However, she recently spoke of Buffy more warmly having sat down to watch the show with her own children for the first time, and found the experience rewarding.


The new iteration of the show being discussed is a successor series which will focus on a new regular cast, with Gellar's Buffy and possibly other actors from the original series appearing in recurring roles. Oscar-winner Chloé Zhao (EternalsNomadland) is being touted as a producer, writer and possibly director for some episodes. Nora Zuckerman and Lila Zuckerman (Poker Face, Prodigal SonsAgents of SHIELD, Fringe) will produce and showrun. Rights-holders Fran Kuzui and Kaz Kuzui (who produced the 1992 film) will produce alongside Dolly Parton, whose production company worked on the original series. Whedon is not involved at this time.

The original Buffy the Vampire Slayer ended with Buffy finding a way of creating more Slayers, allowing others to take over the burden of saving the world and allowing her to have a vacation. Some of the spin-off media posited that Buffy would effectively become a mentor to a whole new generation of Slayers, and working more in the capacity of a general directing her forces against larger threats. Whether this project would go in a similar direction, or return to the status quo of a single Slayer, remains to be seen.

Saturday, 1 February 2025

Netflix's THE SANDMAN to end with Season 2

Netflix has confirmed what has been strongly rumoured for a good two years now, that the upcoming second season of The Sandman will the final one.


Despite early reports that Netflix were eyeing three to four seasons for the show, the first season's just-good-enough performance (which saw an unusually long delay before the second season was commissioned) and the impending problem that main character Dream plays a smaller role in many of the storylines in the middle and latter part of the graphic novel series, barely appearing in some issues, saw Netflix move to make the second season the final one. The series will continue to adapt the primary story arc of the comics, but in an abridged format, with some of the middle-series storylines and episodes likely to fall by the wayside.

Extremely fortuitously for Netflix, they made this decision before filming and a long time before accusations of sexual misconduct were made against Sandman creator/author Neil Gaiman by eight women. These accusations, which Gaiman has strenuously denied, has seen both publishers and another production company, Amazon Studios, cutting ties with the author.

Netflix has not yet confirmed a broadcast date for Season 2 of The Sandman beyond "2025."

Rebecca Yarros sells 12 million copies of her EMPYREAN series in under two years

Rebecca Yarros' Empyrean fantasy series has sold (non-paywalled reference) a startling 12 million copies in less than two years, marking it as one of the fastest-selling fantasy series of the 21st Century. The first book in the series, Fourth Wing, was published in May 2023 and was followed by Iron Flame in November 2023 and Onyx Storm in January 2025. Two more books are projected to bring the series to a conclusion.

Onyx Storm itself is the fastest-selling adult novel published in the last twenty years, shifting 2.7 million copies in its first week on sale. Onyx Storm saw bookshop midnight openings, launch parties and other events that haven't been seen since the release of the final Harry Potter novel in 2007, without the dual adult/child appeal of that book.

For comparison, Yarros' sales in two years are approaching half those of Brandon Sanderson's non-Wheel of Time books in twenty (Sanderson has sold 40 million books, with over 12 million of those being his three Wheel of Time novels, for approximately 28 million sales of his solo work). Yarros has sold approximately a quarter of the total sales of her colleague Sarah J. Maas, who has sold just over 40 million books in thirteen years. 12 million is also approximately the same number of books that George R.R. Martin sold of his Song of Ice and Fire series before the TV adaptation began.

The only author who can be said to had a more impressive debut was Patrick Rothfuss, who shifted over 10 million copies of his debut novel The Name of the Wind alone (though nowhere near as fast).

With two more books to come and an adaptation of the books underway at Amazon MGM Studios, it's clear that these figures are only going to continue rising in the future.

What will be interesting to see is if this influx of new readers benefits the rest of the fantasy genre, but it does confirm that Romantasy's current sales dominance is no danger of ending soon. 

Monday, 27 January 2025

New MURDERBOT editions criticised for poor quality

As I noticed previously, readers have been calling for omnibus editions of the critically-acclaimed Murderbot Diaries science fiction series for some years. The series, by Martha Wells, consists of five novellas and two short novels which has been positively festooned with awards, praise and strong sales, but their high prices for a short page count have put them out of the reach of more frugal SFF fans.


The books have been reissued in the last few weeks in new omnibus editions to hopefully address the issue. Whilst the format is still not generous - with only two books per edition rather than a more appropriate three (the first three novellas combined only come to 450 pages) - it was still a marked improvement over prior editions in terms of value for money. Unfortunately, the new editions have been called out for terrible proofing and formatting.

The problem appears to be that the books have been released in a print-on-demand format, with all the hallmarks of shoddy formatting and/or corrupted files being used. Given the publisher is Tor Books, the largest and most popular SFF publisher in the United States, and its UK off-shoot, the poor quality of the books is most surprising, especially given they are charging the price of a full, properly-formatted and edited paperback edition.


The three omnibus volumes are each a different height and size to the others, with the cover images not aligned correctly, and in the interior there is an inefficient use of space.

Multiple reviewers have pointed out the problem on the Amazon review pages, and via BlueSky, noting they have returned the books for a full refund.

Hopefully this problem can be fixed quickly; as one of the highest-profile science fiction book series of recent years, and with an imminent TV adaptation on Apple TV+, it would be a shame for new readers to be put off by poor quality books. The series, and readers, deserve better.

Sunday, 26 January 2025

Age of Empires II Definitive Edition Chronicles: Battle for Greece

The Aegean Sea and its coasts are the battleground between the two great powers of antiquity: the vast Persian Empire and the Greek city-states, led by the two rivals of Athens and Sparta. Armies march, huge navies are constructed and the powers clash over a century of warfare, with the dominance of the ancient world in the balance.


Back in 2019, Microsoft released Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, a comprehensive remake of the classic 1999 real-time strategy game. The result was probably the best video game remake ever created, which not only updated the original game's graphics, controls and userface whilst fully retaining the spirit and style of the original, but also added a massive amount of new content. This was then expanded through no less than six new expansions: Lords of the West, Dawn of the Dukes, Dynasties of India, Return of Rome, The Mountain Royals and Victors and Vanquished.

This latest, seventh expansion marks a shift in format. Chronicles: Battle for Greece follows in Return of Rome's footsteps by adding civilisations from the ancient world to the game. Whilst Return of Rome remade some of the campaigns from the original Age of Empires game, Battle for Greece is a wholly new campaign built from the ground up. It adds the civilisations of the Achaemenids (the Persian Empire), Athenians and Spartans, but the game eschews the traditional expansion format, with 5-7 missions for each civilisation, largely separate in time and setting. This time around the game has a fully voiced, expansive, 21-mission sequential campaign which moves between the three sides. There are fully-animated cutscenes (though heavily stylised, Blizzard's cinematic department can sleep easily here, but still very nice), full voiceovers and a story that unfolds across the game. The feeling is more like Age of Mythology (which recently also saw a comprehensive remake via Age of Mythology Retold) than any prior Age of Empires campaign, with a strong narrative and character focus.

The story is appropriately epic, spanning almost the full century of the Greco-Persian Wars, which saw the Greeks square off against the Persians (not for the last time) before fighting an internal conflict, the Peloponnesian War, over which Greek city would come to dominate the rest. This is a much more zoomed-in campaign than normal, with minor battles and campaigns being featured alongside the much more famous ones like Marathon, Salamis and Thermopylae.

Most of the 21 missions are huge, taking multiple hours to complete apiece with numerous twists and turns. The expansion took me 27 hours to complete on moderate difficulty. Some missions have timers, some missions require you to undertake operations without a home base, and some have you relying on allies to provide troops whilst you fight with them in the field. The few times you do get a town centre and can play a "normal" game of Age of Empires both feel like a relief but also an acknowledgement of the game's limitations; those missions are usually the easiest and most straightforward. Some of the missions are intricate puzzles with you having to work out how best to hit targets in the optimal order. One memorable mission has you having to win a democratic election (this is Greece, after all), meaning you have to keep the people happy, which you can do by fair means (hosting lavish games, winning glorious victories) or foul (smearing your opponent's name through rumour-mongering). Most of the missions are inventive, showing once again how to get surprising results out of what is still, under the 4K sheen, a 26-year-old game.

The game can also be frustrating. The campaigns do feel like a 2024 design hosted on a 1999 foundation, but those foundations sometimes shine through: a few too many missions have you completing the last mission objective only to be "surprised" by a final twist objective, usually some variant of "fight off this massive enemy army which has appeared outside your city with no warning, somehow." It's the type of cheap mission design I'd hoped we'd have seen the last of somewhere around 2005. The game's traditionally eyebrow-raising pathfinding and AI awareness issues are also present and correct. The expansion has changed a lot about how the game works, especially naval forces, but underneath it's Age of Empires II through and through.

The narrative focus could be of interest to people who perhaps find the traditional Age of Empires II campaign a bit remote and hands-off. The stories here are more personal and more engrossing, reflecting the massive events happening through individual ambitions and failings. It's a strong success, leading to one of the strongest expansion campaigns we've seen for the game. However, the campaign does feel a little on the long side, with some very bizarre difficulty spikes that can be deeply frustrating. The expansion also ends on a cliffhanger, confirming there will be a follow-up focusing on the life of Alexander the Great.

Age of Empires II Colon Definitive Edition Subcolon Chronicles Subsubcolon Battle for Greece (****) is a good time, and an easy recommendation for Age of Empires II fans who want more Age of Empires II (even granted this game has more content for it than almost any other video game ever made, after a quarter century of expansions and updates). Those who've perhaps not tried out the game before may find the narrative focus of this expansion are more compelling way of playing the game, although the mission design often assumes experience with how the game already works. Some frustrations and annoyances ultimately do not derail what is a nice twist on the Age of Empires formula. The expansion is available right now.

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

Sunday, 19 January 2025

Exodus: The Archimedes Engine by Peter F. Hamilton

Fleeing a ravaged Earth, humanity launched near-lightspeed arkships across a large part of the galaxy. Many have vanished, some established isolated colonies in remote systems, but the greatest success was in the Centauri Cluster, a group of millions of stars within a few hundred light-years of one another with thousands of habitable worlds between them. The Green Signal was sent across the galaxy to attract more arkships. But in the tens of thousands of years it took them to arrive, the humans of the Centauri Cluster become technologically advanced, becoming near godlike beings called the Celestials. The late-arriving humans, for whom only years or decades had passed at relativistic speeds since the fall of Earth, these Celestials might as well be a different species.


The arrival of the arkship Diligent in the Crown Dominion, the only Celestial empire to allow humans their own worlds, settlements and businesses, after 40,000 years in deep space at first seems like business as usual. But the owner-ruler of the Diligent is one of old Earth's most ruthless businessmen, who sees an opportunity in the ossified power structures of the Crown Dominion to further the cause of ordinary humans. At the same time, the arkship's arrival gives the rebellious son of a rich family an opportunity to become a Traveler, an interstellar starship captain. Elsewhere, a police officer is recruited by a Celestial archon to become his eyes and ears in the Crown Dominion's home system, and a potential recruit to succeed a Celestial ruler sets about her destiny with impressive ruthlessness. Both within and outside the borders of the Crown Dominion, threats are gathering which could change - or obliterate - the fate of billions, humans and Celestials alike.

Peter F. Hamilton, Britain's biggest-selling living science fiction author, is known for his brick-thick, far-future space operas featuring living starships, immense space battles and impeccable worldbuilding. His most recent space opera trilogy, The Salvation Sequence (Salvation, Salvation Lost, The Saints of Salvation), operated on a different level, with three relatively constrained novels working with a tight focus to deliver a very effective storyline. It worked very well, but arguably lacked the epic grandeur of his best work.

The Archimedes Engine cheerfully throws that approach out of the window and slams down the accelerator. This is, once again, a huge (900 pages in hardcover), dizzyingly epic space opera which swaps between a large number of storylines, planets and starships, with a meticulously constructed plot that combines breathless action setpices with impressively atmospheric worldbuilding. Hamilton hasn't delivered a book quite like this since 2004's Pandora's Star and 1996's The Reality Dysfunction, so it's impressive to see that, twenty years on, he's still got it.

The Archimedes Engine does have one major differences to his earlier work though: this is, to some degree, a collaborative project. It is part of the wider Exodus project which also incorporates an episode of Amazon's recent Secret Level animated series (Exodus: Odyssey) and a forthcoming, massive video game RPG from the same team as Mass Effect. Reading interviews with the creatives, it seems that they came up with the underlying concepts and gave them to Hamilton to flesh out, with them then providing guidance on those ideas. The result is an impressive amount of worldbuilding, since it is needed to drive not just this novel, but TV and video game projects as well.


The core principle of the setting is incredibly straightforward: FTL (faster than light) travel is utterly impossible. Spacecraft are limited to the speed of light. There are "Gates of Heaven," incredibly powerful devices which can accelerate spacecraft to 99.99% of lightspeed in an instant (that's 500,000 gees, thank you very much) without obliterating them, but that's about it. Starship crews buzz around at relativistic speeds, with only a few days or weeks passing for their crews as they travel from one system to another, but potentially years at a time passing for their friends and family back home. Even a round-trip to a star a modest fifteen light-years away will see at least thirty years, a quarter of a human lifetime in this time, elapse for those left behind. This makes it incredibly important to work out which journeys are necessary and which are not; an early meeting in the book, which takes three years out of someone's life, feels like it could have been an email, which is even more annoying in this context.

Hamilton's not actually done this before, his previous work has largely relied on FTL travel, usually via wormholes, so seeing him track where his characters are as decades pass for them is quite interesting (his friend Alastair Reynolds is more of a dab hand at this, as his signature Revelation Space setting similarly lacks FTL travel). To some degree the action in the book is largely constrained to the Kelowan system, which limits the problem, but several subplots do see trips to other star systems, allowing decades to pass when they return. Fortunately this is a setting where people like to set in motion very long-term plots.

Hamilton juggles a huge number of plots, subplots, characters and worldbuilding information with typical aplomb. For all the praise given to Brandon Sanderson and Steven Erikson for this, I think Hamilton has them both beat when it comes to building a series of wildly disparate threads over the better part of a thousand pages only for them to converge with a titanic clash at the end. The Archimedes Engine is no different, with storylines that seem utterly disconnected colliding with the force of matter and antimatter, leaving the reader eager for the sequel (though you'll have to wait until late 2025 for that).

As an author, Hamilton does have a number of long-standing, almost infamous weaknesses. One is that no matter how far future, bizarre or strange the setting, his characters can have a tendency to break down into English idioms, sayings and insults. This is a nice change from SF novels which have characters doing the same thing with American vocabulary, but can be a bit distracting. Fortunately, his other infamous (though probably over-stated, especially in his later work) tendency towards sex scenes of wildly variable plot relevance is here altogether missing. Characters hook up, but tasteful fades to black are the order of the day. Also, for some reason, Hamilton seems to have lost faith in his recurring plot device of a benevolent billionaire/trillionaire who helps save the human race from the goodness of his heart, so our stand-in in that role in this book is a much more morally grey character.

Where the book is a bit more variable is the quality of the characters. Thyra, the would-be-heir to the crown of Wynid who has to fight against her low rank of birth to gain her Queen/Mother's favour, is probably the standout here, but she does take a back seat in the back half of the book. Finn is the very beige young callow youth protagonist who goes on a wild adventure (this book's Joshua Calvert), though he works enough as a bit of a blank slate for the reader to experience the crazy universe through. I'm more surprised that Hamilton didn't do more with Ellie, the Diligent crewmember we spend the most time with, though mostly not as a POV character. As someone who's spent her life on a low-tech arkship, she's probably better-placed to act as our eyes and ears in the setting, but perhaps that would have been too obvious. It's Gahji, the Celestial politician trying to make sense of the increasingly weird goings-on, and Terence Wilson-Fletcher, police detective (and our spiritual surrogate for the Commonwealth universe's Paula Myo, still Hamilton's finest character creation) who emerge as the most interesting protagonists. Other characters descend into the usual morass of petty criminals, scheming politicians and greedy businessmen. It works well, but isn't his most vivid cast.

The Archimedes Engine (****½) is Peter F. Hamilton back on top form, doing what he does best: large-scale, epic space opera, in a well-realised setting, with a huge, multi-faceted plot that builds and concludes hugely satisfyingly at the end. This is the first in a duology, so there is a significant cliffhanger. The second book, The Helium Sea, seems tentatively scheduled for later this year. The book is available now worldwide.

Exodus, the video game, is currently unscheduled but likely to arrive in 2026 or 2027. There is a significant amount of worldbuilding and background information that can be seen on Archetype Entertainment's website.

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

Thursday, 16 January 2025

RIP David Lynch

News has sadly broken of the passing of legendary director, producer and occasional actor David Lynch, four days before what would have been his 79th birthday. A connoisseur of the strange and inexplicable, Lynch is best-known in genre circles for directing the first feature film version of Dune in 1984, and creating the deliciously strange television series Twin Peaks (1990-91, 2017).


Born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, Lynch moved around a lot as a child, living in five different states in his formative years (including an inspirational stretch in Washington State). As a Boy Scout he was present at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in January 1961, on Lynch's 15th birthday. Early plans to be a painter fell through after a dispiriting trip to Europe, so he pivoted to film to support his young family.

His first short film was Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967), an "arty" but somewhat baffling short piece, setting the tone for his career. Several promising short films followed, and then his first full release, Eraserhead (1977). Lynch spent five years making the movie, remounting it every time he raised enough money to shoot a bit more material. The film proved polarising on the festival circuit, but it picked up a cult following after a wider release in 1977. Stanley Kubrick and Mel Brooks both highly rated it.

Such plaudits saw Lynch taken more seriously and producer Stuart Cornfeld agreed to help him fund his next project. After considering several scripts doing the rounds, Lynch chose The Elephant Man purely based on the title. The film, starring John Hurt as the deformed Joseph Merrick, was rapturously received and earned Lynch his first Academy Award nomination. George Lucas was a huge fan and offered Lynch the chance to direct the third Star Wars film, an idea Lynch found baffling and declined.

Perhaps appropriately, Lynch instead decided to join forces with novelist Frank Herbert on an adaptation of his 1965 novel Dune. Herbert had been furious when viewing Star Wars in 1977, finding many points of similarity between his novel and Lucas' film. Herbert considered legal action, but was advised to instead leverage the resulting sci-fi craze to get Dune on the screen instead. Despite production difficulties, Lynch enjoyed making the film and working with Herbert, and also considered the cast most impressive: a young actor he discovered, Kyle MacLachlan, became a frequent collaborator. However, Lynch fell out with the producers over the film's final cut (which bombed at the box office in 1984), and a later attempt to re-edit the film into a TV mini-series without his permission angered him.

Lynch returned to more of his traditional output with the intense, surreal and disturbing Blue Velvet (1986), also starring MacLachlan. The film was praised by Woody Allen and saw Lynch regain some of the kudos he'd lost with Dune.

Lynch then surprised many by deciding to move into television, helped by ex-Hill Street Blues producer Mark Frost. After developing a Marilyn Monroe biopic series, they hit on the idea of a murder mystery in the American north-west under the working title "Northwest Passage." ABC bought the project and it hit the screens in 1990 as Twin Peaks. Again starring MacLachlan, the show saw the FBI brought into investigate a puzzling murder in Twin Peaks, Washington. The mystery gripped not just the USA, but every country it was broadcast in, and "Who killed Laura Palmer?" because the single-most-asked question of 1990. The first, eight-episode season was acclaimed, as was its haunting soundtrack, but ABC wanted a full 22-episode second season, which stretched viewer interest past the breaking point. Aware they were losing the audience, ABC insisted on the killer being revealed early, to Lynch's immense frustration. Aware the show would not be returning, he ended the second season on a brutal cliffhanger that raised a whole load of new questions. Lynch returned to the series with a bizarre prequel film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992), that answered few questions and alienated many fans of the show.

Lynch returned to film, directing Wild at Heart (1990), Lost Highway (1997) and The Straight Story (1999); the latter shocked audiences for being a relatively straightforward story with no sex or violence, though it did retain some of Lynch's surreal imagery.

Lynch again decided to work in television, developing a new project for ABC about a young woman who arrives in Los Angeles and gets mixed up with some strange local characters and another woman with amnesia. The pilot was half-finished when ABC decided to shelve it, but Lynch worked out a deal to turn it into a feature film. Mulholland Drive (2001) was a surprise hit when it launched, attracting wild critical praise and moderate commercial success. The film was praised for launching the career of Naomi Watts and enhancing the career of up-and-comer Justin Theroux. The film has several times topped polls to find the best film of the 21st Century (so far).

Lynch continued to work in film, releasing Inland Empire (2006), but admitted he had become pickier about projects. He collaborated with Werner Herzog on the latter's My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done? (2009) and with the band Nine Inch Nails on a 2013 music video ("Came Back Haunted"). To the surprise of some, he decided his next project would be a reprise of Twin Peaks, by producing, co-writing and directing 18 new episodes for Showtime. The third season of Twin Peaks aired in 2017 and received significant critical praise.

In 2022 Lynch did finally return to film, but in an acting role. He portrayed director John Ford in Steven Spielberg's autobiographical film The Fabelmans. New projects were definitively ruled out by his diagnosis with emphysema in 2024, which he blamed on his lifelong smoking habit.

David Lynch was very much one of a kind. An intense artist, he had a bemusing sense of humour and little interest in playing by other people's rules. His films are mostly unified by their strangeness, a mirror to the weirdness of life (both the everyday and the extraordinary). Although Dune is his only overtly science-fictional work, and Twin Peaks dabbles in fantasy, a lot of Lynch's other work taps into his fascination with quantum mechanics. Mulholland Drive, perhaps his most popular and well-regarded film, spins on a dime between two different versions of Los Angeles, with the same actors playing suddenly very different characters. Lost Highway and Inland Empire both employ similar devices.

Lynch could direct more conventionally, with The Elephant Man, Dune, The Straight Story and elements of Twin Peaks hinting at a more commercially-aware side, and many a Hollywood producer probably regretted Lynch not adopting a more conventional approach. But that was never in Lynch's style. He is survived by four children, and will very much be missed.

Wednesday, 15 January 2025

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew

The people of the planet At Attin are carrying out a Great Work for the Galactic Republic, which requires their planet to be sealed off from the rest of the galaxy by an unbreachable barrier. The children of At Attin are encouraged to study hard to get great jobs to carry out the Work, with only ancient stories of Jedi percolating through to reach those with imagination. When four children stumble across a buried starship which inadvertently carries them far from At Attin, they have to use all their resourcefulness to get home, through a galaxy decidedly less civilised than they were led to believe.

Skeleton Crew is yet another Star Wars TV show from the Lucasfilm/Disney+ production line. Since The Mandalorian debuted five years ago, the production line has pushed out a whole raft of Star Wars projects, which have all looked fantastic but, to varying degrees, struggled to hit the high notes of the franchise. The first season of Andor and the first two seasons of The Mandalorian were very good, but its third season, Obi-Wan Kenobi and Ahsoka were all patchy, The Acolyte flawed and The Book of Boba Fett bafflingly structured.

Combined with the well-documented struggles in getting a new movie in the franchise off the ground, this has led to the conclusion that Star Wars, at least as a live-action concern, was in trouble under Disney's stewardship.

Fortunately, and most unexpectedly, Skeleton Crew didn't get that memo. Jon Watts, who masterminded Marvel's take on Spider-Man, rocked up with a mission: to make the Star Wars / 1980s kids' movie crossover event that we never knew we wanted, but it turns out was a great idea all along. Taking inspiration from the likes of The Goonies and Flight of the Navigator, the film jettisons almost all the baggage of the extended Star Wars canon that has been weighing down the rest of the franchise for a near-stand-alone adventure in which some kids find a spaceship and get into hijinks.

You might think that sounds fair enough but maybe not enough to sustain eight episodes, but Watts and his team expand the storyline to incorporate subplots revolving around the kids' families trying to work out how to find them from back home, as well as expanding on Jod, the mentor character they encounter along the way who agrees to be their guide through the dangerous galaxy beyond At Attin. Jude Law plays Jod with absolutely maximum relish, turning in a great performance that mixes humour and roguery in classic Star Wars fashion. The kids are all fine (due to their age, the occasional scene where they mistake enthusiasm for skill can be overlooked), and many of the other adult actors are great, though Kerry Condon (Rome, Better Call Saul) feels under-utilised.

The episode count allows our characters to visit several planets (all new) and learn more about the galaxy and its recent past, meaning that total Star Wars novices should be at home here. The impressive action set-pieces come thick and fast, and the lighter tone is mostly successful after too many Star Wars projects that feel weighed down by the need to be serious. But, like the best 1980s kids' movies, the show also knows it won't work without some darker moments and real jeopardy, and a late-series shakeup to its format is highly effective at darkening the show without making it unsuitable for its audience.

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (****) is not high art but it achieves its objective of being breezy fun for kids and adults alike. Easily the best Star Wars TV project after Andor and the early part of The Mandalorian, it's almost a relief to find an adventure in the Galaxy Far Far Away that can simply be enjoyed and not merely tolerated. The show is airing now on Disney+ worldwide.

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

Monday, 13 January 2025

Further allegations against Neil Gaiman emerge

Last year, allegations of sexual assault and non-consensual behaviour were levied against Neil Gaiman by five women, reported through several venues. Through spokespeople, Gaiman denied these allegations, stating that all of his relationships have been consensual.


Today, New York Magazine and its website arm, Vulture, have published an extremely detailed follow-up investigation, totalling 11,000 words. For the article, the investigation talked to eight women in total who all reported non-consensual and abusive behaviour from Gaiman. Gaiman's ex-wife Amanda Palmer is quoted as saying that she believed as many as fourteen women had reported problematic behaviour from Gaiman over many years.

Some of the reporting is extremely graphic, detailed and disturbing.

The investigation did not interview Gaiman directly, but through his representatives he repeated his position that all relationships were consensual, despite the vast power differential in several of them (one of the women involved was employed as his nanny; another was living in one of his houses with the intimation that she would be kicked out if she refused to sleep with him).

The allegations have already negatively impacted Gaiman's career: Amazon have cancelled the third full season of his TV show Good Omens and instead are airing a single 90-minute special to wrap up the story. Netflix are deep in post-production on Season 2 of Sandman and had been expected to heavily promote the show after its first season was acclaimed, but now seem to be experiencing headaches over how to handle the situation. Rumours of varying credibility have indicated that the story has been tweaked so Season 2 can serve as a final conclusion to the whole saga if necessary. Gaiman has not published a solo, full-length novel in some twelve years, though he has published some books for younger readers and story collections.

At least two police investigations based on the reporting have taken place, with one of them still ongoing.

Gaiman has long been considered a cult figure in science fiction and fantasy circles. He rose to fame with his 10-volume graphic novel series The Sandman, published from 1988 to 1996, followed by novels including Neverwhere, American Gods, Anansi Boys and The Ocean at the End of the Lane, as well as his collaboration with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens. He has sold well over 40 million graphic novels and books, and won numerous awards. Since the allegations rolled out last year, the response from his fans and former collaborators has been one of shock, but this is now turning into anger as the seriousness of the situation escalates.

Update: Neil Gaiman has made a public statement, again denying that many of the incidents took place, whilst saying that everything he did was consensual.