I've been on a Star Trek kick lately. While I have been mostly enjoying Starfleet Academy I have also dipped back into Picard and just started a rewatch of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I never watched TNG when it aired but instead caught up with it on Netflix on DVD years later as part of a massive OCD binge of all things Trek. And while I never caught it in the 1980's and 1990's when it aired, there is something comforting and nostalgic about TNG and that's not just because of the very 80's soft beige, grey and cranberry decor and dramatic fade-outs to commercial (although very much also that) but its now-quaint value system in which Starfleet's best and brightest do their best to live up to their high ethical standards.
I had seen The Next Generation's pilot episode, "Encounter at Farpoint" a couple of times before, once even on the big screen when the beautiful Blu-ray remasters were released and had always thought it was a little dull and not really reflective of the heights the show would achieve in its later seasons. In 2026, however, it feels refreshing and almost radical. In light of the recent very dumb arguments about whether or not Star Trek has become "woke," 1987's "Encounter at Farpoint," is decidedly so with everything from male crewmembers running around in skirts, to characters making offhand and subversive remarks about humanity's past obsessions with "tribal gods." Remember, the future of Star Trek is well-documented as a post-capitalist, largely agnostic utopia. So, yes, it's woke at a molecular level which is why all the right wing kvetching is even sillier than normal.
In "Farpoint" a seemingly all-powerful, god-like being called Q diverts the Enterprise and puts its crew on trail for the past barbarism of humanity. Mind you, although Q presents himself in various historical guises, his court is apparently based on a chaotic, post apocolypic, mid-twenty-first century court. This tracks. However, the charges of barbarism are forcefully rebutted by Captain Picard who both acknowledges humanity's terrible past but argues that humanity has grown and improved over the centuries.
This storyline really resonated with me on this watch and reminds me of the current dialogue in the United States about American history. The current administration is doing everything in its power to stifle any discussion of US history that might put the country in a "negative light," including pressuring museums into removing exhibits that highlight things like slavery and genocide of native people. This is pretty typical of conservative thinking in recent years which seeks to whitewash our history and return to an era of fawning over "great men," instead of reconciling with the realities of the past.
While Captain Picard can look back on the problematic sweep of human history with supreme confidence that humanity has grown and improved, American conservatives seemingly cannot. Indeed, when Picard is told by Q that his mission at Farpoint will serve as a test of humanity's quality, the captain does not flinch, confident in the fact that even this brand new crew will act in an ethical way and prove Q wrong.
Perhaps the most refreshing thing about watching Star Trek in 2026 is seeing people in leadership who are both competent, curious, and ethical which is especially nice considering the 2026 leadership in the US is composed of a mix of Cardassians, Romulans, and Ferengis.
At the time of The Mandalorian’s second season, Ahsoka Tano was already a character with a deep history on the animated side of Star Wars, in addition to appearances in The Mandalorian, The Clone Wars, Rebels, her own eponymous show and other media appearances. At the time of this writing, much of her life has been covered on screen (with some intriguing gaps) and it can be argued that she is one the franchises best and most beloved characters.
She wasn’t always so loved, however. First introduced in the theatrical release of The Clone Wars she was a character jointly created by Dave Filoni and George Lucas and takes some visual cues from Filoni’s love for Studio Ghibli movies, particularly Princess Monanoke. Ahsoka was initially met with controversy and disdain by Star Wars fans (imagine that!) due to her sometimes annoying and bratty characterization and over-familiarity with our beloved legacy characters (“Artooey!”). She was introduced as the Padawan apprentice to Anakin Skywalker which initially felt like a jarring retcon to the Prequels. Also, the idea of Anakin having an apprentice at all seemed crazy, although a characteristically terrible Jedi decision.
However, Ahsoka was slowly and methodically developed over the first few seasons of The Clone Wars and during the course of the conflict, Tano was layered with depth and the burden of leadership and responsibility. She also took on some of her master’s independence and tendency for improvisation as well as his martial skill. Ahsoka literally matured before us and through her eyes we experienced the toll of the Clone War on the galaxy and the Jedi. Soon fans were less worrying about her being a retcon than about her seemingly inevitable demise. Her complete absence from Revenge of the Sith hinted at a tragic fate for the young Togruta.
She went on too many notable adventures in The Clone Wars to really get into here and has experienced everything from brainworm-controlled zombies, to being sold off into slavery, to almost having a romance with a young Mandalorian. In possibly her most fateful arc on the show, she and Obi-Wan and Anakin find themselves on a mysterious world called Mortis on which live a trio of Force deities who's mythic struggle seems to mirror the balance of power in the galaxy. During the course of this storyline Ahsoka is killed and resurrected by the Daughter, the embodiment of the Light Side of the Force, and perhaps this act has imbued Ahsoka with some special destiny of which we have yet to really see. Ahsoka season two seems to be going in the direction of continuing this story. Ahsoka's frequent visual companion and herald, the owl-like Morai is also tied into this storyline and her connection with the Daughter.
Ahsoka's story came to a head toward the end of the fifth season of The Clone Wars in a series of episodes which saw her framed for a bombing at the Jedi temple, and which resulted in her going on the run and being captured and put on trial, with only Anakin really attempting to prove her innocence. Ultimately Anakin exonerates her, but the events sour her on the Order and, in a truly shocking moment, she leaves Anakin and the Jedi behind to go off on her own. This moment alone cements her status as a true icon of the franchise and one of the best characters in the whole saga.
We find out that after leaving the Jedi she disappeared into the underworld of Coruscant where she got mixed up with some smugglers. She eventually reconnects with the Mandalorian warrior Bo Katan who is attempting to liberate her planet from a criminal syndicate lead by Maul (yes, that one.) Ahsoka contacts Anakin and petitions the Jedi for military assistance on behalf of the Mandalorians and she is granted temporary command over a battalion of clone troopers. This final arc of The Clone Wars is some of the greatest Star Wars storytelling ever and includes one of the finest lightsaber fuels of the entire saga. Ahsoka defeats and captures Maul but en route to Coruscant, Order 66 is transmitted and Ahsoka and a clone narrowly escape. Maul also manages to escape on his own.
She lives on the run for a while trying avoid the Empire and its Jedi purge, eventually running afoul of one the Jedi-hunting Imperial Inquisitors (which she easily dispatches.) She takes the corrupted red kyber crystals from his lightsaber and purifies them into a pure white color. These crystals are in the katana-style sabers she wields hereafter. Tano then links up with Senator Bail Organa who is establishing the basis what will eventually be the Rebel Alliance, assuming the identity of Fulcrum.
We pick up her story next in Star Wars: Rebels as she is revealed as the rebel agent with whom our cell of rebels has been communicating since the beginning of the show. She’s now much older and wiser than during her Clone Wars years and despite not identifying as a Jedi, Ahsoka briefly serves as a mentor for our Jedi characters Kanan and His apprentice Ezra. Once again, she easily clowns Inquisitors practically taking their lightsabers and smacking them in the face with them. While she is not technically a Jedi, she has become quite a powerful Force-wielder.
Ahsoka and the Jedi make their way to the abandoned planet of Malachor, the site of a historic conflict between the Jedi and the Sith and the activation of an ancient and powerful weapon. The trio meet Maul there who is attempting to activate the dormant weapon. They are soon joined by a trio of Inquisitors and finally by Vader. Throughout her short time on Rebels, Ahsoka has been attempting to piece together the identify of the Sith Lord, with the dawning realization that he is actually her former Master. On Malachor, the two duel and Vader seemingly defeats her, in another one of the great Star Wars face-offs.
In a storyline in the final season of the show, Ezra Bridger returns to the Jedi temple on his homeworld of Lothal and uses it to enter a previously unseen-dimension in the franchise, The World Between Worlds-a kind of Force nexus in time and space. Indeed, the World Between World sequences are full of audio cameos from all over the saga, past and future. During his exploration of this realm, Ezra discovers a portal to Malachor during the Vader/Ashoka duel and manages to pull her out, rescuing her from her fate. Escaping the Emperor's attempts to enter the World Between Worlds, the two are separated and Ahsoka escapes back to Malachor at some point after the destruction of the temple. Since she is entirely absent from the Original Trilogy, it is entirely possible that Ahsoka was trapped on deserted planet for years.
Her live-action debut in The Mandalorian is her next chronological appearance in the Saga. Her brief animated coda during the finale of Rebels takes place later and is likely (although not definitively) an animated version of a scene in Ahsoka season one.
My recently re-released novel, City of the Gods is meant to be a love letter to kaiju media but this kind of story is fairly uncommon in fiction. Kaiju is mostly a cinematic genre and I wanted to take a moment to discuss some of the great giant monster stories that were an influence on my book while I was writing it and a couple of notable entries which were released in the fifteen years since.
Godzilla in Godzilla Minus One, 2023
You can’t talk about kaiju without talking about Godzilla, while it’s not the only game in town, the series originated the genre as we know it today and continues to dominate it. As of this writing there have been 38 films in the over 70 year-old series and it is actually going stronger than ever with both an American-produced cinematic universe with multiple films and television series and a revitalized Japanese film series, which won its first Academy Award for the terrific Godzilla Minus One, due to get a sequel later this year and even other Japanese films in development.
From Godzilla 2000, 1999
I’m sure you can look at the seventy year old series and find lots of similarities to my book from the decision to give Quetzalcoatl an oceanic resting place so he could come ashore like Godzilla, to his battles with a UFO not unlike Godzilla 2000, to his tussle with a multi-headed opponent. There are tons of homages to the series but probably the Godzilla movies that were the biggest influences on City of the Gods were 1991’s Godzilla vs King Ghidorah and 2001’s Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack. While not the first movie to introduce this concept, Godzilla Final Wars from 2004, famously featured kaiju used by aliens as weapons of mass destruction against humanity, much as is the case in COTG.
Like COTG, Godzilla vs King Ghidorah involves UFO aliens who have a seemingly benevolent agenda. Also like COTG, it is a time-travel Kaiju story, which was unprecedented when the movie was released and still uncommon. In fact, Godzilla's origin in GvKG revolves around a time loop. It's a pretty unique movie in the series. While the writing of COTG is a bit of a blur to me, as lover of time travel stories I would not have been able to resist including this element in my book and GvKG certainly opened the door to do so in this genre. So, you know, blame them if you didn't like the book.
Whereas the previous movie has a definite sci-fi angle on Godzilla, Godzilla, Mothra, King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All Out Attack (which will hereby be referred to as GMK for obvious reasons) takes a more mystical view of the genre with all of the title monsters being akin to nature spirits and Godzilla himself being a manifestation of Japan’s war-time dead. While the movie has no real plot points in common with COTG, the film's mysticism, grandeur, and vibe were all an influence on the book since GMK is widely considered to be among the best of the Godzilla series. Like the guardian monsters who rise to oppose Godzilla in the movie, Quetzalcoatl rises to defend Mexico (and also the Earth) from the Nahuan invaders.
Before he was granted directing duties on GMK, director Shusuke Kaneko cut his teeth on a trilogy of movies in the 1990’s featuring Godzilla’s main cinematic rival, Gamera. Gamera: Guardian of the Universe, Gamera 2: Legion, and Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris tell the story of a turtle-esque kaiju created by an ancient civilization who serves as a guardian of Earth against a series of giant monsters. This depiction of Gamera was a big influence on the way Quetzalcoatl is written in COTG. Both kaiju occupy a similar position in the spectrum of villainous destruction (Say GMK Godzilla or Shin Godzilla) to mindless animal (1998 Godzilla) to antihero (Legendary Godzilla) to cuddly pal (Showa Gamera and late Showa Godzilla). Both kaiju are tough-as-nails brawlers who are reluctant defenders of humanity or at least the Earth. I also just love these movies and think they are among the best in the genre.
Another notable entry in the genre was 2008's Cloverfielda rare "found footage" kaiju movie. This American feature film gives the audience a full first-person perspective on a giant monster attack. The horror and immediacy of the movie was certainly something I had in mind when I was writing COTG, specifically the scenes of Eddie on the ground during Coatlicue's attack on the city.
A few years after the release of City of the Gods the landmark kaiju-versus-mecha epic Pacific Rimwas released. The movie was directed by Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro (also my fantasy pick for directing duties on a prospective COTG film, if anyone cares) who is no stranger to genre films (a couple of them have been featured on Monster Movie of the Week). While there is not too much in common plotwise between City of the Gods and Pacific Rim (other than a similar kaiju birth scene) but I'm intrigued by the film's reputation. It has been called alternately the "smartest dumb movie ever made" and the "dumbest smart movie ever made," which is backhanded praise but speaks to how we look at this genre and the contradictions inherent in an auteur like del Toro making a "silly monster versus robot" movie that takes itself less than seriously. The result is an often ridiculous film made with a lot of meticulous attention to detail and artistry that you don't often see in the genre, which are often made by talented journeymen directors. I like to think that mix of silliness and thoughtfulness is at play in COTG, which for all its big dumb action set pieces, has a distinct point-point-of-view and things to say about the world and history.
Shin Godzilla, 2016
A lot of Godzilla movies in the twenty-first century have had a notable vein of seriousness to them. The first of the American movies, 2014's Godzillais a fairly somber affair in which the kaiju action largely takes a backseat to the human drama. The Japanese series relaunched in 2016 with Shin Godzilla, a new take on Godzilla that is more grounded and scarier than traditional Godzilla fare. Like Shin Godzilla, City of the Gods also spends some time with the leaders on the ground, their logistical challenges, and their fraught relationships with the United States. While the American movies went into a more action-oriented and fun direction, the Japanese films doubled down on human drama in the acclaimed and Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One, which is nothing short of a post-war drama set wrapped around a kaiju movie.
Thankfully the addition of King Kong to the Legendary movies, starting with his own movie 2017's Kong: Skull Island, has reintroduced an element of levity to the franchise. Both Godzilla v. Kong and Godzilla X Kong: The New Empire are incredibly fun examples of the genre featuring unexpected humor, great characterization, and sometimes surprising action.
The term woke is derived from African American colloquial English to describe a state of social awareness, being conscious of the realities of social injustice in the world and particularly in American culture. Its usage was not unlike the way it is used in Buddhism. The title of Buddha literally means “Awakened one.” It was a good, meaningful word. However, in recent years, right-wing commentators have co-opted it to describe any piece of media that prominently features women, LGBT people, or people of color. The argument seems to be that when a piece of media features anything other than heterosexual white men, it is promoting a “social agenda,” instead of simply showing an accurate reflection of the world we live in, which features lots of other people in addition to heterosexual white men.
A Ghostbusters movie with a female cast? Woke. A Marvel movie featuring three female leads, two of which are women of color and a black female director? Woke. A Star Wars series with a black female lead and queer female director? WOKE. She-Hulk? She’s mean to men. Woke. Black stormtrooper? Woke. Black mermaid? What do you call that? Woke. A Lesbian side character in an animated movie? Too woke. Superman-just being Superman? Why is it so woke?!
In recent years, Star Trek has returned to its serial television roots with a handful of shows on Paramount+. Those have been a mixed bag with some real highlights and some lowlights. The flagship show for this run was Star Trek: Discovery which ultimately gave us our first black female captain (leading a series anyway) and (unbelievably) it was our first show with openly queer characters. Of course, given the political climate, the usual insecure and terminally online people cried “woke” but calling Star Trek woke belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the property which has always promoted at least Liberalism and certainly diversity. Star Trek has always had a social agenda of showing us a an egalitarian, anti-colonial, post-capitalist world. It has never pretended to be anything but woke for the last sixty years.
You tell her, Data!
This was true going back to the original incarnation of Star Trek in the 1960’s which despite the presence of a swaggering American male (played by a Jewish Canadian) was remarkably diverse for the time and as the franchise continued in the 1980’s and 1990’s it seemed like the producers were actively playing Diversity Bingo with the various bridge crews if only to better reflect the diverse society that was watching these shows.
The final frontier for the new batch of shows is in the area of LGBTQ representation which had always been lacking. Queer people were effectively invisible in Star Trek for decades and there were constant teases that this or that minor character might be revealed to be gay only for the producers to chicken out or be blocked by the studio. The first canonically gay character on Star Trek was the alt-universe Sulu in the JJ Abrams-produced Kelvin trilogy, although the openly gay original Sulu actor George Takei was not necessarily on board with that juxtaposition of his on and offscreen life.
Star Trek: Discovery not only gave us a gay science officer in the form of Paul Stamets but gave him a husband who was the ship’s medical officer (and a Latino for your Bingo card) they show even threw in a Lesbian engineer for good measure. In retrospect, not having Lesbian engineers on all those other ships seems terribly unsafe. In later seasons, the show introduced a transmale and a Non-Binary character. And if recent years have shown us anything, it’s that trans and Non-Binary people are catnip for right-wing dickheads, earning Discovery the dreaded woke label.
To run the risk of being overly fair to idiots, if you squint, Discovery was woker than most other Trek shows in that it sometimes eschewed Star Trek’s allegory to more explicitly tie into the progressive politics of the moment. Only time will tell how that will age the show. In fifteen years, the Stacey Abrams cameo as the President of the Federation might seem like a strange curiosity of the 2020’s.
And new we are onto a new show with the launch of Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, a direct spinoff of Star Trek: Discovery featuring a young and diverse cast (including the most beautiful Klingon man I’ve ever seen) and the boys who cried woke are at it again not even two episodes in. So far they are nitpicking (get ready) the way that the captain played by Holly Hunter sits in her chair.
Look, Star Trek is, and always will be, woke. The non-woke version of Star Trek would be, I don’t know, a show set on an Imperial Star Destroyer. If you think it’s too woke, I have a mirror universe that you might enjoy emigrating to but please keep Star Trek out of your silly political BS.
The first season of The Mandalorian is kind of a miracle: it was a new Star Wars project that was widely-liked and uncontroversial (not counting the nostalgic sugar rush that was The Force Awakensrelease) among the famously fickle fans of the franchise. Iron Man director and Star Wars: The Clone Wars showrunner Dave Filoni teamed up to deliver was is a wildly appealing and fun Star Wars concoction set about a half decade after Return of the Jedi and set un the relatively unexplored part of the Star Wars galaxy; the underbelly of criminals and bounty hunters during the New Republic period, a timeframe largely uncharted in the Disney canon (the sequel movies are set about a generation later). The show was released during a time of strife in the Star Wars fandom, shortly after the run of The Rise of Skywalker, a movie widely disliked by Star Wars fans which followed a movie which was intensely disliked by half of Star Wars fans, but to be fair, every year since 1999 has been a time of strife in Star Wars fandom. But the fans liked The Mandalorian! At least initially.
The Mandalorian in its first season is very much a simple, back-to-basics Star Wars project. Indeed, one can imagine Jon Favreau or Dave Filoni dumping out a tub of Kenner toys from The Empire Strikes Back and creating the show from old Boba Fett, Yoda, Ugnaught, Stormtroopers, Imperial Officer action figures and maybe an occasional Klatuu, IG88, ATST and X-Wing thrown in for good measure. That said, the show remixes a lot of pop culture elements that are intertwined in the Star Wars DNA such as the Space Western vibe of A New Hope and mixes it with a dash of the Japanese Lone Wolf and Cub samurai stories which had never been part of Star Wars before but feel right at home in Kurosawa-inspired world of the Galaxy Far, Far, Away and its themes of legacy and found family.
While the true origins of this show are unknown, it should be noted that there was in the early years of the Disney Star Wars era talk of a Boba Fett movie which got so far into production that it even had a director (Josh Trank) and even had Michael B. Jordan attached in some capacity. That project was one of the dozens of announced Disney projects that never made it to production and The Mandalorian followed shortly after. It is worth wondering whether this project was adapted from that film, Din Djarin, the titular character has much in common with the Original Trilogy Boba Fett: both are laconic bounty hunters only ever seen in Mandalorian armor who ride around in shambling gunships. Djarin even wields Fett's rifle used in his original Holiday Special appearance.
This would also explain the show's famously uneven pacing. Every season of The Mandalorian features a certain number of filler or "sidequest" episodes in addition to those that drive the story forward. In season one, you could essentially skip episodes four through six and not miss much regarding the core story of Mando, Grogu Gideon, and the Mandalorian clan on Nevarro. That said, those episodes are all a lot of fun but I can imagine a them having been added as part of a process of expanding a Boba Fett movie into a season of television. This is interesting to consider as The Mandalorian makes the jump from television to movie later this year.
Despite the fact that Star Wars has been episodic television in animated form for twenty years at this point there is always a lot of discussion about where the franchise belongs and how well it "works" on TV. In fact, many of these Disney+ shows have been the subject of fan cuts (certainly nothing new for Star Wars). While the first two seasons of The Mandalorian is widely well-regarded, shows like The Book of Boba Fett,Obi-Wan Kenobi, and The Acolyte have been recut by talented fans to address perceived quality or pacing issues often with fascinating results.
While Din Djarin is often brought to life by a pair of stuntmen, his face and voice belong to Pedro Pascal in a role that cemented him as the go-to actor for playing protective "daddy" figures to gifted but endangered children. He voices Djarin with a terse toughness, moral decency, and occasional flashes of dry humor. He initially seems like a tough-as-nails bounty hunter in the vein of Boba Fett, he reveals additional depth when his high value quarry turns out to be an alien child. After initially turning the child over the Imperials who had contracted him, Djarin has a change of heart and rescues him cementing his status as a Good Dude.
The Child-as he was known for the first season-is, of course, Grogu, a fifty year-old alien from the same long-lived species as Yoda. Din and Grogu's first meeting ate the end of episode one is an iconic Star Wars moment, especially since it was not spoiled beforehand. The Yoda species has remained a mysterious one and George Lucas has famously refused to reveal much about them, even their name. The only other member we have seen is the Jedi Master Yaddle in The Phantom Menace and Tales of the Jedi. Like the others of his ilk, Grogu also has force powers which he uses saves Din's life on a couple of different occasions, creating a bond leading to their "Clan of Two."
Grogu is of course, adorable and the creators of The Mandalorian are very adept at coming up with genuinely cute business to occupy him. While he is often in danger, Grogu is frequently seen having a blast which is part of his charm. He also is infinitely marketable and for a while the market was flooded with all manner of Grogu dolls, apparel, and collectibles.
During the season Din Djarin meets lots of other memorable characters. Strangely the series is full of lots of 1990's Second City people like Horacio Sanz and Amy Sedaris. Nick Nolte voices the Ugnaught character Kuiil, who becomes a friend and close ally of Mando in the first season and who sadly does not continue on. Taika Waititi hilariously voices IG11, an assassin droid and rival bounty hunter to The Mandalorian. Action Legend Carl Weathers appears in a recurring role as Grief Carga, Mando's Frenemy in season one. On the villain side we have Giancarlo Esposito as a ruthless Imperial Remnant Moff, and seemingly a Vader fanboy, who has a long association with Mandalore and is revealed in the season's closing moments to be in possession of the Darksaber (more on that below). And somehow they managed to get legendary director and occasional actor Werner Herzog, to bring his distinctive Austrian rasp to the role of the mysterious Client in search of Grogu and his blood which has a high "M-count" because apparently it is too triggering for some fans to hear the word "Midichlorians."
A MANDALORIAN PRIMER
As the title implies, The Mandalorian also reveals more about one Star Wars other mysterious groups, the Mandalorians. Of course the first of these depicted in Star Wars was the aforementioned Boba Fett, and he was identified as a "Mandalorian" as far back as his creation in the late 1970's in the ancillary materials that have always accompanied Star Wars. This culture has a long history in the old expanded universe, where the concept of Mandalorian steel or "beskar" was first introduced back in the 1990's. The Mandalorians were often treated like Star Wars' version of the Klingons, an honorable but warlike culture, sometimes uneasily aligned with our heroes.
Much of the old EU history was retconned even before the Disney era and Filoni has already told some of this story in animation, introducing us to the concept of the great Mandalorian ruler, Tarre Visla, a Mandalorian Jedi who was the revered ruler of his people (one of his descendants is the very big surly Mandalorian often seen with the Armorer in The Mandalorian). As is now a feature of Star Wars, we are being told the story of Mandalore and the Mandalorians out of sequence and in fits and starts, so it can be a bit jarring to jump into the story in The Mandalorian perhaps coming out of the animated shows set decades before.
Let's break it down.
We are first introduced to the culture and the planet during a couple of different arcs on The Clone Wars, which depict a culture with a warlike past but which is now governed under a pacifist reform movement. Buy this time, the Mandalorians have destroyed much of their planet through internecine wars and mostly live in giant enclosed cities on the surface. During the Clone Wars era they are led by Duchess Satine, an old "associate" of Obi-Wan Kenobi. Satine is also the sister of Bo Katan, who opposes her as part of a terrorist group called Death Watch, lead by Pre Vizla, descended from the legendary ruler.
Viszla's traditionalist Mandalorians consider the wielding of the Darksaber to be the true signifier of leadership of the Mandalorian people and look at Satine's political movement with contempt. Later in the Clone Wars, the Death Watch Mandalorians arrange to take over the planet in alignment with Darth Maul (yes, that one. Long story) but the planet is shortly liberated by the Republic, led by the ex-Jedi Ahsoka Tano and Bo-Katan who had left Death Watch after Maul took power. That's where we leave things at the end of the war. By the way, this final arc of The Clone Wars is some of the finest Star Wars content ever created, full stop. Watch it now.
We later catch up with the Mandalorians over a decade later during Star Wars Rebels in the Imperial era when we learned that the planet had defied the Empire and had been destroyed by orbital bombardments. The surviving Mandalorians had spread throughout the galaxy, thinking Mandalore cursed and uninhabitable.
During the time of The Mandalorian six or seven years after the fall of the Empire, the particular group of Mandalorians that Din Djarin is associated with is referred to as Children of the Watch, a fundamentalist group spun off from Death Watch with strict rules regarding behavior and wearing of armor. Unlike the Mandalorian survivors we see in Rebels, these Mandalorians live hidden on the fringes of galactic society. Given that these are the only Mandalorians that we see in the season, we don't yet know if all surviving Mandolarians are like this or what happened to other characters like Sabine Wren or Bo Katan, who were a little more cosmopolitan in how they mixed with other cultures and regularly were seen unhelmeted.
In many cases these Children of the Watch have no actual connection to the planet Mandalore and are only Mandalorians by creed, as is the case with Din Djarin who joined after being rescued by Death Watch during the Clone Wars. Din is not "Mandalroian" in the same sense as Bo Katan or Sabine Wren from Rebels and Ahsoka, both of whom are from old Mandalorian houses. The vibes are perhaps cultier even than the Jedi and how this all actually works has been the subject of endless speculation since the show aired.
One last thing definitely worth noting about the show is the remarkable feat of having its own musical identity in the Star Wars franchise, a series of movies that are famous for having perhaps some of the finest and most iconic movie music in the history of film. Ludvig Goransson, the Oscar-winning composer behind movies like Black Panther and Oppenheimer has here created an instantly recognizable piece of music that captures the Neo-western sci-fi vibes of the show.
The Mandarlorian is available to stream on Disney+.
The only other major element that was in the older drafts and omitted closer to publication was the presence on the ship of an alien being, a representative of the mentioned Wayfarer species. It was one of these creatures (I believe his name was Far-ash) who attended to Sandra on the ship when she awoke, much to her horror and shock.
I had some fun thinking up these aliens whose heads were big and shaped something like an ice cream scooper with a lot of negative space where their face would have been. I am a fan of alien creatures that are genuinely surprising and, well, alien (see any Alien movie or Annihilation for good examples of this.) I really wanted them to be something other than humans with latex applications or forehead ridges or something.
The Wayfarers were a race that the Nahuans had conquered and kept on the ship as slaves to maintain their advanced technology. They were cut later in the writing process that the longer prologue, probably to ease Sandra's journey of trusting the Nahuans since she was so freaked out and disturbed by these aliens. Also, their presence as slaves on the ship telegraphed a lot of how the Nahuans operated that it was becoming an impediment to the story so they got the axe.
Other than that, the story didn't go through a lot of changes during its development but these are items I had in mind as I was thinking about a prospective 15th anniversary edition.
Fifteen years ago I published my first book, City of the Gods: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, a love letter to Japanese Kaiju films and Mesoamerican mythology. To be frank, I was never happy with the version that was released due to quality issues with the manuscript. While the physical version has been off sale for quite a while, late last year, I took the Kindle edition off sale as well with the goal of putting it through an extensive editing/proofing process which I have recently completed. With my second book-We Lowly Gods-out soon, I wanted the best version possible of COTG to stand next to it.
My memories of the writing of COTG are murky and it is likely some of these old ideas only ever lived in early drafts that were written in longhand and never even made it to Microsoft Word. However it existed, those old drafts are lost forever.
So sadly nothing new in this version other than new cover art and fairly extensive editing and proofing. It’s still the same novel, “goofy” and “didactic” as it always was but this new fifteenth anniversary edition is at least one I can live with.
The Kindle version is available here with other versions forthcoming.
Millennium Godzilla, or Miregoji, in the lobby of the Hotel Gracery Shinjuku, August 2023.
Godzilla is in something of a renaissance these days. 2023’s Godzilla Minus One was an excellent movie and even won an Academy Award. The American Monsterverse movies continue to be a lot of fun with a new entry in 2027. In addition to the Minus One sequel there are additional mysterious Japanese Godzilla projects in development, apparently including a sequel to the awesome Shin Godzilla. On top of all that, Toho studios has been releasing a series of amazing shorts every year for Godzilla Fest.
This year's short has just been released and it’s a doozy. First off, it marks the return of my all-time favorite Godzilla design, Miregoji as seen in Godzilla 2000 and Godzilla vs Megaguirus, complete with his oversized jagged spikes and reptilian visage. This version of the character is going into meltdown a la Burning Godzilla from Godzilla vs Destroyah.
Godzilla head atop the Hotel Gracery Shinjuku.
Secondly. it is well-made and full of fun details (peep the active silhouettes in the windows) and is cleverly edited to look like a single cut. I'd love to see this director get a shot at a feature Godzilla movie. The short is set in Tokyo's vibrant Shinjuku neighborhood. My favorite detail has to be the kaiju coming face-to-face with the giant Godzilla head atop the Gracery Hotel which is an actual landmark in the area. It's also lovingly made through suitmation and detailed models.
The movie ends on a cliffhanger and the shadowy presence of a mystery kaiju. My money is on Biollante, a monster unseen in live action since 1989. I hope this is the case because Biollante is really fantastic and imaginative creature, essentially a hybrid of Godzilla, a human being, and a rose. Hopefully next year we will see a battle between Burning Miregoji and Biollante!
Anne Rice had a truly deep and unique relationship with her fans. In her heyday in the 1980's and 1990's she was known to hold epic multi-hour book signings often participating quirky setpieces like being driven around in her own Jazz funeral while she was still alive or climbing out of coffins wearing wedding dresses or elaborate Babylonian headdresses. She was also directly involved with the fan club for her most famous creation, the Vampire Lestat, and frequently attended the club's famous Haloween Vampire Balls in New Orleans.
She was uniquely accessible to her fans both during the more analogue times in which she had a physical newsletter (Commotion Strange anyone?) and had a published telephone number for fans to call and leave messages. In the digital era, she had a for-the-time robust author website and later a well-developed community on Facebook for an audience she referred to as People of the Page.
And then there’s the actual content of her books which formed the relationship to her fans even in the primitive 1970’s. While she may been reduced to a "horror" writer and her books can be found in that part of the bookstore, Anne's books meant so much more to her readers. We can and do argue about her particular genre mash-up (see below) but what’s most important to her readership is the sincerity of her writing and her outsider perspective.
Readers of her first novel 1976’s Interview with the Vampire encountered not just an ordinary vampire tale (vampire stories were and are a dime a dozen) but something much more compelling, a story with vampires which was full of emotional realism about supernatural characters living on the edge of human society and struggling with questions of good and evil and love and loss.
And it turns out that the first generation of Anne Rice readers really responded to these themes. If you were a queer reader in 1976 to some extent you knew what it was like to live in a shadowy subculture and if you were also religious perhaps you knew something of Louis’ tortured existence. If you were an adult woman who had suffered the lifelong indignities of being infantilized and not taken seriously then perhaps you knew Claudia’s rage. If you were a parent who had experienced the unimaginable loss of a child as Rice herself did then you would recognize the loss and grief that elevated the book to something beyond a basic vampire tale. And, really, any American living a comfortable existence within spitting distance of poverty and human misery might feel like a bit of a vampire themselves if they stop to think about. There is something fundamentally vampiric about runaway capitalism.
I was introduced to Anne Rice’s work through a battered copy of Interview loaned to me by my “cool” high school friend Autumn in 1992. I loved it and as a queer kid responded to the coded homoeroticism in the book but more than anything as a son who felt saddled with a poor excuse for a mentor in the form of my father, I empathized with Louis’ frustration and disappointment in Lestat as “the pig’s ear from which nothing good can be made.” I felt seen and was thereafter a dedicated Rice reader.
Like all her fans I was sad to hear of her passing on 2021. When it was announced that her celebration of life would be happening this year and would be produced by her son, the novelist Christopher Rice and his producing partner, I jumped at the chance. Not only had I never experienced New Orleans during Halloween but I had missed out on all of the Rice-related events of my youth such has the Lestat Balls (which apparently are still a thing.)
The Anne Rice Celebration of life took place on Saturday, November 1, All Saints Day at the Orpheum Theater off Canal Street, the handsome Twentieth-century boulevard which forms the Uptown boundry of the French Quarter. I had looked up the space beforehand and had an approximate idea of where it was located but as soon as we reached the street we were greeted with a line of people in various levels of Gothic attire. There were lots of vampire characters, people in different period outfits, some Victorian ladies clutching creepy porcelain dolls, some Egyptians, etc. I was wearing a polo, navy slacks and dress shoes so I felt a little underdressed. Note to self: when traveling keep a Goth outfit packed, you never know when you will need one. My colorful Golden Age Flash costume would not have been appropriate.
The venue itself is a beautiful old baroque-style theater which was decked out with wonderful old photos of Anne and other Rice-related decor, including life-sized replicas of Akasha and Enkil, the two progenitor vampires from her books. We had a pair of vertigo-inducing seats up on the nosebleeds, which required me to stare down through my progressive lenses with my glasses on the tip of my nose.
The event was a mix of biographical video, guest speakers talking about Anne, a few music performances, and some segments with actors reading selections from her books which even included some deep cuts like the Sleeping Beauty series, Violin, and Christ Out of Egypt among the better known Vampire, Witch and Mummy books.
There were some certainly some really lovely and even funny anecdotes from the speakers, particularly from the event’s producers Christopher Rice and Eric Shaw Quinn (who are also hosts of the Dinner Party Podcast) although others seemed to misunderstand the fundamental assignment and focused mostly on themselves.
I would say the strongest part of the whole thing were the biographical video segments which were at times moving, revealing, and delightful. I appreciated that they didn’t lean away from Anne’s often awkward and quirky persona and included such things as members of her housekeeping staff reacting to finding rooms full of porcelain dolls and mummies.
I’m not sure how much of video they had completed or what further uses are envisioned beyond this event but I would love to see a full length documentary built around this footage. For an author of Rice’s profile there is little biographical info available about her aside from the early 90’s era Ramsland book. From the same time period there is the moody BBC documentary Birth of the Vampire. I am including a version of this that I have restored below. But there is little that covers her later life.
What is unavoidably clear now too is existing tension between the Rice estate, which Christopher heads and the Anne Rice adaptations that AMC is producing in the form of Interview with the Vampire, The Mayfair Witches, and Talamasca. The videos presented at the event prominently and repeatedly features clips from the 1994 Interview movie adaptation (to the point of distraction almost) but literally nothing from the new shows. This is particularly odd since AMC’s Interview With The Vampire is widely acclaimed and an all-around excellent adaptation of the novel which one would think would be worthy of highlighting given how few of Rice’s works have actually made it to screen. Couple this with one of the speaker’s somewhat shady comment about how the fans should hope for “faithful” adaptations of Rice’s work, which was met with puzzling applause.
One can follow the sequence of events which lead to Interview ending up at AMC without Christopher Rice’s involvement whereas he had previously been attached as writer in previous iterations of the show as it was shopped different streamers around to his perhaps being unhappy with the final product. One can make a case that the show has taken some liberties with the story but it is an adaptation of the book, not the book itself. But that’s a topic for another day. Regardless, Rice rarely if ever publically comments on the AMC shows on which he is still nominally attached as a producer.
In any case, this was a lovely event to celebrate the unique life of an author who’s work touched her readers dearly. That much is clear from both the in-person testimonials and the short video excerpts sent in by readers. Her work reached people from all walks of life and inspired us and made us feel seen.
We will miss you dearly, Anne.
Note:
Personally, I fell off from reading some of her later books but that just means I have about a half dozen unread Anne Rice books to enjoy at my leisure (Including 3 Vampire Chronicles!) which makes them a precious commodity.
Adapting a beloved book to screen is a tricky proposition. On one hand the book is beloved for a reason and one wants to retain the things about it which its readers enjoyed in the first place. On the other hand, film and television are very different media from fiction and have different limitations and strengths from prose. They should be different by nature but an adaptation is often deemed successful by how "faithful" it is to the source material.
At the recent Celebration of Life for author Anne Rice, one of the speakers struck a somewhat sour note in an otherwise joyous occasion. He said something to the effect that we fans can still hope for accurate adaptations of Rice's work, apparently a dig at the AMC shows which have varying levels of fidelity to their source material. The best and most high-profile of the three shows, Interview with the Vampire, famously makes some bold changes from the book on which it is based.
It got me thinking that despite the popularity of her books, the work of Anne Rice has seldom been adapted for screen or television-which is sad because Anne Rice LOVED both of these media and would share her thoughts on movies and shows she enjoyed frequently online, in print, and often in her books themselves through the pens of her characters. Sadly out of a catalogue of about thirty-seven novels only the following had been adapted prior to the AMC deal: a film based on her religious book Christ Out of Egypt, a cable miniseries based on her historic book The Feast of All Saints, and a uniquely terrible comedy adaptation of her erotic novel Exit to Eden. And, most successfully, the 1994 adaptation of Interview with the Vampire which starred Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
Interview had a tortuous almost twenty-year journey to its first adaption which included a lot of close calls with potentially disastrous productions such as one that would have starred Cher in a gender-swapped version of the Louis role. The 1994 adaption was directed by Neil Jordan and at least partially written by Rice herself. The movie for the most part keeps the book’s story intact.
While it cut out some side plots like the business with the Freniere plantation, Lestat's secret fledgling, and the trip to Romania, the movie is about as faithful an adaption you could get in a feature-length film. It was also a big hit and remains a cult classic to this day. It was eventually followed by The Queen of the Damned which was not made by any of the people associated with the first movie nor with the same budget, thoughtfulness or general level of quality as Jordan's movie. From an adaptation point of view, it not only (mostly) skipped the second book in the series, The Vampire Lestat, but attempted to cram a very long and complex novel into a single feature film.
The rights to the Vampire Chronicles then returned to Rice and lay dormant like an emotionally exhausted vampire in one of her books. In the 2010's there were regular breathless stories about the Chronicles being purchased by various different production companies or streaming services or attached to different creatives like Orci and Kurtzman or even Bryan Fuller (as much as I love the AMC show, can you imagine a Vampire Chronicles show from Bryan Fuller, the showrunner of the incomparable Hannibal and American Gods?) At one point there was even a bizarre rumor that Robert Downey Jr. was attached to an adaptation of the fourth Vampire Chronicle, The Tale of the Body Thief. Ultimately, it was announced that AMC-the home network of The Walking Dead franchise-would be making a series based on the books, and that they were starting with Interview.
I was surprised and disappointed. Why we doing this again? We have a good adaptation already. Let’s get to stuff we haven’t seen on screen yet! I want my MTV Lestat!
Then I saw the cast, most of whom were low-profile actors or unknowns. I started having Queen of the Damned panic. Is this going to be some cheap-o Hot Topic version of my beloved Chronicles?
Jacob Anderson is Louis? Is Gray Worm really up for this role? How does a Louis-of-color change the story particularly since he is an antebellum Southern plantation owner? Who is this Australian rando playing Lestat? Daniel is being played by Eric Bogosian, an actor pushing 70?
Then I learned the time period was being changed from the 18th century to the early 20th century. Claudia was being aged up even more than she was in the 1994 version. (My dream for Claudia has always been a VFX version mo-capped by Glenn Close.) There were lots of seemingly cavalier changes to the story. My Spider-sense was tingling hard.
And then I watched it. And I watched it. And I watched it again.
Not only is Interview with the Vampire a really excellent television show but it is also a masterful adaptation of Rice's novel. It should be studied by people who are looking to adapt a literary work for the screen. It is full of very smart choices.
The show does the magic trick of being extremely faithful in theme and character without being slavish to the details. Most importantly, it justifies its own existence which is a threshold many book adaptations do not meet. It even maintains some of the storylines dropped from the 1994 movie...and at least a shout out to the Freniere family. And all those “cavalier” changes? In almost every case they enrich the story.
Who knew that Jacob Anderson, a musician best known for playing a tertiary character on Game of Thrones (another work which wrestled with the perils of adaptation, sometimes successfully sometimes not) with a limited emotional palette would have this magnificent performance in him? It’s genuinely delightful and surprising to me to see that he is capable of so much that I could not see from his past work. I've never been so happy to be wrong about a piece of casting.
Instead of being a white Creole slave-owner living in Louisiana like Book Louis, Show Louis is a black Creole New Orleans brothel owner in the infamous Storyville district of New Orleans, essentially trading one iconic New Orleans time period for another, and avoiding tiresome and toxic depictions of slavery while still maintaining Louis' as someone morally compromised by human exploitation even before he becomes a vampire, which is a thematically important element to his character. Interestingly, Louis refers to having had a plantation-owning ancestor who in the broad strokes seems to resemble the pre-vampire Book Louis, as though he is a descendant of that same character.
Show Louis is also explicitly a gay man, whereas this was buried under subtext and narrative hand-waiving in the book and movie. The intersection of his blackness, queerness, and vampirism make him a compelling character and serves the larger themes of the book about marginalization and otherness and provide this version of the character with very rich and earned conflicts. For example, his relationship with Lestat which had always been defined by its inequality is now complicated by the racial inequality of turn-of-the century New Orleans. Indeed, the instability of the trio of Lestat, Louis, and Claudia is now underscored by the fact that Louis and Claudia are now both black characters.
Another interesting choice is aging up Daniel Malloy, the interviewer who is only referred to as "the boy" in the book but later named in The Queen of the Damned. In the show's first season we learned that Louis and Daniel had actually already had an attempt at an interview in the 1970's which ended in half-remembered disaster, likely resembling the ending of the published novel and movie. The premise for the show is that Louis wants a re-do of said interview and has a genuine need to embark on an "odyssey of recollection." He approaches this second interview with a sincere desire to accurately tell his story and reckon with his past.
We flashback to this first interview several times in the first season and more so in the second season in which we learn the true series of events which transpired fifty years earlier and it is a truly wonderful payoff to what seemed to be an odd change to the Daniel character. This is also a lovely homage in both the time period and some of the dialogue is directly lifted from the novel, as though Show Louis' first interview was very close in character to that of the book.
Speaking of fidelity, another thing that this series brings to life that was only ever tangentially addressed in the books is the idea of point of view and the reliability of the narrator. Interview with the Vampire is the only novel in the series that is from Louis' perspective. Most of the others are from Lestat's point of view in a first-person narrative. Others are from the perspective of different characters as relayed through Lestat or another character. Ever petty, Lestat devotes a whole chapter in his book The Vampire Lestat presenting the events of Interview from his point of view, where he flat-out disputes his characterization and some of the events Louis had recounted. His distaste for Louis' "miserable memoir" is a running joke in the Chronicles. And based on the trailer for season three, it seems Show Lestat isn't any more of a fan of Interview than Book Lestat.
The show, however, makes the idea of Louis being an unreliable narrator a major plot point, particularly in its second season. In fact, one of the taglines of season two is "Memory is a monster." Things that seemed to be plot holes in season one are revealed to be lapses in his memory which calls his whole account into question. Compare that to the 1994 film which leaves all of Louis' story unquestioned. Show Daniel is a much more active, skeptical interviewer who frequently challenges and pushes back on the account, creating a real tension in those scenes.
While the bulk of the first two season are from Louis' point of view, we do see sections that are from Claudia's diaries and even a scene or two from Armand's perspective. There are potentially even some scenes which are not clearly identified as being from any particular character's point of view, such as the very Hollywood Loustat reunion scene, which for all we know could have been the invention of one of Daniel's editors to give "closure" to the story. It's important to note that the analogous scene in the novel is a scene Lestat specifically claims is made-up. Season three will likely be all or mostly from Lestat's perspective and will likely provide some alternative versions of events depicted in seasons one and two. and perhaps an offhand reference to this scene having been fabricated. Either way, the show seems to relish in keeping us on our toes.
One of the challenges of adapting the Vampire Chronicles is that every novel is based on a character recounting the story’s events, sometimes there are multiple levels of this with characters recounting tales told by other characters. This is particularly true of IWTV, the conceit of which is that the text of the book is literally meant to be a transcription of an interview session. Therefore, some of the book scenes have the quality of characters quickly recounting recalled events with a bit of vagueness as to the specifics. While that works as a literary device, it’s not really satisfying on screen and the thing that this adaption does best is to bring the characters and their relationships to vivid and very specific life.
The way that the show handles these relationships might be the greatest change of all but I would less call it an alteration of what is on the page but an expansion on it. While the characters and relationships in the Vampire Chronicles have always been compelling, the show creators have taken every relationship in the book and really mined them to make them more three-dimensional than they ever were in the source material. The dysfunctional and messy relationships between Louis, Lestat, Claudia, Armand, and Daniel are here rendered into vivid, unforgettable detail. Even side characters like Santiago and Madeleine really shine in this version. Even the "decadent" and "useless" vampires in the Theatre des Vampires feel like specific characters, albeit bitchy theater people.
Fans of Rice and her Vampire Chronicles are lucky to have such a miraculously good adaptation. While it may not be traditionally "faithful" it captures the spirit and character of its source material beautifully. I can't help but think that Anne would have fallen in love with it.
The term woke is derived from African American colloquial English to describe a state of social awareness, being conscious of the realities of social injustice in the world and particularly in American culture. Its usage was not unlike the way it is used in Buddhism. The title of Buddha literally means “Awakened one.” It was a good, meaningful word. However, in recent years, right-wing commentators have co-opted it to describe any piece of media that prominently features women, LGBT people, or people of color. The argument seems to be that when a piece of media features anything other than heterosexual white men, it is promoting a “social agenda,” instead of simply showing an accurate reflection of the world we live in, which features lots of other people in addition to heterosexual white men.
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