Category: Media Reviews

Media Reviews

Review of Signalis

Bryn Shaffer

Rose Engine. Signalis. Humble Games and PLAYISM, 2022.

“Achtung. Achtung.” The first line of Rose Engine’s 2022 science fiction survival horror game Signalis isa distress signal repeating a single German word over an interstellar radio, flashing over a dramatic glitching red CRT screen. The opening is an obvious deep space horror trope meant to denote the game’s membership in the lineage of other SF and survival horrors such as Alien Isolation, Dead Space, and Silent Hill. However, it’s not long before this genre allusion is betrayed. Signalis proves through its referential prowess and surrealist mechanics as not only an SF survival horror, but a psychological text that challenges the delineations of genre, and engages with transmedia cultural, historical and philosophical discourses on the nature of personhood, death, and memory. The game opens with the player journeying out from a crash-landed spaceship into a strange deep hole in the ground where a nightmarish mining facility spirals impossibly deep into the earth and the laws of time and space become distant memories. As the title cards flash, so do lines from Chambers’ The King in Yellow,a shocking rendition of Bocklin’s painting The Isle of the Dead, and several lines from Lovecraft’s The Festival. The message the developers telegraph with this intensely convoluted yet beautifully referential introduction to the game world is clear: this game is not what you think it is. Achtung. Achtung. Danger. Danger.

Signalis is set in a dystopian future where humanity has spread across the solar system under totalitarian militaristic rule. Even in deep space, the long tendrils of fascism exert their crushing grip on the last vestiges of humanity and its replicas. The player follows one such “Replika”, Elster, an android created using edited memories copied from a long-dead human. The plot follows her on a nightmarish cosmic journey after her ship, the Penrose, crashes and its only other inhabitant goes missing. Most of the game takes place in the strange underground government mining facility stuck in a dreamy time loop that shifts to reflect the repressed memories of Elster, her originator, and her missing friend. The developers have woven themes of identity and memory throughout the game world and many have speculated the plot itself is a living memory, an existential crisis, or the melting dreams of an artificial being whose concept of ‘self’ is coming apart at the seams. The possibilities for exploring the notion of personhood are plentiful, and Signalis knowingly presents these themes at the forefront of its game world inviting speculation meant both to enhance the player’s experience and to incite a deeper consideration of the genre themes at play in games centered on artificial protagonists.

The game’s survival horror mechanics are directly reminiscent of Resident Evil and Silent Hill—a limited 6-item inventory, a stash box only found in safe rooms, a sprawling puzzle-filled map requiring continuous doubling back and detailed exploration, and enemies that deal high damage compared to your very limited health. Stealth, exploration, survival and purposeful confusion are the driving forces of play. These classic mechanics weave expertly alongside a story of surreal complexity that requires a constant re-exploration of the environment, and a science fiction setting that blurs the lines between the possible and the otherworldly. In the era of infinite inventories and mechanics that encourage larger and larger amounts of time spent in menu optimizing status over in world exploration, Signalis’restrictive inventory system is a refreshing callback that forces the player to stay in the scary enthralling game world and boosts rather than breaks immersion.

Interspersed throughout the story are interactions with literary works that at first glance seem out of place in the science fiction world, but which upon further examination serve to situate the game within genre traditions of cosmic horror and the problematic nature of some of the genre’s more historically prominent creators. It is likely no coincidence that the player is invited into the deeply fascist dystopia of the mining colony with the words of HP Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers, authors whose prominence gave rise to the cosmic horror and weird fiction literary genres, and who in equal measure were notorious racists who wielded white privilege to enable their rise to literary fame. Working in cosmic horror has troubled creators for generations: how do we reconcile these deeply problematic authors with their contributions to the genre and all it offers as a space for creative and horrific expression? Here Signalis gives us an engagement with cosmic horror that future developers should note—treating these ‘fathers’ of cosmic horror as themselves horrors. Where it could have been easier to make cursory allusions to the cosmic horror genre in the setting of Signalis using similarly aligned aesthetic tropes, Rose Engine has made a concerted effort to engage with the authors themselves in the game world, framing these works as fascist, hellish, and problematic objects that trouble the player, protagonist, and NPCs alike.

Mechanically, Signalis is definitively retro-tech. From the HUD and UI to the limited player mechanics, to the creation of a gameworld where analogue technology dominates over digital, the metallic and plastic clicking and clacking of mechanical interaction are a key element of the game’s design and play well with the game’s use of low poly modeling. Although the game is cross-platform, it is best described as a PlayStation 2 throwback. This is common in many retro-style survival horror AA games that seek to emulate the Silent Hill and Resident Evil style, Another comparable release much like Signalis in its recreation of this look and feel is Headware Game’s 2024 Hollowbody which likewise relies on a limited inventory, low poly modeling, fixed camera angles and surreal horror elements. Even though the developers likely wanted to re-create the visuals of the bygone era of 2000s survival horror, the graphics of the game also speak to the developers’ ability to write an intriguing story. Where modern AAA releases rely on ‘good graphics’ and impressive animation, Signalis pulls off the same impact with low graphics fidelity and uncomplicated mechanics. What keeps the player entranced in this retro space is the strength of how the retro technical look plays into the expertly crafted storyline and atmosphere, which is only enhanced, rather than undercut, by the limited and vintage quality graphics. This is perhaps one of the reasons for the current appeal of the early 2000s or Playstation 2 era survival horrors: a desire to push back against the supplanting of well-written and truly surrealist stories with impressive visuals as seen in the AAA industry, and instead return to narrative-driven horrors that work with what technologies are available to tell compelling stories.

Perhaps most impactfully is Signalis’engagement with an array of musings and histories related to death and dying. Arguably, we can consider the entire story as one drawn-out death played and replayed through memory in the mind of two decaying minds clinging to each other in the depths of space. More specifically, within the facility, death constructs both the environment and actions of the NPCs—Replikas wander the halls in a zombie-like state, molding, and slowly crumbling. The walls of the facility bleed and turn from metal to cancerous flesh over time. It’s no coincidence the developers chose Japanese as one of the dominant surviving cultures and languages in their distant society, with their depiction of mass death in the facility often showing ashen shadows of bodies imprinted on walls and floors, calling to mind the tragic imagery of victims of nuclear fallout. Bocklin’s Isle of the Dead is not only a painting found throughout the game, but makes its way into the game as a location visited by the player, inviting us to situate the game alongside the symbolist tradition of depicting death through lenses of oblivion and the surreal. At one point the player explores a literal hellscape, and encounters rituals of death and funeral whose names are long lost. Through and through death lingers over the entirety of Signalis,keeping it unrelentingly on the mind of the player.

Signalis is a challenging game, not only because its mechanics are unforgiving, its puzzles challenging, and its environment deeply upsetting, but because it demands a level of analytical, philosophical and historical engagement the player may not anticipate from a Playstation 2 homage. However, Rose Engine’s work is worthy of playing, and replaying, as it offers multiple points of entry for analytical engagement and is unique in both the survival horror and science fiction genres. Overall, Signalis is a work that delivers on the key elements of both deep space horror and retro survival horrors, is an expert return to 2000s aesthetics and modes of play, and layers in unique and compelling storytelling that touches on themes of personhood, death, and memory in completely unexpected and deeply evocative ways.

Bryn Shaffer is a graduate student at the University of British Columbia School of Information, where she holds a SSHRC award for her thesis work on information video games, and is an ALA Spectrum BIPOC scholar. Her research interests are in video games, HCI, horror and capitalism and labour studies. When she isn’t writing her thesis, she’s writing video game reviews and essays for the internet, or playing video games with her cat Salem.

Godzilla Minus One

Media Reviews

Review of Godzilla Minus One

Jeremy Brett

Yamazaki, Takashi, director. Godzilla Minus One, Toho Studios, 2023.

Scholar and translator Jeffrey Angles notes in his recent translation of the original Shigeru Kayama Godzilla novellas, that Kayama used the massive, irradiated reptile as a driver for suggesting that “humanitarian values, especially when coming from the postwar generation, will be what Japan needs,to guide the country through its ethical dilemmas” (Angles, 215) That observation could just as equally apply to the 2023 film (and most recent franchise reboot) Godzilla Minus One, in which the realization of ethical commitment to a new future, to a new generation, is brought to bear by a traumatized and shaken population emerging from complete catastrophe. Godzilla’s use as a metaphor for the atomic bombings of Japan and the existential fear of nuclear war is already well-known, but much of the genius of Godzilla Minus One is an explicit coupling of that to the deep trauma produced by the American firebombing of Tokyo and immense conventional destruction levied against a civilian population in the course of war. The people of Tokyo near the end of World War II did not experience an atomic attack, but no less than the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered incomprehensible loss and the end of everything and everyone they knew, believed, and loved. It is in the aftermath of that loss that Godzilla arises. The 37^th film in the Godzilla franchise—and the 33^rd by Toho Studios—Godzilla Minus One strips away layers of backstory, titanic battles between kaiju, and many of the traditional Godzilla tropes, to create an ultimately simpler story of character and the ways in which humans not only process and learn to cope with shock, but transform it into constructive, beneficial action.

Both the trauma of war and the human failure war signifies suffuse the entire film, centered on pilot Shikishima Koichi (Kamiki Ryunosuke). At the very end of the war, Koichi lands his plane at a garrison on distant Odo Island, claiming technical problems. Mechanic Tachibana Sosaku (Aoki Munetaka) quickly realizes Koichi’s true motive—to avoid fatal service as a kamikaze; a realist, Tachibana supports Koichi’s choice to live in a world when the outcome of the war is patently obvious. But war, in the person of Godzilla, is not done with Koichi; the monster rampages through the garrison, which is decimated after Koichi freezes in terror and fails to turn his plane’s gun on Godzilla. Once Godzilla departs, only Koichi and a wounded, enraged Tachibana are left amid the bodies and the wreckage. In an example of Godzilla’s ongoing metaphorical shifting throughout the film (and, indeed, the franchise), Koichi cannot escape modern war’s destruction, which knows no limit and which indiscriminately creates victims, no matter how hard he tries or how remote the location to which he flees. War, like a giant monster, is relentless in its progress. The film, interestingly, presents a monstrous and deadly Godzilla from the outset—the 1946 US atomic bomb tests that in previous incarnations of the franchise create Godzilla, here simply amplify him, both in size and destructive capability (i.e., his radioactive heat ray); Godzilla Minus One suggests that war to a great extent is only a continual evolution towards greater and greater harm, but that in some form has always been a part of the human experience.

Koichi returns to a devastated, defeated Tokyo, carrying only the family photographs of the men on Odo for whose deaths he feels responsible. The scenes set in the ruins of the city are powerful in their presentation—a once-thriving capital is a place of shacks, shanties, food lines, and the ghosts and memories of the countless dead slaughtered in the firebombings. The dead include both Koichi’s parents and the children of his embittered neighbor Sumiko (Ando Sakura), who rages at Koichi for not having sacrificed himself as his duty to try and save the nation. Her reaction only compounds his survivor’s guilt, yet he discovers a motive for living when he encounters Oishi Noriko (Hamabe Minami), a young woman, left utterly alone, carrying baby Akiko (played by Nagatani Sae as a toddler) through the ruined streets. By 1946, the three have become a found family (overcoming Koichi’s terror of closeness and its concomitant risk of loss), imagining the possibility of hope and renewal, both on the personal and the national level. The strength of human connection proves powerful even in the face of existential oblivion—when Koichi tells Noriko he has obtained risky work on a ramshackle boat charged with destroying American mines, she grows furious and terrified, ordering Koichi not to get himself killed.

The minesweeping crew represents different elements of the postwar Japanese generation—
Koichi, the traumatized veteran, wracked by guilt-ridden nightmares of Godzilla; Noda Kenji (Yoshioka Hidetaka), the former weapons designer wrapped in his own introspective remembrances; Akitsu (Sasaki Kuranosuke), the cynical captain bitter at his government’s history of using and silencing the common man; and Mizushima (Yamada Yuki), too young to have seen service but anxious to prove himself. Akitsu counterbalances Mizushima’s youthful enthusiasm, telling him at one point, “To have never gone to war is something to be proud of.” Following reports of Godzilla sinking American ships, the crew are posted with orders to stall the monster until naval reinforcements arrive. Their encounter with Godzilla reveals his new mutations—increased size, deadly heat ray, and his regenerative powers that let him rapidly recover from both naval artillery and a mine jammed into his mouth and then exploded by gunfire from Koichi. But this defeat proves a turning moment for Koichi in his journey towards redemption. In a desperate plea to Noriko that he be able to “put all this to rest”—his guilt at being alive at all—she responds, “Everyone who survived the war is meant to live.” Koichi gains newfound purpose and determination; he is reconstructing himself just as the Japanese nation has begun to reconstruct itself after the war, just as the Ginza district of Tokyo, where Noriko now works, is busily rebuilding itself. A new and horrific attack by Godzilla on the city, though, levels much of Ginza, kills 30,000 people, and apparently kills Noriko just after she pushes Koichi out of the way of the blast wave caused by Godzilla’s heat ray. Koichi is left with a renewed sense of trauma and guilt, castigating himself for daring to try and live when his redemption remains unfulfilled.

At this point, the film begins to center on a collective popular effort to stop Godzilla from returning to Tokyo; the struggles of the Japanese people as a whole become signified by a concerted endeavor by men at the lower end of the social order to save their nation. Unlike previous Godzilla films, there are no labs full of white-coated scientists developing high-tech solutions to eliminate the monster, only Noda putting together a desperate plan to entrap Godzilla with freon gas and destroy him via rapid underwater descent and reascension. There are no masses of generals and other officers in war rooms and bunkers planning stratagems and massive responses, only a single former naval captain, Hotta (Tanaka Miou), asking for former naval personnel as volunteers to steer four disarmed destroyers into harm’s way. There is no help coming from either the Japanese government, which has no resources to muster, or the occupying Americans, who fear military action might antagonize the Soviets—in this, Tokyo’s desperate hour, victory and the end of years of prostration will come through the mutual efforts of ordinary men—navy veterans, engineers, and tugboat crews. Years of feeling betrayed by a neglectful and abusive government, and without agency in a newborn world, are to be superseded by a chance at preserving, not taking, life. As Noda says to the assembled group of volunteers the night before the attack,

Come to think of it, this country has treated life far too cheaply. Poorly armored tanks. Poor supply chains resulting in half of all deaths from starvation and disease. Fighter planes built without ejection seats and finally, kamikaze and suicide attacks. That’s why this time, I’d take pride in a citizen led effort that sacrifices no lives at all! This next battle is not one waged to the death, but a battle to live for the future.

The hope of a better world becomes the engine driving the war against Godzilla, who represents at this one moment both the endlessly destructive past and the potentially devastating atomic future
—Godzilla Minus One posits that the legacy of the one and the looming danger of the other are effectively countered only by a common human effort, one that looks unselfishly to what might come after. As the volunteers, including Noda and Akitsu, board their ships, Mizushima—enthusiastic to help—is purposely left behind; over Mizushima’s protests, Akitsu mutters, “We leave you the future.” Stopping Godzilla has transformed from the simple killing of a monster into, instead, a dramatic step in the process of Japanese societal rebirth and restructuring, and another progression towards exorcising the trauma of war. It is an emotionally resonant return to the original postwar ethos of the Godzilla saga –a turn away from the frequent positioning in the series of Godzilla as Japan’s protector rather than its destroyer and back towards his symbolic image as the terrible power of war and nuclear destruction. (The film also, I note, supplies a psychological complexity and thematic value absent from the recent American “Monsterverse’ Godzilla series, which would rather ape traditional disaster movies and add unnecessary backstories than confront the real human traumas and costs inherent to Godzilla.)

Koichi also finds in this battle his own restoration, and an end to his crippling guilt. He pilots a late-war experimental fighter to lure Godzilla into position in Sagami Bay—the plane is repaired by Tachibana, one of the ghosts of Koichi’s past, reconciliation with whom is vital to Koichi’s healing process. And before Godzilla can use his heat ray to eliminate the volunteer fleet, Koichi flies the bomb-filled plane directly into Godzilla’s mouth, destroying him from the inside. He survives because Tachibana had installed an ejector seat, demanding of Koichi that he must put aside his guilt and live. And so, Koichi does, indeed, live, having given himself, his adopted daughter Akiko, and his nation, a new chance for life. It is telling that the film’s final line of dialogue, from Noriko (who has survived and is in hospital) to Koichi, “Is your war finally over?”, references the psychological struggles that have defined him, his friends, his country, and, indeed, the film as a whole. What Godzilla, a monster whose metaphorical nature has been a fundamental part of the character since his 1954 inception, represents in this impressive and striking film above all is the collective ordeal of the Japanese wartime and postwar experience. That trauma is both a shared experience and shared uniquely by each individual Japanese; much of the strength of the impressive Godzilla Minus One comes from its recognition of the psychological journeys that both societies and individuals take in overcoming guilt and trauma inflicted by the vagaries of catastrophic war.

WORKS CITED

Angles, Jeffrey, translator. Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again. By Shigeru Kayama, University of Minnesota Press, 2023

Jeremy Brett is a librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, where he is, among other things, the Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection. He has also worked at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region, and the Wisconsin Historical Society. He received his MLS and his MA in History from the University of Maryland – College Park in 1999. His professional interests include science fiction, fan studies, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.

Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities

Media Reviews

Review of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities

Alice Fulmer

Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. Guillermo del Toro. Netflix, October 2022.

In the late 70s-tinged seventh episode of illustrious writer-director and auteur-tastemaker Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, “The Viewing”, we are innocuously introduced to the anthology’s thesis. Upon being asked ‘what was the best song you ever heard?’ by his insidious host Lional Lassiter (Peter Weller), comedian Eric Andre’s blaxploitation-esque, funk troubadour character Randall pensively remarks that, “1969. I’m in Greece and I … fall in with these freaks making psychedelic music. One of them played this song one night. Never been recorded, something they knew. It made me nostalgic for things that never happened”. This is also the perspective we are invited to share as an audience—beholden to del Toro’s series of hauntological, liminal spectacles which are scripted, animated, performed, recorded, and or otherwise “things that never happened”

At the helm Cabinet of Curiosities coming from the same director of Cronos (1992) and Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), it should be no great surprise then to see how or why classical motifs collide with Victorian ghosts, microwaveable hot wings, or deep cuts from the 20th century’s speculative fiction and horror to create an anthology rich with anachronistic gestures. These selections range from H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), Henry Kuttner (1915-58), and Michael Shea (1946-2014), as well as adaptations (or teleplays thereof) from del Toro himself and contemporaries like Panos Cosmatos and Emily Carroll. This anthology series creates a different dialectic of aesthetics and mores while paying homage to many of del Toro’s formative influences. Perhaps it is for the best that he is not looking through rose-tinted glasses to Lovecraft—tempting as it may be for any fan of horror, sci-fi, and related genres. Instead, the show’s relationship to nostalgia is complicated.

For Randall, nostalgia—whose inception in ancient Greek poetry was characterized as Odysseus’s longing for home—appears in contrast to the German fernweh, “far-sickness”, or in more archaic English, “far woe”. For a horror hound audience this is a devastating conclusion because del Toro’s manipulation of nostalgia and its oppositional forces like fernweh is what not only drives the aesthetic overtures of Cabinet of Curiosities, but uses the audiences’ sentimentality against them. This tension is central to the series. His take on the gothic, macabre, and the monstrous is pointedly different from other anthology series that have been quick to cash in on their own self-referential nostalgic tropes. Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story, for one, though pioneering in several different ways including a stellar inclusion of LGBTQ+ talent, is guilty of producing seasons and storylines that cannibalize past ones in the name of early 2010’s tumblr nostalgia for the first three seasons. While Cabinet of Curiosities so far seems to just be a standalone season, its internal and nearly randomized structure precludes anything like its immediate predecessors (or future competitors)—one of the shows’ many strengths.

In terms of nostalgia’s embodiment, there is more represented than just the ‘specter’ that Derrida posited from Marx’s sediment in the opening lines of The Communist Manifesto (1848)– —Cabinet of Curiosities presents visceral alternatives. This is seen plainly in “The Autopsy” as well as “The Murmuring”—literally parasitic in the former and neurodivergent ruminations in the latter. The alien forces entering the miner’s bodies in “The Autopsy” need human bodies to demonstrate their vision of humanity’s future. And as the episode crescendos, their argument about their natural embodiment versus the humans they ‘possess’ is as convincing as it is unsentimental. This is not unlike the motion towards the bodies of the dead as resources in “Graveyard Rats” by Masson. In both instances, the script propels the viewer to sympathize. But from overhead in both episodes initially evoked here (or rats underground, for “Graveyard Rats”), nostalgia strikes back. At the climax of “The Autopsy”, Dr. Winters (F. Murray Abraham) reaches for the scalpel just off the exam table and kills the alien inside Allen (Luke Roberts).

Similarly, from overhead in “The Murmuring”, it is only after Claudette’s (Hannah Galway) apparition is carried off by a classic of (folk) horror, a huge flock of birds, that Nancy (Essie Davis) can confront the pushed back grief of the loss of her only child Ava with her husband, Edgar. The grieving has been subdued by them both—and from the onset of the episode the marriage appears both unromantic and anti-nostalgic. Their internal and external grief’s dam is filled given the release of catharsis through the parallel ghost train that Nancy is witness to over the course of the episode, spanning the events of Claudette’s son being drowned and her subsequent suicide. Her husband, however, is not privy to this. Nonetheless, both episodes end optimistically if but on the precipice of confession—the alien plot will be unfoiled from a tape recorder in Dr. Winter’s lab and Nancy wants to talk to Edgar about the feelings surrounding their daughter’s death—and perhaps revive a ghost of their own lifetime: an emotionally open and vulnerable marriage.

Furthermore, Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities as an anthology series resists easy classification, and the manipulation of nostalgia and fernweh can be argued to operate on an uneasy hauntological fulcrum that even contests the arguments of Fisher. Mark Fisher lamented in his 2012 “What is Hauntology?” that, “The future is always experienced as a haunting: as a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating cultural production. What hauntological music mourns is less the failure of a future to transpire—the future as actuality—than the disappearance of this effective virtuality” (Fisher, 16). These cultural theories on hauntology are useful to highlight the series’ often contradicting and (not but) multivalent takes on sentimentality and temporality. Consider the second episode, “Graveyard Rats” and the sixth, “Dreams in the Witch House”, and their attitudes to the departed. In the former, the cadavers of the mortuary and those already buried in the nearby cemetery (and their valuable belongings) are bargaining tokens for the intrepid graverobber Masson’s (David Hewlett) conflicting Protestant work ethic and theological guilt: how can a graverobber go to Heaven? If this rhetorical question stands in doubly as a set up for a joke, a punchline may roll out as “He gets buried alive”. His rationalization of graverobbing for profit disrupts the sentimentality around burial within the wider Christian tradition, burying any guilt accrued from religious or scrupulous guilt—a haunting which remains unresolved as he is exhumed in the same grave he dug, eaten alive by rats and discovered sometime later by other graverobbers.

Conversely, “Dreams in the Witch House” has a disruption of the dead that is heavily and/or overly sentimental: researcher Gilman’s (Rupert Grint) teleological drive to ghosts, spirits, séances and other antiqued Spiritualist ephemera is endemic of unresolved trauma over his twin sister’s childhood death. His obsession to re-animate her body becomes the de-animation of his own. It is worth noting that this episode is based on a Lovecraft short story originally a part of the Cthulhu Mythos—an embedded narrative whose inclusion would not fit the scope of this series at all because of the Mythos’ own concepts of continuity. So instead, our protagonist is situated in the 1930’s at the end of the Spiritualist movement. This framing is emblematic of the series writ large, and how it deals with the pernicious afterlives of its socio-cultural subjectivities. This contrasts with Fisher’s conceptions of hauntology (Derrida’s notwithstanding), which necessitate the need for a haunting to come within one’s lifetime.

The Spiritualist movement and its aesthetics no doubt ‘haunt’ our understandings of ghosts and the corporeality (or lack thereof) of the dead in media. Tarot cards, deliberate conjuring of the dead, and uncanny salons, galleries and basements are all in the backdrops of several episodes. This hallmark set of aesthetics is not only showcased in del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, but in contemporary adaptations of media which depict the dead made before the peak of Spiritualism circa the latter half of the 19th century. The “Dreams in the Witch House” not only lampoons the decline of Spiritualism (nearly ‘dead’ by the 1930’s), it dispels that conjuration ‘fixes’ the past or that lofty aims to revive the dead are conducive to the human condition of grief. For our cultural moment that is rife with a renaissance in astrology, tarot, and practices this take is refreshing. Cabinet of Curiosities does not deny the existence of ghosts, hauntings, or even aliens—it does affirm though that there are several approaches, materialist or “Spiritualist”, to how nostalgia is processed as an inhibition or disinhibition for characters like Gilman.

*Walter Gilman (Rupert Grint) and Mariana (Tenika Davis) with the tetrapych predicting his death, and the fate of other dead characters. Copyright Netflix, 2022*.

From my scholastic methods used to conduct this review, these three episodes—“Lot 36”, “Graveyard Rats”, and “Pickman’s Model”—did not manipulate sentimentality, nostalgia or fernweh effectively and sparingly used the dark, macabre, hyper temporalities and realms that lies at the heart of del Toro’s work. This is evidenced from the episodes’ near-unison clamor on the locus of the archive—be it a storage unit (“Lot 36”), cemetery underground (“Graveyard Rats” or even an art gallery (“Pickman’s Model”)—these are dangerous places that will eat you alive if given the chance. From a theoretical point of view, Fisherian hauntology may offer some potential answers as to how and why the hauntings are constructed and conceived.

WORKS CITED

Fisher, Mark. “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly, vol. 66, no. 1, 2012, pp. 16–24. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1525/fq.2012.66.1.16.

Alice Fulmer (she/her) is an MA/PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, educator, and poet. She is pursuing a Medieval Studies emphasis, and planning a prospectus on disability and gender in the Canterbury Tales. Her debut collection Faunalia (2023), is available from Ritona Press. Aside from reviews in SFRA Review, other academic publications include an article on Sir Launfal (c. 1400) in UCLA’s Comitatus. In February 2025, an arts & comedy podcast co-hosted by her and graduate students, Cunterbury, will debut on all major podcasting platforms.

Starship Troopers: Extermination

Media Reviews

Review of Starship Troopers: Extermination

Drew Adan

Starship Troopers: Extermination. Offworld Industries, 2024.

Starship Troopers: Extermination is a 2024 first person extraction shooter developed by Canadian studio Offworld Industries. An official entry in the Starship Troopers franchise, the game sees players assume the role of soldiers in the Mobile Infantry battling an insectoid, hostile alien species known as the Arachnids or “Bugs” across a series of planets. While based on Robert A. Heinlein’s 1959 novel, the game is set in the universe of the 1997 Paul Verhoeven film and adopts a similar jingoistic, satirical tone. While offering fleeting moments of fun, frenetic gameplay, Starship Troopers: Extermination largely misses its target as it fails to deliver on the rich world building of its source material or offer a compelling gameplay loop to keep players coming back for more.

As of January 2025, Starship Troopers: Extermination offers two gameplay modes. The first is a brief, single-player campaign across 25 missions that place the player in the boots of an elite special operations squad of the Mobile Infantry. These missions are narrated by the voice of Casper Van Dien who reprised his role as Juan “Johnny” Rico, the protagonist of Verhoeven’s 1997 cult classic sci-fi action film. These missions see the player and three NPC (non-player characters) squadmates traversing bland subterranean and planetary surface environments to complete singular, simplistic objectives such as eliminate specific enemies or hold key areas. There is little to no character development of these squadmates who only offer brief and banal exclamations. Before each mission, a static rendering of General Rico briefs the player on the upcoming mission with monologues that offer little narrative development or meaningful additions to the Starship Troopers cannon. These missions could have been strengthened in both narrative and gameplay if multiple objectives were combined into longer missions. This would provide an experience closer to a proper single-player campaign than an extended tutorial.

The other game mode, and the most compelling experience Starship Troopers: Extermination offers, is a cooperative, 16-player PvE (player versus environment) mission-based extraction shooter. Before the mission, players choose one of six trooper classes, each with their own weapon, equipment, and ability loadouts. So far, the six classes included in the base game are Sniper, Demolisher, Guardian, Engineer, Medic, and Ranger. Each mission starts with players deploying from a dropship and completing various objectives which typically culminate in tower-defense style gameplay as players collaboratively spend mission specific currency to build base fortifications, turrets, and ammo caches. After the base is successfully defended, players must make a hurried rush to the extraction point to complete the mission. This extraction sequence is one of the most engaging parts of the game as persistent enemy corpses litter the battlefield and transform the planet surface into a labyrinthian hellscape of explosions and green Arachnid blood. This leads to some truly cinematic moments as frenetic gameplay combines with visual spectacle and desperate cries from fellow squad members.

Unfortunately, Arachnids are not the only bugs one must battle while playing Starship Troopers: Extermination. Various technical issues have plagued the title through early access and 1.0 release. Performance issues persist on consoles and higher-end PC hardware as swarms of enemies on screen see frame rates plummeting. Hard crashes are frequent and odd textures or visual glitches are rampant. These issues contribute to a sense of Starship Troopers: Extermination being an underdeveloped project attempting to cash in on franchise affiliation. In 2022 players created a mod for Squad (also developed by Offworld Industries) called Squad Troopers. This mod introduced PvE gameplay and Starship Troopers skins for the Squad engine, gameplay, and weapons. It was well received by players, becoming one of the most popular and well-reviewed mods in the Squad community (Steam). It appears that Offworld Industries ran with this concept in their development of Starship Troopers: Extermination.

Starship Troopers: Extermination had the great misfortune of releasing the same year as another wildly popular squad-based, cooperative bug shooter inspired by the Starship Troopers universe. Arrowhead Studio’s Helldivers 2 was a massive and surprise hit for publisher Sony, breaking sales records and overwhelming game servers shortly after its release. In many ways, Helldivers 2 succeeds where Starship Troopers: Extermination fails as it actualizes a compelling game world and supportive community immersed in roleplaying dispensable “divers” who are fighting to spread “managed democracy” across the galaxy. Despite not having the rich lore of a storied franchise to draw on like Starship Troopers or Warhammer 40,000, Helldivers 2 offers players the opportunity to explore various worlds with scattered tidbits of environmental storytelling, and participate in a live service Galactic War moderated by dungeon master “Joel” who controls enemy tactics, in-game events, and the game’s metanarrative. The community has enthusiastically embraced the heavy-handed, tongue-in-cheek satire of Helldivers 2 producing videos, fan art, and other content that mimics the fascistic and jingoistic tone of in-game propaganda.

However, such satirical treatment of fascism, colonialism, and militarism as seen in Starship Troopers: Extermination and Helldivers 2 has created an online discourse around the public’s ability to differentiate satire from genuine endorsement (Rosenblatt). Even the richest man in the world, Elon Musk, was mocked for seemingly missing the satirical message of the Starship Troopers film (Greg). This disheartening lack of media literacy calls into question the efficacy of satire in video games for the purposes of social commentary. The concern is that satirical games may only serve to platform problematic ideologies as some players may relate acritically with the game’s toxic protagonists and themes.

This is further complicated by the unique nature of how satire is presented and interpreted in video games. It appears that satire works differently in video games than other forms of storytelling. Firstly, live-service games like Starship Trooper: Extermination or Helldivers 2 are intended to be played forever. Theylack a traditional narrative arc that offers a didactic resolution to punish the protagonist for their abhorrent behavior. Without the comeuppance of hedonistic, satirical novels and films like Fight Club or American Psycho, games generally lack true moral resolution as players are simply rewarded for their deviant behavior by progressing the game and earning greater abilities, weapons, and in-game cosmetics. Secondly, satire typically requires ridicule by the audience of a character or situation. Given the participatory and immersive nature of video games, the players actually become the intended object of ridicule and may lose the ability to critically view the characters as parodies of themselves. Video games, perhaps more than any other media, see the audience sympathizing with the protagonist whether or not they are the hero. Games don’t always prompt the player to wrestle with the question, “are we the baddies?” (Mitchell and Webb). Successful satire in games must adapt to the idiosyncrasies of the genre. A standout example of this adaptation is The Stanley Parable which cleverly satirizes interactive storytelling as a whole by subverting the conventions of narrator and player choice.

While Starship Troopers: Extermination was largely a commercial and critical flop, it serves to spark the same ideological debates as its original 1959 source material. Themes of militarism, fascism, and moral decline, are just as prevalent across the media landscape now as they were over sixty years ago. However, concerns about declining media literacy and video games’ unique ability to allow the player to inhabit, and sympathize with, the protagonist, call into question the efficacy of satire as a method of social commentary in video games.

WORKS CITED

Squad Troopers, created by xpe and Devlikeapro, 2022, Steam Workshop https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2830905314&searchtext=

Rosenblatt, Kalhan. “A video game has reinvigorated a long-running debate about fascism and satire.” NBC News. 28 Feb. 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/helldivers-2-fascism-satire-debate-rcna140653

Evans, Greg. “Elon Musk roasted after missing ‘painfully obvious’ message from 1990s sci-fi classic.” The Independent. 16 Nov. 2024, https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/films/news/elon-musk-trump-starship-troopers-meme-b2649528.html

Mitchell, David, and Robert Webb. That Mitchell and Webb Look, season 1, episode 1, BBC, 2006.

Drew Adan is an archivist with the M. Louis Salmon Library at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). Before coming to UAH, Drew worked for ten years in the Yale University library system at the Lillian Goldman Law Library and Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. He holds an MLIS from Simmons School of Library and Information Science and a Master’s degree in History from UAH. In 2024 he published a book chapter entitled “Space City, USA: The Theme Park of the South that Failed to Launch” in NASA and the American South and has presented on various archival and history topics at national and international conferences.

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Media Reviews

Review of Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Jeremy Brett

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga. Dir. George Miller. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2024.

With the intensely propulsive Furiosa, George Miller continues to extend his fascination with the narrative power of constructed mythologies and the stories flowing from it that humans use to explain the world around them. Miller’s deliberate temporal and spatial shiftings throughout the Mad Max series have long been (and continue to be) noted as a tactic in telling meaningful human stories that transform history into evolving myth; the series and the individual films that make it up are best analyzed through this lens. It is hard to categorize the films within any kind of traditional series chronology, or even in some ways to judge their worthiness as sequels or prequels in the general sense because they refuse to follow the traditional film series pattern. Miller deliberately occludes and obscures Max and his world’s timeline and history (for example, there is no realistic way in which the Max of Mad Max (1979) can literally be the same man as the one in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), but if viewers consider each story in the series as a legend told about a popular folk hero, then the need for chronology and canonical consistency falls away). In doing so, the films, including Furiosa, are not only movies but anthropological documents that analyze how people develop new rituals, roles, and ways of thinking and being when in crisis. Following a series of voiceovers that hint at the gradual destruction of civilization, the first line of dialogue in Furiosa comes from the History Man (George Shevtsov), a living archive of historical remnants, who asks of us, “As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?” It is a question that each film in the Mad Max series seeks to answer, perhaps none more so directly than Furiosa.

Furiosa’s titular character is the future Imperator Furiosa (Anna Taylor-Joy as an adult, Alyla Browne as a child), and the film chronicles her youth and maturity in the years before her fateful encounter with Max in Fury Road. Her story was briefly sketched out in the latter film: as a child, she had been kidnapped from a paradisical oasis—the Green Place—and grew up under the thumb of the fearsome Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne in Fury Road, Lachy Hulme in Furiosa) and his War Boys in the aquifer-fed fortress of the Citadel. In Furiosa, we see Furiosa’s initial capture by the warlord Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and his biker horde; Dementus tortures and murders Furiosa’s mother Mary and “adopts” her as a replacement for his own long-dead daughter. Following her trade by Dementus to Immortan Joe, Furiosa rises to become one of Joe’s drivers for his War Rig, charged with the paramount duty of transporting gasoline, food, and bullets between Joe’s three power centers. The film follows both her intense desire for revenge against Dementus and her intent to escape the Citadel and return to the Green Place.

“How must we brave [the world’s] cruelties?” As Dementus breezily notes after the repulsion of his early attack on the Citadel, “When things go bonkers, you have to adapt.” When the entire world goes bonkers, falling into half-life, people adapt themselves to new and harsh conditions through reinventing themselves, making themselves into mythic figures and utilizing the power of story to imprint on the world. It’s a recurring theme throughout the Mad Max series, whether it be Lord Humungus (Kjell Nilsson) in The Road Warrior anointing himself as the fair and compassionate leader of the Wasteland, Aunty Entity (Tina Turner) building and leading the bustling community of Bartertown while ritualizing her authority via rites of legal combat in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, or, most explicitly, Immortan Joe declaring himself a god and creating wholesale a cosmological system of duty and reward for a post-life Valhalla. We even see this kind of mythbuilding applied to others—Max himself throughout the series becomes the subject of legends and narratives about a desert wanderer who emerges to save innocent people and returns into self-imposed exile.

In Furiosa, both Furiosa and Dementus make themselves into sites for preserving and interpreting the new history of this new world. Furiosa literally turns her body into geography, marking on her left arm the star map that provides the route to the Green Place. She also designates herself a living oasis in the desert and a secret guardian of life in the midst of death, having hidden on her person a peach seed given to her by Mary (Charlee Fraser) as a sacred duty to plant and watch grow upon her return. By the film’s conclusion, she has also remade herself (literally so, having replaced her left arm with its precious map, with a cybernetic one) into a mythic warrior figure—“the darkest of angels,” the History Man calls her—relentless in her unstoppable rage fueled by grief.

Meanwhile, Dementus creates (and believes) himself as a savior of the people. In his first scene, he is seen kneeling before a motorcycle—about which his History Man is reciting facts as if in a liturgy—and with his beard, head covering, and kindly expression resembles Christ. In multiple instances, he promotes himself as one who will liberate the downtrodden and allow them to share in the bounty he provides and protects—to the lower orders of the Citadel, to a group of his captives, to the rebellious denizens of Gastown, and even to his loyal horde as they prepare for war against Joe. And in their final confrontation, both Dementus and Furiosa understand their roles in acting out new iterations of an ancient but still psychologically necessary story that provides future generations with a mythic cycle of inspiration. The two meet on a featureless, misty, dust flat plain, almost dreamlike in its presentation. To complete her revenge against Dementus for the deaths of both Mary and Furiosa’s lover/fellow Rig driver Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), the rules of storytelling require a suitable recompense. As Dementus says to Furiosa in his last moments on screen, “The question is, do you have it in you to make it epic?” But in the tradition of noncanonical myth, the manner of his death is left unclear and different stories going forward will tell it in different ways. Was he shot? Was he dragged behind Furiosa’s car, much the same way that Jack died? Or was he allowed to live, in a manner grotesque and narratively satisfying that preserves life in the face of decay and death? Which of these stories is true? Are any of them? And really, does it matter—does a straightforward canonical narrative ‘truth’ matter more in the Wasteland than the inspirational potential of narrative multiplicity? Historical mutability and uncertainty as methods of psychological survival are common sense in a sour world of shifting sands, where little makes objective sense.

There is a great deal of scholarship to be mined from Furiosa, including the infusion of gender into post-apocalyptic cinema (a subject that centered many analyses of Fury Road), exploring how human communities exist, break down, and reform in a post-scarcity era, or the disastrous societal consequences of reliance on gasoline as a key element of civilization, to name only a few. Most significantly, however, the character of Furiosa (and, in fact, that of Max) have many things to tell us about the ways in which people engage with each other through the creation of mythic storyworlds that provide meaning, hope, and inspiration. To make the mythmaking element more explicit, Miller and his co-writer Nico Lathouris divide the film into five saga-like chapters—“Books” with titles like ‘Lessons from the Wasteland’ and ‘Beyond Vengeance’—that chronicle both the gradual development of Furiosa’s character, and important steps in the mythic narrative she is creating and that is creating her. Mythic narratives are often set in times of chaos, new creation, or great change; at their core many are concerned with the responses by humans to profoundly transformative events. Furiosa follows in this storytelling tradition by connecting these kinds of mythic-historical moments to the myriad ways that we create social structures and satisfying modes of self-expression—e.g., the series’ use of names like Dementus, Lord Humungus, Master Blaster, the People Eater, the Bullet Farmer, perhaps even Furiosa—that to us in our ordered and secure society might sound immediately outlandish, but that in the Wasteland go unchallenged and that reflect people’s altered ways of thinking and presenting themselves to a post-apocalyptic world. Furiosa, indeed, the entire Mad Max series, embraces the subjective construction of narrative and sets it to the sound of roaring engines and the smell of precious gasoline.

Jeremy Brett is an archivist and librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, Texas A&M University. There he serves as Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection, one of the largest of its kind in the world. Both his M.A. (History) and his M.L.S. (Library Science) were obtained at the University of Maryland, College Park. His professional interests include science fiction, fan studies, superheroines, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.

They Cloned Tyrone

Media Reviews

Review of They Cloned Tyrone

Jess Flarity

They Cloned Tyrone. Dir. Juel Taylor. MACRO Media, 2023.

They Cloned Tyrone is an American Afrofuturist film centered around consumerism, systems of inequality, and governmental distrust. It’s unfortunate that the film released only on Netflix at the same exact time as the Barbenheimer phenomenon in the summer of 2023, denying the movie the same name recognition as Get Out (2017) and Sorry to Bother You (2018), as it belongs firmly into a new genre that has been called Afro-Surrealism (Bakare). Director Juel Taylor frames They Cloned Tyrone in a blend of science fiction, humor, and campy callbacks to the blaxploitation flicks of the late 20th century, rather than relying on the horror elements favored by Jordan Peele or the bizarro Black absurdism of Boots Riley. This results in something like a sleeker version of Undercover Brother (2002), though the satire elements don’t push as far into parody as Black Dynamite (2009). Taylor has also cleverly interspersed easter eggs and callbacks throughout the film (Moore), but despite its unique setting and fantastic acting from all the main characters (including John Boyega as a drug dealer, Jamie Foxx as a pimp, and Teyonah Parris as a prostitute), this review will focus more on the racial themes present throughout its plot, which are crucial for understanding its science fictional premise. To briefly summarize, the movie is about this unlikely trio discovering that their neighborhood is part of a secret government program to keep Black communities subjugated through the use of mind-control drugs—clones of key people in the neighborhood are unaware they are pushing the drug.

This film is the first-time feature of Taylor, who wrote the script with Tony Rettenmaier, and was clearly influenced by his upbringing in Tuskegee, Alabama (Ugwu). Taylor grew up in the same neighborhood where the hideously unethical USPHS Syphilis Study took place, as 600 Black men were experimented on by the U.S. government to study the results of untreated syphilis from 1932-1972 (Tuskegee University). Though Taylor does not directly mention this study in any interviews, the Philip K. Dickian levels of paranoia experienced by the protagonists must have stemmed from all the conspiracy theories he heard growing up, which ranged from college sports scandals to fears about fluoride in toothpaste (Haile). Many science fiction fans will notice that the story has elements of Groundhog Day (1993), The Truman Show (1998) and The X-Files (1993-2018), though Taylor has also stated that he wanted it to feel more like a haywire episode of Scooby Doo, which explains its more comedic elements. Because of this lighter tone, the hard science and thought experiments concerning the moral paradoxes and social impacts of cloning are mostly bypassed, which may be disappointing to those who enjoyed the plots of movies such as Oblivion (2013), Moon (2009), or even The 6^th Day (2000).

Taylor is insteading using cloning as a metaphor for how culture can have a flattening effect when linked with the forces of capitalism. The film makes a powerful statement about how systemic inequality is often interwoven with consumerism in impoverished areas, which is why the movie’s ubiquitous setting of the Glen could be Anywhere, U.S.A. It has long been noted that Black communities are at a much higher risk for being forced into this cycle, as they often exist in “food deserts” where adequate grocery stores and other shopping options are unavailable; this explains why the characters in this movie feel like they’re living in a loop. When the audience discovers that the main antagonist of the film is the original version of the cloned protagonist, whose goal is to keep Black communities subjugated until they can fully assimilate into white culture, Taylor is directly lampooning the rhetoric of Booker T. Washington and other assimilationists. Get Out and Sorry to Bother You have similar moments in the climax of the films, as the message of each movie shifts from being tongue-in-cheek into a direct statement to the viewer about the horrors/dangers of systemic racism for Black people; however, the endings of all three movies provide very different lenses on this issue and are worth exploring further.

Get Out was a breakthrough film for Peele, though the ending was toned down for its wider release. In the original, when the hero escapes after his traumatic ordeal with the sinister white liberals, he hears a siren and a police car arrives on the scene; the police arrest him and he is charged with murder, mirroring the unfairness of the American justice system for Black people. Peele pulled back from this ending, however, as he said it made the audience “feel like we punched everybody in the gut” (Ronquillo)—this fictional situation was too horrible for the character to face after everything he had endured, despite it mirroring the reality of Black people in the real world. Peele’s choice to go with the “happy” ending would prove to be the commercially correct one, as it resonated with audiences and secured his Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. This is interesting, as it could be argued that the choice to turn into optimism is actually a pro-assimilationist stance that bows to the pressures of the moviegoing market (or to Hollywood), and this decision may have influenced Peele to critique the film industry (at least in California) in his most recent movie, Nope (2022).

In contrast, Sorry to Bother You is much more focused on how capitalism, rather than class, intersects with race, as the climax involves a completely bonkers sequence of events where the audience discovers that a diabolical CEO is using a cocaine-like substance to transform Black people into half-human horse hybrids. In one of the most genuinely shocking scenes I’ve seen in a long time, the movie shifts from absurd realism to outlandish science fiction as the hero stumbles across a number of “Equisapiens” locked away in the company’s back rooms. The last scenes of the film involve the horse people escaping and storming the CEO’s mansion, and They Cloned Tyrone takes a similar route for its conclusion: the “rising up” solution goes back to communities using protests and social unrest as the only way of changing unfair capitalist or racist structures. In They Cloned Tyrone’s final scenes, we find out that a clone is watching a version of himself escape from the government’s underground bunker on a news broadcast, and I feel this is a more thought-provoking ending than the other films because it doesn’t negotiate with capitalist forces or state that overthrowing them is the simple solution.

Instead, it asks an important question: How do our choices as consumers reinforce cultural and ethnic stereotypes, and in what ways are we all just copy/pasted versions of ourselves, consumer cogs grinding away in the American capitalism machine?

REFERENCES

Bakare, Lanre. “From Beyoncé to Sorry to Bother You: the new age of Afro-surrealism.” The Guardian. Dec. 6, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2018/dec/06/afro-surrealism-black-artists-racist-society.

Haile, Heaven. “They Cloned Tyrone Director Jule Taylor on His Favorite Conspiracies and Winning Over Erykah Badu.” GQ. Aug. 28, 2023. https://www.gq.com/story/they-cloned-tyrone-juel-taylor-erykah-badu-interview.

Moore, Lashaunta. “‘They Cloned Tyrone’ Was a Masterclass On Social Issues, But I Bet These 19 Things Went Over Your Head.” Buzzfeed.com. Aug. 1, 2023. https://www.buzzfeed.com/lashauntamoore/19-things-that-went-over-your-head-in-they-cloned-tyrone.

Jess Flarity teaches English and other classes at the Lake Washington Institute of Technology and Renton Technical college. He has a PhD in Literature from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA from Stonecoast.

3 Body Problem (TV)

Media Reviews

Review of 3 Body Problem

Abhinav Anand

3 Body Problem. Dir. David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, Alexander Woo. Netflix, 2024.

Based on the Chinese author Cixin Liu’s 2008 novel of the same name (originally published in 2006 in serialized form), which won the prestigious Hugo award, 3 Body Problem is part quest narrative, part science fiction, and part detective fiction. The series is primarily set in China and the United Kingdom. It opens with the depiction of the cultural revolution in 1966 China, specifically focusing on Tsinghua University. The series straddles between present-day Britain and China during the 1970s. In modern-day Britain, a group of scientists witness several mind-rattling phenomena that the existing laws of science fail to explain. Simultaneously, as a further complication, many world-renowned scientists commit suicide, a situation which not only jeopardizes the scientific community but also poses a challenge to science as a knowledge system.

The adaptation stages the struggles of these protagonists, who are mostly scientists, vying to resolve the “3 body problem” while simultaneously striving to understand the almost supernatural occurring, which goes back to a contact established with an alien species, who now plans an attack that can wipe off humanity from the face of the earth. Ironically, the key to the former problem i.e., the “3 body problem” lies in the scientific advancement that humans have made—and perhaps will make in the future. The earth, unlike this other alien planet, is a stable unit. Still, the reason for the possible annihilation of the human species is the very same scientific advancement which facilitated contact with the alien species, who now pose a threat to humanity.

The “problem” posed in the title is the presence of three suns in an alternate solar system, which alters the climatic conditions in a way that makes survival impossible for a sustained period. The connection between this system and Earth was established by one of the Chinese scientists who lost her father to the cultural revolution and started firmly believing in the need for an external intervention to save human beings from themselves. This alien intervention, she believed, would also counter the cynicism of the governments across the world who undertook various projects under the pretense of progress and development. However, establishing a connection with this technologically advanced but highly unstable system comes at its own risk: the ultimate risk being wiping out humankind.

3 Body Problem employs various tropes and themes associated with the traditional definitions of science fiction as a genre. However, the first scene establishes that science cannot provide all the explanations, for instance, why the protagonist’s father, who himself was a scientist, was brutally murdered by young revolutionary students while being cheered on by a group of frenzied crowds. The scene distinguishes between what is scientific and everything else that can be done under the guise of science. This also invokes the idea of “revolutionary” and “counter-revolutionary” science, which points to the politics that science is implicated in, showing that science no longer remains an innocent quest for “truth” but becomes a tool to reaffirm one’s version of truth. When the revolutionary students ask their professor about science’s verdict on the existence of God, he says, “it does not deny it”. The revolutionaries take it as the acceptance of god’s existence by science/scientists and end up killing that science/scientist, while his wife, who is also a scientist and incidentally is on the same stage, is left alive.

The scene sets the tone for the most crucial aspect that is focalised throughout the series: the constant questioning of the relationship between science and politics and understanding science’s politics, which is both dynamic and contextual. Unlike the conventional trope of “good scientist versus bad scientist” often used in science fiction, the first scene underscores the idea that scientists are political beings and they can either be anti-establishment or pro-establishment. Science has been shown as a contested territory that is enmeshed in power relations. The series captures Lewontin’s idea of scientists being “social beings” and, subsequently, science being a “supremely social institution.”

For instance, the social aspect of science comes to the fore when one of the characters, who is in direct touch with the alien species, builds a ship akin to Noah’s ark, highlighting its resemblance to Christian mythology. The man also treats these alien creatures as God—addressing them as my Lord and himself as their servant. The advanced science of the alien species makes them god-like figures who get to decide the fate of humanity and pick and choose the ones to be saved and the ones to be damned. The turn comes when the species realizes that humans are capable of lying and deception and decides to annihilate the entire species because of it. Thus, science is shown to be deeply intertwined with the social, religious, and humane aspects of the world.

In order to combat this situation, the three people are selected by the United Nations, two military personnel and one scientist. This reiterates the connection between politics and science—where international organizations take over and assume complete authority to make decisions about the entire humanity. The military personnel and scientist are brought together on several other occasions where violence is justified in the name of saving the entire species. However, ironically, the unrest and violence among humans caused by the “bug” message, where every screen in the world is made to display the cryptic message, “You are bugs” by the alien species, highlights the hollowness of human society that just needs a nudge to disintegrate. This also shows that an alien invasion isn’t necessary for the wiping off of the human race, who are very much capable of self-annihilation.

The series’ emphasis on the fragility of human existence, despite excelling in the field of science and technology, gains renewed significance in the light of wars erupting across the globe. Despite being a relatively stabler system without a planetary crisis like 3 Body Problem,the unrest and violence that surrounds human beings make us question whether we ourselves consider some humans amongst us as “bugs” that can be terminated and wiped off the face of the earth. 3 Body Problem does what the New-Wave of the 1960s and 70s promised, where the focus was on mapping the effect of emerging science and technology on human beings (Stableford) while adhering to accurate scientific descriptions. According to Judith Merril, a key theorist of New Wave SF, science fiction is “required to be about things that happened to people, rather than just to have people in them.”

The series focuses on characters and shows their development, be it their moral, psychological, or philosophical development, which itself is enmeshed in the science of the times. Thus, it uses the embedded nature of science to carve characters whose lives are enmeshed with their times, which in turn is enmeshed in the science of that time. The series depicts scientists as social beings with emotional vulnerabilities, philosophical skepticism, political leanings, and, most importantly, human flaws. This results in a piece of science fiction where the quest includes understanding both the outside world and the inner workings of the human mind and how science permeates both the inner and outer worlds, as an epistemology and as a social institution of knowledge respectively.

REFERENCES

Lewontin, Richard C. Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA. CBC Massey Lectures Series, 1990.

Merril, Judith. “Judith Merril’s definition of SF (Science Fiction)”. SF: The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy. Gnome Press, 1959. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/judith-merrils-definition-of-sf-science-fiction

Stableford, Brain. “Science fiction before the genre.” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction edited by Farah Mendlesohn and Edward James. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Abhinav Anand is a Ph.D. candidate at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. His Ph.D. research analyses the relationship between science and social justice in contemporary Indian English fiction. He has worked as a Research Assistant for the GOTHELAI project on gender mainstreaming in Higher Education. He is the recipient of the 2020 Sahapedia-UNESCO Fellowship, where he worked on the intersection of gender and caste in Bihar’s “Naach” folk theatre tradition. He is interested in the areas of Science Fiction Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Indian Literature, Feminist theory and activism, and critical theory.

Doctor Who, season 14

Media Reviews

Review of Doctor Who, season 14

Neil James Hogan

Davies, Russell T. Doctor Who. TV Series, BBC/Bad Wolf Productions/Disney+, 2024.

Doctor Who, the longest-running science fiction television series in the world, has continually reinvented itself since its debut in 1963. The latest rejuvenation, under the aegis of Disney+, introduces Rwandan-Scottish actor Ncuti Gatwa as the Fifteenth Doctor, accompanied by Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday. This new series, characterized by its innovative blend of magic realism and traditional science fiction elements, marks a significant shift. Russell T. Davies, returning as showrunner, has emphasized his intent to break new ground (Bhuvad 2022), casting Gatwa to bring a fresh emotional depth to the character.

While Doctor Who is not averse to magic realism, having used it in several stories in the classic (1963-1989) and new series (2005-), this was sporadic, usually as part of a deux ex machina narrative enabling the Doctor to get out of an impossible situation. In this series it is used in almost every episode, appearing first in the 2023 Christmas special The Church on Ruby Road. Released earlier than the rest of the series, the story features goblins, evoking European fairy tales, yet explained through characteristic pseudoscientific rhetoric with “the language of rope” and a goblin ship that surfs “the waves of time”. This sets a precedent for the supernatural themes that follow. Also, the Doctor and Ruby engage in a musical number with the goblins, a first for the series, signaling a new direction under Davies’ vision.

Featuring a space station baby production factory run by toddlers, the official first episode Space Babies reflects an absurd yet poignant commentary on innocence and technological exploitation. The parallels with The End of the World (2005) and The Beast Below (2010) are clear, as both episodes place the new companion in a futuristic, perilous setting with an underlying problem. This episode emphasizes the theme of uniqueness and survival, also drawing emotional responses from the Doctor on being the last of his kind. The inclusion of a bogeyman and the threat of an exploding ship inject classic Doctor Who peril, blending it with the new series’ emotional and whimsical tone.

The Maestro, a god from another reality who consumes music, played by Jinx Monsoon, introduces a mythological dimension to the series in The Devil’s Chord. This fun, bombastic romp, with Monsoon eating the scenery at every opportunity, and featuring The Beatles, explores the nature of artistic inspiration and its exploitation, connecting to broader philosophical debates about creativity and its commodification. The narrative’s reliance on mythological allusions, particularly Greek and Egyptian pantheons, enriches the intellectual tapestry of the series, inviting comparisons to ancient myths and their modern reinterpretations. This story also parallels The Pyramids of Mars (1975) with a reimagining of a scene from that classic episode to remind us why the Doctor tries to keep the relative timeline on track—with a visit to a destroyed alternate-future London. The episode’s climax, featuring a musical number in the rain, underscores Davies’ intent to infuse the series with unprecedented elements, blending musical theater with science fiction.

Boom confines the Doctor to a landmine, forcing him to confront his vulnerability while chaos ensues around him. The writer, Steven Moffatt, expressed the importance of disrupting the Doctor’s characteristic and expected behavior, saying, “It would take so much away from him – he can’t run about, he can’t bamboozle people, and he literally can’t move” (BBC Media 2024) . This episode challenges the traditional dynamic hero role of the Doctor, emphasizing his reliance on companions and the importance of collective action. This episode also explores the moral and ethical implications of power and control, echoing themes found in Marxist critiques of capitalism, and biblical allegories of human frailty and redemption. Interestingly, with Doctor Who having a penchant for unsafe space career stories since the 1980s (Hogan and Jürgens 2024), this is another story in that long running theme with, in this case, humans continuing to fight wars far into the future. On the special effects side, the use of ‘volume’ screens to create realistic environments marks a technological advancement, moving Doctor Who beyond its reliance on greenscreen (Johnston 2024), and showcases the influence of Disney’s production capabilities and budget.

73 Yards delves into horror and Welsh folklore, with the Doctor vanishing after stepping on a fairy circle, leaving Ruby to face a haunting figure and an alternate timeline that continues into her 80s. The episode’s unexplained supernatural occurrences challenge Doctor Who’s historical emphasis on rationalism, turning towards a more surreal, David Lynch-esque narrative style. An especially poignant scene in this children’s show carefully alludes to rape, and the fear of speaking out against someone powerful, in a way that only adults would understand. This episode parallels Turn Left (2008), exploring alternate realities and the consequences of small actions. The portrayal of Ruby’s life and aging, and her encounter with a malevolent politician, adds layers of social commentary, particularly regarding the exploitation and sacrifice of individuals within power structures.

Dot and Bubble critiques social media, privilege, echo chambers, and systemic racism, featuring genetically engineered creatures and a digitally dependent society. This episode mirrors contemporary anxieties about technology’s impact on human relationships and societal structures, drawing comparisons with works like Black Mirror. The portrayal of AI-designed creatures raises ethical questions about artificial intelligence, aligning with current debates in science fiction literature and media. The Doctor’s encounter with racism in this episode provides a powerful commentary on discrimination, leveraging Gatwa’s casting to explore themes previously untouched in the series. A stimulating classroom debate could be on which side the Doctor should be: the “human” white supremacists who plan to invade and colonize the rest of the planet, rejecting everyone that is not like them, or the A.I.’s “alien” slug creatures, solely designed to eat them alphabetically for their crimes.

Rogue takes the Doctor and Ruby to a dance party in 1813, encountering shapeshifters and a Harknessian bounty hunter, Rogue (Jonathan Groff). The episode’s meta-textual references to Bridgerton and the exploration of identity and transformation reflect contemporary discussions on performative identity and the fluidity of self. While there had previously been a potential for a romance between the female 13th Doctor and her companion Yaz (see Condon 2023), Rogue is the first time to see strong romantic chemistry between the Doctor and another character since the 11th Doctor’s adventures with his wife River Song. The historic setting and the depiction of a same-sex kiss between the Doctor and Rogue address LGBTQIA+ representation, continuing Doctor Who’s tradition of inclusive storytelling. The episode’s playful and dramatic elements highlight the series’ ability to blend historical fiction with science fiction narratives.

The Legend of Ruby Sunday sees the return of Sutekh, last seen imprisoned in the time vortex by the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) in Pyramids of Mars (1975), drawing on Egyptian mythology and the show’s own history with the character. The episode’s focus on family—Ruby’s search for her birth mother, the Doctor’s loneliness, the reappearance of previous companion Melanie Bush (Bonnie Langford), and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart (Jemma Redgrave)’s describing memories of her father (Brigadier Gordon Allister Lethbridge-Stewart)—provides emotional depth and continuity with past series. The use of non-diegetic music from previous episodes as red herrings during a dramatic reveal showcases the series’ intricate narrative weaving and its respect for long-term fans. The incorporation of magic realism and supernatural elements throughout the episode exemplifies the series’ thematic boldness and narrative innovation, while also emphasizing for concerned long-term fans that this element has always been there.

Empire of Death focuses on Sutekh’s destruction of the universe. This episode employs apocalyptic imagery and explores themes of death and rebirth, aligning with classic science fiction tropes. The Doctor’s use of a ‘remembered’ TARDIS and quantum mechanics to reverse the destruction highlights the show’s creative approach to resolving seemingly insurmountable crises. Ruby’s emotional reunion with her birth mother adds a poignant human element to the grandiose narrative, emphasizing themes of family and identity. The episode’s cinematic quality and detailed production design reflect the increased budget and technical advancements brought by Disney’s involvement, and its release to cinemas in the UK at the time, reflects Davies’ ongoing plan for Doctor Who to be available through several kinds of media outlets.

This series features a heightened level of meta-commentary, meta-textuality and self-awareness which reflects the increasingly popular use of self-critical commentary in amateur performative meta-narrative role-playing videos on social media. Examples include: in The Devil’s Chord, when Ruby is dragged away by a physical manifestation of music, the Doctor says, “I thought it was non-diegetic”, a laugh-out-loud moment for anyone who has studied film, but also a line in-universe that emphasizes the higher-dimensionality of the Doctor; character Kate Lethbridge-Stewart lamenting, in the alternate timeline of 73 Yards, that “Things seem to have been getting more supernatural of late”, foreshadowing more science-less imaginings to come; the shocked Bridgerton-esq dancers at an event that could double for a science fiction convention cosplay party commenting about the “scandal” of two men together, an acknowledgement that various forums will fill with complaints about a white man and a black man kissing, and the character Carla Sunday blurting “It’s the Beast” when first hearing the voice of Sutekh, a character voiced by Gabriel Woolf, not only reprising his voice-acting role as Sutekh from 1975, but also returning to the series after voicing The Beast in The Satan Pit (2006).

Non-diegetic music was used to great effect in misleading fans into guessing incorrectly who the ultimate villain reveal would be, with signature music from The Curse of Fenric (1989) and The Sound of Drums (2007) suggesting villainous characters the Haemovores and The Master, respectively. Davies also returned to his signature use of extensive transmedia storytelling (see BBC Studios 2024), with the marketing of The Whoniverse (see BBC Media 2023), building on the public’s acceptance of other franchise universes. This included the prologue-like series Tales of the TARDIS (see Mellor 2023), filmed after the new series was completed but broadcast before it, introducing various re-edited and rescored classic Doctor Who stories relevant to the future series. Davies also organized regular posts to the Doctor Who YouTube channel, his Instagram account, and other social media outlets of excerpts, interviews, podcasts, and behind-the-scenes clips. Many of the cast and crew previously involved with classic and/or new Doctor Who were quick to supply mutual likes and hearts to any related post, and some, like Katy Manning, who played Jo Grant in the series in 1971, reviewed every episode in reels on Instagram.

Doctor Who has always been deeply rooted in the history of science fiction, drawing inspiration from the genre’s classic tropes and themes. The BBC-Disney+ first series continues this tradition while incorporating fresh elements that resonate with contemporary audiences. Unlike many other arc-focused TV and streaming series where there is a single story stretched across six or more episodes, Doctor Who has retained its encapsulated episode format, allowing for nine distinct multilayered and complex storylines, with several “B” stories culminating dramatically in the final episode. While there has been an increase in supernatural elements, these follow the general idea of magic realism in that they are a normal part of the Doctor Who universe, rather than something alien to it, occasionally explained with science-adjacent rhetoric, yet still acceptable within the canon of the show. This change is ideal for a series that continually renews itself, tapping into the zeitgeist of the public’s wish for more fantasy-oriented shows like Game of Thrones, yet still written within the bounds of a complex, multilayered children’s series that can also appeal to adults, proving its ongoing relevance to science fiction fans and scholars alike.

REFERENCES

BBC Media. “Doctor Who: Welcome to the Whoniverse Where Every Doctor, Every Companion and Hundreds of Terrifying Monsters Live.” BBC News, BBC, 30 Oct. 2023, bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/2023/doctor-who-the-whoniverse-tales-of-the-tardis/. Accessed 20 Sept. 2024.

BBC Media. “Doctor Who’s Steven Moffat on Returning with Boom and Putting the Doctor ‘on a Knife’s Edge.’” BBC News, BBC, 13 May 2024, www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/doctor-who-boom-steven-moffat. Accessed 20 Sept. 2024.

BBC Studios. “BBC Studios Announce Doom’s Day, a Brand-New Multiplatform Story to Celebrate Doctor Who’s 60th Anniversary Year.” BBC Studios, BBC, 20 Mar. 2023, bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/bbcstudios/2023/bbc-studios-announce-dooms-day-brand-new-multi-platform-story-to-celebrate-doctor-whos-60th-anniversary-year. Accessed 20 Sept. 2024.

Bhuvad, Ariba. “Russell T Davies Teases Doctor Who Season 14: “This Is Strange and New.”” Winter Is Coming, Winter is Coming, 17 Feb. 2022, winteriscoming.net/2022/02/17/russell-t-davies-writing-doctor-who-season-14-strange-new/. Accessed 19 Sept. 2024.

Condon, Ali. “Showrunner Reveals Why Doctor Who and Yaz Never Kissed: “It Was More Heartbreaking.”” PinkNews | Latest Lesbian, Gay, Bi and Trans News | LGBTQ+ News, PinkNews | Latest lesbian, gay, bi and trans news | LGBTQ+ news, 18 Sept. 2023, thepinknews.com/2023/09/18/doctor-who-yaz-never-kissed/. Accessed 19 Sept. 2024.

Hogan, Neil James and Jürgens, Anna-Sophie. “Work in Space: The Changing Image of Space Careers in the TV Series Doctor Who.” Southern Space Studies, 1 Jan. 2024, pp. 19–43, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51425-8_2.

‌Johnston, Dais. “An Infamously Cheap Sci-Fi Show Just Produced Better Special Effects than Star Wars.” Inverse, 21 May 2024, inverse.com/entertainment/doctor-who-the-volume-special-effects. Accessed 20 Sept. 2024.

Mellor, Louisa. “Doctor Who Anniversary: What Actually Is Tales of the TARDIS?” Den of Geek, 31 Oct. 2023, denofgeek.com/tv/doctor-who-anniversary-what-is-tales-of-the-tardis/. Accessed 20 Sept. 2024.

Neil James Hogan is a researcher and sessional digital humanities lecturer with the Australian National University. His PhD project includes analyzing science fiction stories in early 20^th century Australian newspapers. In his spare time, he is editor and publisher of the space fiction semiprozine Alien Dimensions, and writes the space fiction series Stellar Flash. Check out his Vintage Science Fiction podcast (Vintage SciFi Guy) his space fiction stories on Amazon (Neil A. Hogan), and his research blog (NeilHogan.com). He resides in Melbourne, Australia, and enjoys exploring the universe via his Quest 3.

Poor Things

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 54, no. 3

Media Reviews