Green Hair, Still Don’t Care

Thanks to the Comic Book Code of 1954, which eviscerated comics for a generation in the U.S., comic books when I was a kid really were for kids. Even the publisher Classics Illustrated intended its comics to make classic novels accessible to kids and edited the material accordingly. It should be no surprise, then, that by the time the Code was effectively scrapped I (along with most others of my generation) had set aside comic books except for the occasional counterculture novelty by Robert Crumb and his ilk. When mainstream comics again came to be commonly aimed at a largely (or primarily) adult readership, as many were by the 1980s, I was out of the habit of buying them. I didn’t restart until after 2000, and only then as a deliberate decision to dip a toe in these particular waters of popular culture in order to be able to talk about them a little. It was a good moment to restart, because some very remarkable work was being done by first-rate authors including Mark Millar, Neil Gaiman, and Bryan Lee O'Malley.

Canadian author Bryan Lee O'Malley is best known (and critically well-regarded) for his off-beat 6-volume Scott Pilgrim comics.  (The 2010 movie adaptation Scott Pilgrim vs. the World deserved a better box office than it got, by the way.) His 2014 graphic novel Seconds is also worth a read; it warns us that second chances have consequences of their own. O'Malley’s current work in progress is the series Snotgirl. Volume 3 arrived in my mail a few days ago.

In Snotgirl Volume 1 Green Hair Don’t Care (2017), Lottie Person is a 25-y.o. Instagram fashion blogger in California with enough followers to make a living at it and to be modestly famous in a modern social-media way. Her always-fabulous online persona is very different from her allergy-ridden real self. Lottie impersonates her online persona in public since she knows full well that in our world of cell phones any false step will end up online, too. She and her circle of frenemies all adopt styles tailored for social media presentation. Lottie gives her frenemies nicknames (though she doesn’t use them to their faces) such as Cutegirl and Normgirl. Lottie’s behavior is often reprehensible, yet humanly understandable enough that the reader doesn’t dislike her for it. The nickname “Snotgirl” is given to Lottie (passive aggressively and to her face) by Caroline, a genuinely cool girl (Lottie’s nickname for her: Coolgirl) whom Lottie is desperate to befriend. Lottie, however, is having some side effects from her allergy medication, and she can’t quite remember if she physically attacked Caroline in a bar bathroom. There is additional drama with Lottie’s ex-boyfriend. O’Malley lets his characters wonder what is real and what is fake – and if what is real counts as real if not captured by cell phone.

Volume 2 California Screaming advances the various plots and lets us know there is more to Caroline than meets the eye. The newly released Volume 3 Is This Real Life? deepens the mystery around Caroline: especially when a male friend of Lottie discovers a photo of Caroline who somehow looks the same in an old 1999 (!) magazine he finds in the library. Normgirl is getting married in the O.C. and Lottie will be there. In the lead-up to the wedding there is a murder at a bachelor party, continued ambiguity all around in sexual orientation, and a surprise appearance of Caroline.

A comic book about a fashion blogger requires creative artwork, of course, and illustrator Leslie Hung handles the job well in all three volumes.

I am about as far from the target demographic of this comic as can be imagined. (Presumably it is targeted at younger Millennials like the characters in it.) But it is a hallmark of any truly good book, comic, or script that it can be appreciated on multiple levels by multiple audiences. (Disney movies succeed, for example, when parents like them too.) This is not just another superhero fantasy like so many popular comics out there, but a thoughtful and engaging comic firmly planted in the present. I recommend giving it a try.

Thumbs Up.

Rick Springfield – Comic Book Heroes

Home Fronts

I remember back in 1994 when my dad had one of those “where have the years gone?” moments. “I can’t believe it’s been 50 years!” he said. He was referring to an upcoming anniversary of the Normandy invasion; he had been on a Liberty ship supporting the Omaha landing. Today, I can’t believe it’s been 50 years since I was a high school senior who had just received an acceptance letter from George Washington University, which meant a 2-S deferment from military service. Yes, I know: that is scarcely anything comparable or even commendable. (It was not actually true in a general way that those who could afford to go to college didn’t go to war back then. They just went four years later. Someone who got a deferment in 1966 was eligible for the draft in 1970. In my case, however, the timing was indeed such that the draft ended before my college graduation.) It says something about that era that among the large chunk of the generation that was draft-age but for whatever reason didn’t serve, a frequent topic of conversation was (and still is) how they avoided it. Arlo Guthrie’s song isn’t so very far over the top.

2,700,000 Americans, however, served on active duty in Vietnam between 1964 and the end of direct US participation in the war in 1973. The 2,640,000 who returned were only 10% of their generation. They knew the other 90% simply couldn’t relate, so most chose not to talk about it. So, largely, did Hollywood and publishing houses. Compared to flood of books and movies that accompanied and immediately followed the two world wars and Korea, Vietnam for several years produced a mere trickle. Other US wars – most of them in fact – starting with the War of 1812 have been divisive and controversial. It helps, however, when you win. Feelings of guilt among those who stayed at home and betrayal among those who didn’t dissuaded many authors and screenwriters in the 1960s and early 1970s from touching Vietnam. This began to change in the late 1970s, though the themes tended to be quite dark as in The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now. It accordingly is no surprise that my Memorial Day picks for book and movie are dark as well. Both deal more with the aftereffects of the war than the war itself.

Cover by Jack Ketchum

Multiple Bram Stoker Award winner Jack Ketchum (aka Dallas Mayr 1946-2018) is the author of some of the most truly disturbing horror fiction to have been written in the past half century. He writes well: graphically but well. Cover is his third novel and the most mainstream of any before or after. In the forward Ketchum tells us the book was prompted by a television interview with a Viet vet who chose to live in the woods because he didn’t trust himself around people, including his own family. [It should be noted that Vietnam veterans, like other veterans, have lower rates of criminality and violence than the general population; PTSD, where it exists, is more often directed inward than outward.] Ketchum mined the experiences of his veteran friends for his flashback details.

Veteran Lee Moravian has isolated himself in the forest since his grip on reality is none-too-secure. He frequently flashes back to the war. He supports himself by growing first-rate marijuana, which he sells wholesale to another (far more grounded) vet named McCann with a weekend cabin at the edge of the woods. McCann tells him that thieves have raided other marijuana patches in the region and to be on guard. The warning amps up Lee’s paranoia. Meantime a bestselling author from Los Angeles named Kelsey, though struggling with his current book, has decided to spend a weekend camping and hunting with several friends including his wife Caroline and mistress Michelle. (Yes, they’re all friendly.) When they stumble on one of Lee’s plants and steal some leaves and buds, Lee misidentifies them as a serious threat. Lee disables their vehicles and sets VC-style traps. Armed primarily with a crossbow he hunts them as they desperately try to escape and fight back. Though the book is primarily a thriller, the characters are not cardboard cutouts, but have complexity to them. All (even Lee) are sympathetic yet none is entirely excusable either.

Thumbs Up. Not my favorite Ketchum novel, but Thumbs Up.

Who’ll Stop the Rain? (1978)

In 1978 the Washington Post reviewer called this “a knockout adventure destined to become a classic.” He was wrong. And right. This movie flopped at the box office and hasn’t done much better on video. Yet it is a worthwhile film based on the novel Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone.

It starts off in Saigon during the war where war correspondent John Converse (Michael Moriarty) arranges with his friend and former Marine Ray Hicks (Nick Nolte), currently a merchant sailor, to smuggle heroin into the United States. Converse is a vacillating intellectual without any real standards but with an inclination to make excuses for himself. Hicks, on the other hand, has taken Nietzsche to heart. He doesn’t give a damn anymore about other people’s standards – which sent him to places like Saigon – but he is rock solid on his own. So, the law doesn’t matter to Hicks, but his own ethos of, for example, keeping faith with a buddy does matter to him – even when the buddy doesn’t deserve it as, as Converse definitely does not. Ultimately, it’s not about Converse but about what has meaning to Hicks. Hicks makes the connection in San Francisco according to instructions with Converse’s wife Marge (Tuesday Weld). Marge, it turns out, knew nothing about the deal. She also has a drug addiction of her own. Things get messy and violent when it turns out they all have been set up by a corrupt federal drug agent and his goons. A flight to New Mexico follows.

In this thoughtful but suspenseful script it is not at all clear whether the war has corroded morals and morale in ways that inform the events, or whether corroded morals were responsible for the war being the mess that it was. Either way, the war looms in the background, and the only character with…well…character is Hicks, albeit not in a conventional way. Great acting by Moriarty, Nolte, and Weld.

Solid Thumbs Up.

…and a remembrance to the real life vets who came back (mostly without fanfare or drama) and those who didn’t.

 Trailer: Who’ll Stop the Rain?

Infernal Music

It is never a big surprise when a member of one generation doesn’t care much for music popular with the next – or, in my case, the one after the next. (I actually liked a lot of GenX material.) What is surprising, however, is how many young people agree that popular music has gotten worse. There are countless magazine/e-zine articles on the subject and even scientific studies trying to quantify the badness. (See Why is Modern Music so Awful?) None of that slows down the consumption of it.

In many ways, this assessment is unfair as such broad judgments usually are. De gustibus, and all that. Current day popular recording artists must be speaking to their audience on some level or they wouldn’t be dominating the charts. I just don’t happen to be that audience. Besides, there are contemporary artists and bands that do I like, many of them playing basic blues-based rock (Dorothy, the Black Keys, Samantha Fish, et al.). These do quite well with a sizable (overwhelmingly non-gray-haired) niche audience. It’s just not sizable enough to lift these bands to the top ten chart. Pop and rap rule. (No unabashed rock band has charted a top ten single in a decade.) Nonetheless, the pop music genre – heavy on glitz and stagecraft but otherwise lightweight – that became so dominant at and since the turn of the millennium simply doesn’t appeal much to me, and not just because of its repetitive rhythms. It seems to lack heart. Despite all the bikini clad twerking going on in so many of the acts, it even lacks heat. 1940s big band singers attired in tuxedos and evening gowns were fundamentally far more sensual.

One act (with both heart and heat) that did appeal to me in the first decade of the 21^st century was the band Devil Doll fronted by Colleen Duffy. Her music is very hard to categorize: part rockabilly-punk, part torch songs, part blues, and part something else. (Like the bands mentioned above, Devil Doll won a sizable niche audience but no more than that – its biggest exposure was probably on the soundtrack of a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode.) Devil Doll turned out two remarkable albums in this century’s first decade, both of which I seriously recommend: Queen of Pain (the album to have if you get only one) in 2002 and The Return of Eve in 2007. (The latter is now hard to find on CD but is easy to stream.) Regrettably, Colleen Duffy soon afterward faced a batch of debilitating health problems (lupus among them) and her performing career screeched to a halt. She always had a return in mind, however, and in May 2020, she at last is back with a third Devil Doll album, Lover and a Fighter. She has lost none of her sultriness, but there is a discernible difference. She sounds less raw, more soulful. A brush with mortality is likely to inspire that, especially when paired with the normal passage of years. (Colleen doesn’t advertise her age, but she had a radio show in the early 1990s before forming her band… so, well, math.)

Several years back I wrote this preface to comments about a self-reflective album (Unvarnished) released by then 55-y.o rocker Joan Jett: “Usually the transition to an integrated sense of mortality occurs in middle age sometime. The change often is audible in the recordings of musicians. When young artists write or sing about death, they typically do so playfully (Jim Morrison) or indulgently (Jagger/Richards). In middle age the references become retrospective and thoughtful, not playful. Frank Sinatra released the album September of My Years (a blatant title if there ever was one) in 1965, the year he turned 50. Among the tracks on the album were “How Old Am I,” “Last Night When We Were Young,” and “It Was a Very Good Year.” In 1969 at age 49, Peggy Lee had her last big hit with "Is That All There Is?" At age 56, Bob Dylan, though perpetually irked at being called ‘the voice of a generation,’ voiced that generation’s aging pains with the album Time Out of Mind.”

The same preface applies to Lover and a Fighter. There is wistfulness in every track, whether the rollicking eponymous “Lover and a Fighter,” the lyrical “One Night Stand,” or the cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man.” Though Colleen’s health challenges are not behind her, she has managed to give us another solid album. If the reader is looking for something different from the standard pop output, all three albums are worth a listen.

The most wistful track on a wistful album

Devil Doll – To All Our Friends

Nothing Left to the Pagination

Despite the evidence of the past few blog posts, not all spare time in my household during the ongoing quarantine is spent binge-watching old TV shows. Aside from property maintenance (including the first lawn cut of the season) and other such practical activities, there is a bit of reading going on as well. (I even cracked open an old 8^th grade Latin text, mirabile dictu; it’s probably time to worry when I revisit high school algebra.) Comments on five book selections follow. They are all old-fashioned paper-and-ink from E.R. Hamilton, so whatever their virtues and failings they are at least cheap. All get at least a mild Thumbs Up though the thumbs for Coben and Baxter are held especially high.

Time’s Last Gift by Philip Jose Farmer

This scifi – or, more appropriately pleifi – novel by Farmer (best known for Riverworld) was originally published in 1972, but holds up pretty well today. I’m not generally keen on time travel fiction due to the awkward paradoxes typically involved. Farmer skirts the bulk of those problems however by anticipating the Novikov self-consistency principle – an argument by Russian physicist Igor Dmitriyevich Novikov that only time travel that doesn’t alter the present is possible. Farmer’s time vessel simply cannot go to parts of the past where its crew could do anything that would alter the present. In this lively tale the anthropologist crew travels from 2070 CE to 12,000 BCE ice age Europe. They encounter hunter gatherer inhabitants, live among them, and share the dangers from the fauna (including unfriendly humans).

Though a stand-alone novel in the sense of needing neither prequel nor sequel, the book does fit into a fictional universe that includes characters not only of Farmer’s own creation but from classic authors including ER Burroughs and Jules Verne (e.g. Farmer’s Tarzan Alive and The Other Log of Phileas Fogg). The crew of the time vessel HG Wells I in Time’s Last Gift are puzzled that one of their number, John Gribardsun, seems all too at home in the age they are visiting.

Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America by Craig Childs

Childs' book pairs well with the pleifi Time’s Last Gift. Childs writes of his own personal travels around North America to early sites of archaeological interest from the Bering Sea to Floridian sinkholes. He describes artifacts that have been found in those locations and notes (often conflicting) academic views about them.

If there is any more bitter battleground than contemporary politics it is anthropology, which often is a proxy for the same thing. Particularly unsettling to some has been the challenge to the theory of the Bering land bridge as the route to the settling of the Americas some 12,000 to 13,000 years ago. To be sure genetic studies confirm that this is the primary path taken by the ancestors of pre-Columbian inhabitants, but too many far older sites (some of the oldest – 25,000 years ago or more –  are in South America) have been discovered to dismiss them all as isolated dating errors. The most likely path of earlier migrations, given the glaciers blocking the land route, is along the coast by maritime fishing people. The coastlines of 25,000 years ago are now under hundreds of feet of water, so what otherwise would be the most promising archaeological sites are inaccessible. Some reviewers have taken Childs to task for simply reporting opposing views rather than championing one (whatever one is favored by the reviewer), but this neutrality is more of a strength than a weakness. The reader is free to consult other more specialized sources in order to draw his or her own conclusions in these matters.

Everything Is Going To Kill Everybody by Robert Brockway

Brockway’s book adds some perspective to the current state of existential panic. There are so many ways to die, both as an individual and as a civilization, that there is little to be gained obsessing on just one – something else will sneak up behind you with a club. There is something oddly comforting in that.

Brockway with graveyard humor discusses natural disasters such as supervolanoes, hypercane, and asteroid strikes. He discusses bio threats including misguided genetic manipulation, a trend toward male sterility, and (of course) old fashioned contagion. He does not forget robotics and artificial intelligence of the sort that so worried Stephen Hawking. Much of what he discusses is silly and much is exaggerated, but more than enough is entirely real.

The Massacre of Mankind by Stephen Baxter

This authorized sequel to HG Well's War of the Worlds by scifi master Stephen Baxter is set 14 years after the first 1907 invasion from Mars. In the real timeline of the early 20th century, of course, humans were busy massacring each other. In Baxter’s version of the era there was still a “Schlieffen War” but it never escalated to a world war thanks to an alliance of convenience between the UK and Germany that allowed the Kaiser to overrun France. Baxter’s UK is a very authoritarian place as the British – who were singled out and damaged badly in the 1907 invasion – brace for a possible rematch. They aren’t wrong. In the 1920s the Martians are back with a larger force (and better antibiotics) for a second go at it. Once again the first wave of the second invasion strikes England – Winston Churchill organizes a defense – but additional waves target major cities around the world. The Martians haven’t lost their taste for human blood. The account of the new invasion is written from the perspective of journalist Julia Elphinstone, sister-in-law to the chronicler (unnamed in Wells' book) of War of the Worlds.

The first sequel to Wells' book of which I'm aware is Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898) by Garrett P. Serviss. (Yes, that Edison: it could have been aptly named The Earthings Strike Back.) It was serialized in The Boston Post, which surely would have been sued by Wells had he been aware of it. It isn't very good, but as authentic Victorian steampunk it has some value. Baxter, needless to say, is far better.

I have a fondness for War of the Worlds. In 1959 my mom brought home the Classics Illustrated comic book version of the novel. Contrary to the zeitgeist of the time she figured that reading was reading and she was happy to encourage it in my sister and me with comics. It worked, because I deliberately sought out HG’s actual novel the following year. It was the second adult novel (i.e. not Dr. Seuss and the like) I ever read recreationally. (Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World was the first: I still have that very copy on my bookshelf.) War of the Worlds began a lifelong enjoyment of literary scifi. The Massacre of Mankind does nothing to undermine that enjoyment. In this affectionate homage to HG Wells’ book, Baxter has (as usual) written a solid action tale and sprinkled it with human drama.

Promise Me by Harlan Coben

Coben is an excellent mystery writer (and NJ native) whose appeal is only slightly enhanced for me by commonly being set in locations I frequent. This novel is a case of “No good deed goes unpunished.” At a party Myron overhears a friend’s teen daughter talk about getting a ride from a drunk friend. He tells her that if she is ever in that situation and doesn’t want to call her parents she should call him. He promises he will pick her up no questions asked. At 2 a.m. one night he gets such a call. He picks up the young lady in Manhattan and takes her to her “friend’s” house in Ridgewood NJ as she asks him to do. She goes around back to the back door, reappears to wave him away because everything is OK and goes around back again. He drives off. The next day the girl is missing. The owners of the house never heard of her. Guess who is the prime suspect in her disappearance?

We’ve all made promises we had cause to regret. It is sometimes hard to know if it is more honorable to keep them or break them in certain circumstances. If you are even asking the question, it is wiser to break them, but wiser is not the same thing as more honorable. Myron proves more resourceful in his bleak situation than most of us would be.

Still More

There have been other books in the past few weeks and there will be time for more in the next few, but five are enough to mention for now. Perhaps one or more will get a mention on this site next week – but no promises.

A tune for waiting out the quarantine – Cold Blood (Lydia Pense vocals):

I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free (1969)

Are You Experienced?

In what I hope will be the last of the lockdown-inspired binge-watches of overlooked scifi television series, I watched the two seasons of People of Earth. The title, by the way, comes from the classic Earth vs the Flying Saucers (1956) in which the aliens broadcast, “People of Earth. Attention!" I had seen some episodes of People of Earth back in 2016 on TBS but its time slot and my own schedule meant I missed much of the 1^st season and all of the 2^nd. (All the episodes for a season 3 were written, but the show was canceled before any were shot.) This is a solidly funny series that embraces its silly premise yet doesn’t undermine itself by trying too hard to be goofy. It also pleasantly respects its characters even when they are crazy. A few of them are indeed crazy, but not because they believe they have been abducted. In the context of the show they are correct. Oddballs, after all, can have anomalous experiences, too.

Synopsis: Ozzie (Wyatt Cenac) is a journalist who travels to the small town of Beacon NY to write a piece on StarCrossed, a support group for alien abductees. (“Experiencers!” as he is quickly corrected, for calling them abductees “is like slut-shaming!”) Each group member has his or her own backstory: often a troubled one as human backstories commonly are. The group leader Gina (Ana Gasteyer), for instance, is a former therapist who gave up her practice after convincing a patient to face his fear of skydiving: he died on his first jump. The members describe three kinds of aliens: whites, greys, and reptilians. Their encounters ranged from scary to romantic, but there nonetheless were similarities in some details of the events. Ozzie believes the StarCrossed members to be harmless nuts until he starts having vague memory flashes and anomalous perceptions (e.g. a deer in his mirror) that make him question if he himself is suppressing an abduction memory.

Thumbs Up, even though Season 2 (while clearing up some subplots) ends on a cliffhanger.

The show plays off our familiarity with the alien abduction narrative in real life. The abduction phenomenon is not as rare as one might imagine. 1 in 50 Americans claims to have been abducted by aliens. 329,000,000 [the US population] times 0.02 divided by 38 years [the median age in the US] means that, if we accept the claims, 173,158 people are abducted every year in the United States alone. This is ludicrous. The sky would be ablaze with flying saucers every night. So what is going on? Are the self-styled abductees just lying attention-seekers? Some of them (maybe a lot of them) probably are. But not all. Maybe not most.

Dr. John Cline (Yale psychologist and sleep expert) discusses the subject in Psychology Today. “Anomalous experiences,” he writes, “include such phenomena as synesthesia, hallucinations, lucid dreaming, past-life memories, and alien abduction, among others. The first thing that I want to make clear is that people who report these experiences are not psychotic and most are not simply advancing a hoax. In fact, going public with these reports can have a negative effect on your standing in most communities.”

Assume for the moment that the abduction memories are false. Where do they come from and why do so many people who have them believe in them so firmly? It is well to remember that human memories of any kind are unreliable. People regularly remember things differently from the way video footage (when available) shows them to have happened. Recovered memories notoriously are commonly invented out of whole cloth – in particular those obtained through hypnosis. In the 1980s there was a string of horrible criminal cases in which recovered memories resulted in convictions that later were overturned by DNA evidence. (Though cheap and easy today, DNA testing wasn’t used in criminal court prior to 1989 and was a laborious, uncommon, and expensive process through the ‘90s.) Despite three decades of debunking, 42% of therapists still are positive toward recovered memories today, which is just plain scary. Even when eyewitnesses don’t recover repressed memories but simply report what they saw immediately after it happened, they often get it wrong. “Often” means tens of thousands of false identifications of suspects each year, most of whom fortunately are not brought to trial. Some, however, are. The Innocence Project (see https://www.innocenceproject.org/dna-exonerations-in-the-united-states/) uses DNA evidence to reexamine cases of people convicted on the basis of eyewitness testimony, and has exonerated hundreds of prisoners. 85% of the false convictions involved “misidentification by a surviving victim.” The witnesses believed what they said and were entirely credible to the juries. Furthermore, some witnesses stubbornly stuck to their identifications in spite of the DNA pointing to someone else – in some cases to specific criminals with records of similar crimes. The witnesses aren’t crazy and aren’t hoaxers: they are just wrong.

There is a difference, of course, between misremembering a human face and remembering an extraterrestrial face – but only because more of us regard the latter as unlikely. Flying saucers, however, have been part of the popular culture for more than seven decades, and alien abductions have been in the news and popular media (e.g. the TV show The Invaders [1967]) since the 1961 Barney and Betty Hill abduction case in New Hampshire. One can see how such elements of popular culture can be a basis for reconstructed memories. There are parallels to reports of ghost encounters, which are more frequent than alien encounters. A 2019 Gallup poll showed a third of Americans believe aliens have landed on earth, but according to a CBS News poll fully 48% of Americans believe in ghosts with another 7% unsure. Given those numbers, it is not surprising that moments of distorted perception (or outright hallucinations, which, as Dr. Cline notes, “are much more common than generally recognized”) sometimes result in ghost sightings. Altered states of consciousness (with or without drugs) can be brought on by countless internal and external factors. We are much more apt to accept consequent weird perceptions or memories as real if they don’t violate our pre-existing belief systems.

Lucid dreams – dreams which seem real even after we wake – are a phenomenon with which I have direct experience. One example is minor. I clearly remember having got up in the middle of the night on one occasion to let the cat out, and would have sworn I did. Yet, I found him asleep in the house in the morning – no cat doors, no open windows, no unlocked doors, and no other house guests. Then there is my ghost story. Three days after my sister died (25 years ago this June), she called me on the phone. Again it was the middle of the night. I remember the call as vividly and matter-of-factly as I do the robo-call I got a few hours ago urging me to switch my electric service. Being a skeptic, I have no doubt that it was a vivid dream and that a video camera would have shown me snoring away all night without ever answering the phone, but the point is that it seemed real the next day and still does. Were my belief system more of a paranormal bent, it would be very easy to interpret the event differently. So, too, if ET came a-knockin’ in the middle of the night.

The reader may notice that I left out one possible explanation for the abduction stories: the possibility that the “experiencers” were abducted by aliens. Perhaps they were, but until I’m personally levitated into the spaceship I’m disinclined to believe it.

Can Something Be Underlooked?

Whether lockdowns were an appropriate response to covid-19 (as opposed to, say, the more moderate Swedish response in which businesses and schools have stayed open, partly due to a different calculation of the risk and partly due to a conviction that economic costs are human costs, too) will be debated for years – more likely decades. As long as there is political capital to be made by taking one position rather than another, it is unlikely any answer will be entirely credible. Whatever the case may be (I don’t pretend to have the answer), yet another weekend at home has passed (mostly), and there was time to sample two more “overlooked” scifi television shows. Both struggled with ratings when first aired (which I suppose is what “overlooked” means). Each was just barely approved for a second season, but neither got a third. I watched only season 1 of each.

Jericho did not get particularly good reviews when its first few episodes were released to critics prior to airing in 2006, but it soon won a smallish but loyal fan base anyway. Critics warmed to it also as the show went on. It was canceled at the end of season 1, but (in an echo of Star Trek decades ago) an intense campaign by dedicated fans convinced CBS to reverse itself and agree to a second season. Ratings didn’t improve, however, and it was canceled for good after just seven more episodes.

The location is Jericho Kansas, a small town near the Colorado border. In the opening minutes of the first episode we meet several key characters. Then a mushroom cloud rises in the distance. Multiple major US cities have been nuked. Denver was one of the cities hit. Jericho is unscathed, but of course supply chains for everything from gasoline to groceries are disrupted, so the situation is still dire. Apparently the explosions were not due to a general exchange with an enemy nation. The most brutal wars are civil wars as Thucydides lucidly described so many years ago, and there are indications these attacks were homegrown.

The show is focused on personal interactions in the small town with the broader national disaster just as a backdrop. We see store owners wondering how to stay in business, kids whose parents were in targeted cities at the time of the attacks, bad romances that are still bad romances, and a mayor who despite the emergency still faces unhelpfully hostile political opposition. There also may be conspirators in town who had prior knowledge of the attack and who knew Jericho was a relatively safe haven. The show is an ensemble drama, but if there is a central character it is Jake (Skeet Ulrich), a ne’er-do-well long-absent son of the mayor who just happened to be in town for a visit when the event happened. Some people rise to the occasion, some people sink to it, while others stumble around in confusion. The show prompts a viewer to wonder how he or she would act in the circumstances.

Upshot: As post-apocalyptic dramas go, it is not bad, but had I watched it in 2006 I wouldn’t have been one of the voices clamoring for its renewal. Thumbs Up, but not way up.

Next up was Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (2016) which shares a title but surprisingly little else with the Douglas Adams book. The raging worldwide success of Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was never matched by his Dirk Gently novels, but anyone who likes the Hitchhiker books should like Dirk despite the absence of two-headed galactic presidents and That Old Janx Spirit. Adams himself described the first book as "a kind of ghost-horror-detective-time-travel-romantic-comedy-epic, mainly concerned with mud, music and quantum mechanics." The two Dirk books are clever, witty, and absurd in Adams fashion. They also have a quintessentially British sensibility. Hence, my first thought in the opening scenes of the television adaptation (created by Max Landis but green-lighted by BBC America) was, “What the hell are we doing in Seattle?” It was not the last time I would ask the question.

The TV show has nothing to do with the plot of the book, but at least there is an English detective named Dirk Gently (Samuel Barnett) and his approach is holistic. That is to say, he relies on the interconnectedness of all things in the universe rather than on pedestrian “clues” such as fingerprints. (There is actually some philosophical sense in this – though not practical utility – which is why the premise works on some level.) He inserts himself into the life of the feckless Todd (Elijah Wood) based on one of his hunches. During the course of the show we learn that Dirk had been part of a defunct secret government project to examine and exploit people with special abilities: in Dirk’s case a knack for stumbling on connections between apparently unconnected things. Another former subject of the program is the flaky Bart Curlish (Fiona Dourif). As she explains to Ken (Mpho Koaho), whom she has kidnapped at the point of a gun, "I'm a holistic assassin... I kill whoever I like killing all day and if I killed them, they were my target." She also comments to Ken, “Well you decided it would be better to come with me than die. That was nice.”

There is a murder mystery involving someone apparently killed by a shark in his hotel room. There is a kidnapped girl who apparently has swapped minds with a Corgi. There is a cult involving body swapping. There is a bodyguard (Jade Eschete) who becomes involved with Dirk and Todd. There are vampires, of sorts, who feed off emotional distress. There is Todd’s sister (Hannah Marks) who suffers from hallucinations. There is time travel.

There is too much intentional quirkiness in the show and it is (once again) set in the wrong country, yet it has some charm if you have a high tolerance for absurdist humor. After a shaky start, I actually found myself enjoying it despite its flaws, so Thumbs Warily Up. You may, too, but don’t be surprised if your viewing partner says, “Uh, no.”

Trailer: Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency