TV Capsule Reviews, because I don’t have much to say

Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV Series, Season 5) - Overall, it was more of the same, but the same is still quite good. Didn’t love the prison plotline and was glad to see it gone. Likewise, I’ve never been wild about Pimento and I was glad he was absent for most of the season. They hit all of the annual gag episodes, though they did seem to try to make a twist out of them: The Halloween heist ended with a proposal, the Doug Judy episode was a new variation, etc. I was a little disappointed that we didn’t seen four-drink, five-drink and six-drink Amy at her bachelor party. Jake and Amy’s wedding planning was delightful, though. And yes, I appreciated Rosa’s storyline.

The Good Place (TV Series, Season 2) - Like the first season, I binge-watched this all in a few days, and continued to find it delightful. It lacks some of the surprise of the first season, but they do a decent job of keeping things fresh and moving from episode to episode. Great lines, full of wit, ends well, highly recommended.

The Hollow (Netflix, Season 1) - Three teenagers wake up in a locked room with no memories. They discover they’re in a strange world and have magical powers, but mostly get tossed from trope to trope over the course of ten episodes. I’m not going to spoil the twist, but I thought it was decently done. I am somewhat annoyed that the mysterious blind man teased that Adam had more powers, but that never actually came of anything. Nothing here is treading brilliant new ground, but it’s moderately fun.

What Have I Been Reading?

The Uploaded by Ferrett Steinmetz - A rather dismal view of a far future, centuries after post-mortem brain-uploading became possible, in a world where the long-dead control everything and the living survive in the dregs of civilization with the promise of an afterlife all they have to hope for. This is a massive anti-capitalist screed, whether it realizes it or not, and I think it’s stronger than Ferrett’s previous books in a bunch of ways. It also ends very bittersweetly, without forcing certain romances or relationships that I think a lesser writer would have ran with. So credit to that, as well.

Happy Doomsday: A Novel by David Sosnowski - This has...a lot of problems. Of the three main characters, one is autistic and has a mess of convenient symptoms, one is a pregnant goth girl, and one is a Muslim football player “radicalized” into attempting a suicide bombing. In fact, suicide attempts are the thing that all three characters have in common. It’s not actually particularly funny or even lighthearted, despite the cover copy; the closest it gets to jokes it noting what a moron the Orange One is. It never actually gets around to explaining most of what’s going on with the greater world; it’s mostly like the author read, “The World Without Us” and wanted to write a travelogue about that combined with his ideas of why an autistic asexual would be the best apocalypse survivor.

Indexing by Seanan McGuire – What if fairy tales were actually Lovecraftian incursions into our reality? What if there was a government agency dedicated to fighting them? And what if terribly broken people were the only ones available to staff this agency and try to keep humanity safe? Well…this book is all that, and it mostly amounts to Henry Marchen having a really bad few weeks. (I do wonder if this was originally written / published as a serial, as the chapters tend to repeat a bunch of obvious exposition—the kind of things you’d never forget from 20 pages ago, but you might forget from two months ago.)