(December 22 – 28)

Woohoo! The story is finished! There’s not really much left to say at this point, other than let the story speak for itself. You can read it on Vocal.

Watching

With two weeks of not having to go to work, I decided that it was finally time to settle down and ‘binge’ the new Watchmen TV series. So far it’s every bit as good as everyone says it is, but my version of bingeing is a maximum of two episodes an evening (less if I get interrupted by kids) and not every evening is going to be free for TV viewing, so we’ll see how I go—and there will be thoughts when I’m done.

I did manage to finish up The Mandalorian however, so here are some thoughts on that. Firstly, this was a fun ride through the Star Wars universe; don’t expect anything more than that, and you’ll have a fun time watching it. Also, Baby Yoda is a stroke of genius—you can be as cynical as you want about why Baby Yoda was created in the first place, but he’s the character that keeps us coming back to the show each week.

There were some minor issues. The first three episodes tell a compelling ongoing story (and one of the best tricks The Mandalorian pulls is to make you think it’s a bounty hunter show, only to tell you in the second episodes that it’s a Lone Wolf and Cub show instead) and definitely earn the ‘chapter x’ prefix that each episode bears. Unfortunately, it actually does then devolve into a bounty of the week format for several episodes which, more than anything, gives the impression that the show is treading water—a bit unforgivable when the series is only eight episodes long. Things come back together for the two-part finale, but I would rather all eight ‘chapters’ had been used to tell a cohesive long-form story.

Reading

I’ve already been distracted away from Norse Mythology.

ComiXology had one of its infamous, wallet-draining sales on so I picked up a few treats. First was a digital expanded edition of Watchmen, which I shall read once I’ve finished the show. In addition to that I picked up two collected volumes of Kieron Gillen’s amazing Darth Vader comic—which does an excellent job of taking the character of Vader from the slightly risible one-dimensional villain we see in A New Hope, to the ultimate galactic badass of Empire Strikes Back. I’m particularly looking forward to revisiting Doctor Aphra and her psychotic droids that hilariously parallel R2-D2 and C3-PO.