The Lockbox

I liked the Korean movie Phantom (2023) enough that I decided to hunt down the novel on which it's based, Mai Jia's The Message -- in large part out of curiosity about whether it's also lesbians.

The answer: ... sort of! The lesbians are not technically textual but there's a bit of Lesbian Speculation and then a big pointed narrative hole where lesbians could potentially be. It is, however, without a doubt, Women Being Really Weird About Each Other, to the point where I'm considering it as a Yuletide fandom (perhaps even moreso than the movie, where the women are also weird about each other but in a more triumphant cinematic way and less of an ambiguous, psychologically complex and melancholic way. you know.)

The plot: well, as in the movie, there's a spy, and there's the Japanese Occupation, and there's a Big Haunted House where we're keeping all the possible spies to play mind games with until somebody fesses up. Because the book is set in 1941 China, there are actually three factions at play -- the Japanese and collaborators, the Communists and the Nationalists -- and for the whole first part of the book, fascinatingly enough, we are almost entirely in the head of the Japanese officer who's running the operation and choreographing all the mind games in an attempt to ferret out the Communist agent in his codebreaking division. The result is sort of a weird and almost darkly funny anti-heroic anti-Poirot situation, in which Hihara is constantly engineering increasingly complicated locked-room scenarios designed to get the spy to confess like the culprit in a Thin Man movie, and is constantly thwarted by his suspects inconveniently refusing to stick to the script, even when presented with apparently incontrovertible evidence, placed under torture, lied to about the deaths of other members of the party, etc. etc.

The suspects include several variously annoying men, plus two women whom we and everyone else are clearly intended to find the most interesting people there: quiet and competent Li Ningyu, cryptography division head, mother of two, whom everyone knows is semi-separated from an abusive husband, and who somehow manages to keep calmly slithering her way out of every accusation Hihara tries to stick on her; and her opposite, loud bratty chic Gu Xiaomeng, whom Hihara would very much like to rule out as a suspect as quickly as possible because she's the daughter of a very wealthy collaborator, and who seems moderately obsessed with her boss Li Ningyu For Some Reason.

Both book and movie spend, like, sixty percent of their length on this big house espionage mind games scenario and then abruptly take a left turn, with the next forty percent being Something Completely Different. In the film this left turn involves DRAMATIC ROMANTIC ACTION HEROICS!!!! so I was quite surprised to find that the book's left turn ( involves spoilers )

We watched Scavengers Reign because it was enthusiastically recommended to genarti as fun animated science fiction about being stranded on an alien planet with interesting alien biology. Which is true! This is not incorrect! Not Mentioned was the extent to which it is also very definitely lovingly animated body-and-survival horror ..... every time we watched we checked in with each other like 'still good to proceed? not too much eugughghhhhhh?' '[grimly] let's watch at least one more episode and see what happens,' and in this way we eventually crawled through all twelve episodes.

NONETHELESS I do think it was very good, once we acclimated to the eugughghhhhhh factor. (I ended up higher on it than genarti did, in some part because I liked the ending for my favorite character better than she liked the ending for hers.) The first episode introduces you in media res to the several sets of people stranded on this planet that the show will be following:

- Sam and Ursula, an older man and younger woman traveling together, who've developed a plan to bring down their heavily damaged ship, the Demeter,, still in orbit around the planet with most of the crew in cryosleep; Ursula is fascinated by the planet and interested in learning more about it, while Sam is laser-focused on Getting Out Of There
- Azi, a motorcycle butch who's been in crop-growing survival mode supported by (a) Levi (unit), a pleasant manual labor robot whose behavior is becoming increasingly altered by some kind of planetary growth thriving in its innards
- Kamen, alone and still trapped in his escape pod, on the verge of death until he encounters a telepathic creature that brainwashes him into symbiotic/parasitic collaboration, and yet somehow his biggest concern is still His Divorce

Over the course of the story, we learn through flashbacks more about who these people were on the Demeter and what happened to strand them on the planet, while they cope (or don't) with the various challenges of the planet and the hope of escape provided by the Demeter. The real fears that the show evokes, IMO, are isolation and transformation -- being, yourself, transformed without your knowledge or consent, or, perhaps even worse, seeing your only companion changing into something unrecognizable and untrustworthy. These are things that scare me personally very much and so I often found this a very scary show! But -- like Annihilation or Alien Clay, the two other stories that Scavengers Reign reminded me of the most -- it also evokes the flip side of this fear, the beauty and wonder of the transformative and strange. The animators loved animating these weird alien ecosystems.

You can watch the trailer here:



(The trailer is very clear and accurate to the amount of body horror in the show. From this you will be able to tell that we did not in fact watch the trailer before we began the show itself.)

A second season was planned, but has not been ordered and may never be made; IMO the first season does stand as complete but I would very much like to see the second season and I hope it happens.

Broadly speaking, I liked Star Wars: The Mask of Fear, the first book in a planned trilogy of Star Wars Political Thrillers pitched as Andor Prequels, For Fans Of Andor.

This one is set right after the declaration of the Empire and is mostly about the separate plans that Bail Organa and Mon Mothma pursue in order to try and limit their government's whole-scale slide into fascism, with -- as we-the-readers of course know -- an inevitable lack of success. It is of course impossible not to feel the weight of Current Events on every page; the book came out in February '25 and so must have been complete in every respect before the 2024 elections, but boy, it doesn't feel like it. On the other hand, it's also impossible not to feel 2016 and Hillary Clinton looming large over the portrayal of Mon Mothma as the consummate politician who is very good at wrangling the process of government but whom nobody actually likes.

That said, as a character in her own right, I am very fond of Mon Mothma, the consummate politician who is very good at wrangling the process of government but whom nobody actually likes. With her genuine belief in the ideals of democracy and her practiced acceptance of the various ethical compromises that working within the system requires, she makes for a great sympathetic-grayscale political-thriller protagonist. I also like the portrayal of her marriage in this period as something that is, like, broadly functional! sometimes a source of support! always number three or four on her priority list which she never quite gets around to calling him to tell him she's back on planet after a secret mission before the plot sweeps her off in a new direction, oops, well, I guess he'll find out when she's been released from prison again!

Anyway, her main plot is about trying to get a bill passed in the Senate that will limit Palpatine's power as Emperor, which involves making various shady deals with various powerful factions; meanwhile, Bail Organa has a separate plot in which he's running around trying to EXPOSE the LIES about the JEDI because he thinks that once everyone knows the Jedi were massacred without cause, Palpatine will be toppled by public outrage immediately. Both of them think the other's plan is kind of stupid and also find the other kind of annoying at this time, which tbh I really enjoy. I love when people don't like each other for normal reasons and have to work together anyway. I also like the other main wedge between them, which is that both of them were briefly Politically Arrested right before the book begins, and by chance and charisma Bail Organa joked his way out of it and came out fine while Mon Mothma went through a harrowing and physically traumatic experience that has left her with lingering PTSD, and Mon Mothma knows this and Bail Organa doesn't and this colors all their choices throughout the book.

Bail Organa's plot is also sort of hitched onto a plot about an elderly Republic-turned-Imperial spymaster who's trying to find the agents she lost at the end of the war, and her spy protege who accidentally ends up infiltrating the Star Wars pro-Palpatine alt-right movement, both of which work pretty well as stories about people who find themselves sort of within a system as the system is changing underneath them.

And then there is the Saw plotline. This is my biggest disappointment in the book, is that the Saw plotline is not actually a Saw plotline; it's about a Separatist assassin who ends up temporarily teaming up with Saw for a bit as he tries to figure out who he should be assassinating now that the war is over, and we see Saw through his eyes, mostly pretty judgmentally. I do not object to other characters seeing Saw Gerrera pretty judgmentally, but it feels to me like a bit of a cop-out in a book that's pitched as 'how Mon Mothma, Bail Organa, and Saw Gerrera face growing fascism and start down the paths that will eventually lead to the Rebel Alliance' to once again almost entirely avoid giving Saw a point of view to see his ideology from within. But Star Wars as franchise is consistently determined not to do that. Ah, well; maybe one of the later two books in this trilogy will have a meaty interiority-heavy Saw plotline and I'll eat my words.

(NB: I have not yet seen S2 of Andor and I do plan to do so at some point, please don't tell me anything about it!)