X-Men ’97 is Good Eating

Finally, some good fucking food.

Editor’s Note: Spoilers Throughout

I don’t need to go through m y whole torrid relationship with comics, but I can say that I love them more than I read them and that the reason I care about comics is because of Fox’s early X-Men movies, Sony’s Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies, Burton-and-Schumacher Batman, and the cartoons of the 1990s that came out starring these same characters and which were replayed on Disney, Cartoon Network and their spinoff channels when I was a lad. X-Men ’97 is a worthy successor to the X-Men show of the 1990s to which it is a direct sequel (complete with mainly copying and slightly updating the iconic theme music) and to the other X-Men series that have come out in the intervening years. It is much better than I have any expectation of the MCU X-Men being, and it is a successor to a children’s show which feels like it respects that its audience is adults. It doesn’t just pander to our need for nostalgic comfort, it also challenges our expectations by asking the sort of poignant and controversial questions that the X-Men’s stories always have, creating an emotionally challenging and mature adaptation of several comic runs. Moreover, by deign of its maturity, adolescents (who *should* be the intended audience) will find it does not condescend.

I sort of avoided it at first, having no expectation it would really deliver what I needed or wanted from it. Then I heard about the carnage of the fifth episode and dove in, knowing that what we were getting wasn’t just an adaptation of X-Men comics, but a show that took seriously the dark depths of its themes. By the time I got to episode 5, “Remember It,” I remembered something very bad was going to happen but was not certain of the details; into the final minutes, I was thinking I must have misinterpreted what I read, until the final death. I watched it on May 1^st and was left speechless for fifteen minutes of its thirty-minute runtime; I rewatched that second half later that night.

It’s only ten episodes which isn’t enough to truly satiate my craving for quality superhero output, but it does whet my appetite for more X-Men; revisiting the predecessor show to fill in backstory I forgot or never knew, maybe revisiting some of the mixed bag of Fox films. Regardless, X-Men ’97 is an exceptionally well-executed ten episodes as it is, with a spectacular three-episode finale.

It’s drawing on Grant Morrison, Chris Claremont, and other X-Men runs I’m not personally familiar with to show the X-Men, as ever, fighting to protect a world that hates and fears them. The show begins with wealthy telepathic geneticist/psychologist Professor Charles Xavier presumed dead, willing all his earthly effects and his control of the X-Men to longtime friend and nemesis Magneto. We meet Roberto Da Costa, filling in the new audience member role that Jubilee provided in the original series. Morph returns, shapeshifting powers tuned way up and used to do visual Easter Egg cameos with other Marvel characters in a way that has practical viability in the many excellent combat sequences. Truly, the fight scenes are engaging and exquisite.

Like, the animation is just so cool and enticing and reminds, occasionally, of a resolution-improved version of the Marvel vs. Capcom arcade game, but mostly of the comics come to life. But, as I believe the hosts of Jay & Miles X-Plain the X-men have said, the comic is a mutant soap opera. And here, things are about to get a bit difficult to parse if you don’t recognize any of the character names…

So, in this series we meet Jean Grey’s doppelganger Madelyne Pryor through intense circumstances of Jean showing up on the doorstep of the X-Mansion at the end of the first episode after Scott and who we thought was Jean were planning to leave the team. The revelation of her existence throws Cyclops and Jean Grey’s relationship into turmoil while Magneto is trying to honor Professor X’s vision of mutant-human coexistence. While we, perhaps strangely, never see Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants outside of the opening credit sequences, his very presence on the team creates tension, throwing a wrench into Rogue and Gambit’s fraught relationship. In the second episode of the season, Storm loses her weather witch powers while taking a shot from an anti-mutant vigilante’s de-powering gun. Magneto shows mercy upon mercy and is punished for it.

As Storm travels and meets Forge, she does battle with a psychic monster and regains her powers. Meanwhile, Jubilee and Sunspot deal with Sunspot’s wealthy parents and his evasion of the spotlight. The mutant metaphor of special people oppressed by the dominant group while a few members of the minority are able to excel and attempt to bring everyone up by being palatable superheroes has become more tightly tied with queerness than ethnicity over the past few decades. It’s never clearer than when the proverbial closet enters the fray.

Eventually, we reunite with old friends like Nightcrawler and are treated to small shots of myriad minor characters on the island of Genosha, with whole romantic storylines playing out in the background. Formerly a place of mutant enslavement, a new mutant society has been established, with the likes of Hellfire Club leaders Emma Frost and Sebastian Shaw requesting Magneto join them. Then, while the mutants are partying and Ace of Base’s Happy Nation plays, a devastating attack takes place, some of the most startling and intense imagery I have seen in an American cartoon targeted at adolescents. Sentinels, the giant mutant-killing robots, are deployed from a giant insectoid-sentinel that is also launching tremendous bursts of energy that act with the force of megatons of explosives. Thousands die.

The ensuing battle is impressive for its seeming futility, all the carnage intentional by the Sentinels and incidental collateral damage during the mutant response. It’s harrowing. It’s likely to remind you of images of natural disasters and of man-made catastrophes and massacres such as, it must be said, the ongoing destruction of the Gaza Strip or the 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre.

The politics of the mutant metaphor (i.e. mutants for any given marginalized group, sometimes paired with the imprecise, incurious, and inelegant analogy of Xavier as MLK and Magneto as Malcolm X) can never be 1:1 exact, and aren’t intended to be, I don’t think. But the Krakoa era rested on a complicated idea about mutants developing their own island nation separate from everyone else, bribing and blackmailing on a global scale for recognition, and creating a cruel and strange social structure in many ways. I’m relatively early in the Krakoa run (it began in 2019 and just wrapped up so I have a lot to read) so I will hold my judgment on its political efficacy or aesthetic effectiveness. What I will say is that this snapshot of Genosha ties in several different stories (I heard Mutant Massacre and E for Extinction referenced on The Mutant Ages) and exemplifies a tendency throughout the show to pull stories direct from the comics and combine them in ways that respect the original creative intention while leaving room for adaptative growth.

There are two episodes of fallout as the character Bastion is introduced as the source of the beyond-conceivable-scale Sentinel army, leading into a three-part finale which ties in Asteroid M/Avalon, Magneto’s extra-terrestrial base, and ending on an incredible time-splitting cliffhanger. The X-Men eventually try to save him, as they’re bound to doing by organizational ideology and editorial decree, but only because of their great well of empathy, belief in Xavier’s dream, and after fighting him for a very long time.

Bastion is a sort of post-human that maybe isn’t *quite* a mutant but has powers tied to the creation and manipulation of technology, and plans to usher in an age of human-sentinel hybrids destroying and enslaving mutants to create a utopia. Magneto is provoked to counter his plan, throwing the world into chaos by using his electromagnetic powers to wipe out power across the country. We get even more touching moments drawn from the comics, and one incredibly violent one in particular, while the ethics of the deployment of the Professor’s psychic powers are disputed and tested. Xavier enters Magneto’s mind, helping Magneto piece together his psyche in a bar on a sort of astral plane (but not the Astral Plane) after seizing control of his mind to reverse Magneto’s catastrophe.

The show is vibrant and enticing throughout, with great voice acting[1] and terrific writing. I’m so impressed by how quickly they have used so much of the history of the characters, though paced in such a way that they still have so much yet to draw from. The relationship between Cable and his parents is teased out very well in not a lot of time, with Mr. Sinister meddling, suppressed angst inside Cable being channeled in a way that made me think of when Vegeta was Majin, and eventually an emotional reckoning and reconciliation between Scott, Jean, and Nathan. There’s more than a few touching moments; the characters are so compelling. The series ends with the mutant heroes just barely preventing Asteroid M from crashing into the planet and then being displaced in time – with many of them ending up in the 4^th millennium B.C., meeting a young Apocalypse and Scott and Jean in the future meeting a young Cable.

And with all those spoilers I’m still trying to leave stones unturned. I think the show does do some things that make you wonder “how did that happen?” but moves quickly and effectively enough that you may be too compelled to engage with what’s going on to get stuck on those questions. The second part of the finale ends with Magneto having placed his helmet over Xavier’s head to block Xavier’s powers and Magneto pulling the adamantium out of Wolverine’s skeleton. The third episode begins with Xavier in Magneto’s head. There are a couple issues like this throughout the series, but I attribute it to trying to get a lot done in just ten episodes. I hope the next season has at least 16 if not 22-26. We need full orders. I feel the show has proven its worthiness to stay around. I haven’t been this interested in an audiovisual Marvel project since I’m not sure when. When I play Marvel’s Midnight Suns, these are the sort of comic book adventures and relationships I am harkening for.[2] I think the show does enough dramatically and aesthetically to handwave some of the structural issues like that (or like the lack of millions of people dying immediately due to a global EMP; I mean, people might have, it hasn’t really been discussed). I felt the episode which spends half its time on Jubilee and Sunspot in a Mojoverse computer game is sort of the weakest except that it helps establish a connection to something else from the past and, moreover, shows proof of concept for doing off-beat episodes. Introducing the Shi’ar is crucial to Professor X’s arc at this stage, but we only get one episode with them really, and expect they will be back next season. I wonder if Cyclops’s anger at humanity will rear its head; at one point (during an ill-fated interview during “Remember It”), I expected him to end up on the more militant side, but I guess they may wait a couple seasons something like the “Schism” storyline to play out.

At the end of it all, so much of this show is relying on payoff in next season because of how much it set up, but the stellar episode 5 and they very strong episodes which followed it will give it an exalted place in critical consideration even if it doesn’t fully deliver (which seems very possible since they parted ways with one of their most prominent creative voices). But that’s how serial storytelling works; that’s why these stories work better as a television series with time to build up characters and have them interact with each other than as movies with compressed character arcs.

X-Men ’97 is a solidly entertaining show that took its subject matter seriously, which is all I could hope for and more than I expected. There were occasional moments of levity that felt misplaced, but not overwhelming on the order of most Marvel stuff. There are some cameos from other Marvel characters, but they are mostly very brief and work in the way I like for X-Men interactions with non-X-Men characters to work: angrily asking where their supposed human allies were when they were dying. Captain America is the main character to come in as a target for Rogue’s ire. Spider-Man and the Silver Samurai have a few cameo reaction shots. Black Panther (King T’Chaka) figures as a small part in the finale.

It’s just very fun to watch. I’d like to take more time and cut this down, but that’s what it comes down to. The creative team[3] utilize a bunch of comic arcs from the 90s to create a compelling story connecting them in a naturalistic way that highlights the frustrations of fighting for people that don’t love you, and the tension between respectability, assimilation, and liberation. It’s not an intrinsically revolutionary text but I don’t think anyone is really expecting that. What it does avoid is being overly conciliatory. It doesn’t lack backbone or grit. I just think it needs more time, and hope it gets some next season. There’s every chance I rewatch it before then, at least once I finish 1992-1997’s X-Men. It’s good eating.¹

Final Score: 4/5

All episodes of X-Men ’97 are now streaming on Disney+

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[1] Alison Sealy-Smith reprises her role as Storm from the 1992-1997 cartoon, as does Carl Dodd with Wolverine, Lenore Zann reprises her role as Rogue, George Buza reprises his role as Beast, A.J. LoCascio reprises his role as Gambit, Adrian Hough reprises his role as Nightcrawler. Jennifer Hale, who voiced Jean Grey in Wolverine and the X-Men replaces original series voice actor Catherine Disher. Ray Chase voices Cyclops in place of Norm Spencer, who died in 2020. Hale and Chase said they based their performances off of Disher and Spencer, respectively. Holly Chou replaced Alyson Court as Jubilee; Court said she would prefer an Asian voice actress voice Jubilee, but she does appear in a small role in the Mojo videogame world episode. Ross Marquand replaces Cedric Smith as Professor X.

[2] I also really miss X-Men Legends, but it’s been almost 20 years since a proper game in that series.

[3] My biggest concern is that creator Beau DeMayo was fired before the premiere, although writing for the second season was finished this spring.

1. Something I meant to mention, since I don’t now if I’ll ever get around to doing a post that’s just a list of podcast recommendations… The first comics podcast I listened to was Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, when I was in grad school trying to build my comic knowledge to get a job at my frequented comic shop. They go through every story in pretty much publication order, with occasional breakages, guest spots, and convention panels. Also co-host Jay Edidin wrote an excellent Cyclops story in Marvels: Snapshots. I listened to the first 300 episodes nearly back-to-back into the winter of 2018-2019 (mixed in with stuff like Davos’ Fingers), though I’ve fallen a bit behind. Cerebro is an incredible deep-dive that goes character by character featuring guests discussing their favorite characters. Battle of the Atom is really entertaining and is making a quality ranking of every X-Men issue – I haven’t listened especially recently but I’ve always enjoyed it. The Mutant Ages is analyzing and reviewing every TV and film adaptation of the X-Men comics – I haven’t listened to them as frequently recently, but they became one of my comfort podcasts last year. All these podcasts have different tones, but they’re all pretty queer, because we see ourselves in the X-Men and have for a long time. There’s also Marvelous, or the Death of Cinema, a podcast that analyzes MCU films and their impact on the film industry. One really prominent comic fan went from a special correspondent to a main host and they’ve covered some X-Men stuff. ↩︎

Fargo Season 5 – On the Confused Politics of Billionaire Matriarchs

There have been five seasons of Noah Hawley’s Fargo show based on the Coen brothers’ movie Fargo.[1] I have seen four of them (not season three, because I didn’t know it existed until four was already out). At some point I’ll rectify that, but today we’re going to talk about my positive but mixed reception to season 5, the most closely related to the first film in plot and theme since at least the first season.

Fargo season 5 follows Juno Temple’s Dorothy “Dot” Lyon on a breakneck adventure that takes the premise of the original film and tilts it, illustrating the American rightwing militia movement’s connection with “constitutional sheriffs” as backdrop to a story about domestic abuse. After a brawl breaks out at a PTA meeting, Dorothy is briefly arrested by Scandia, Minnesota police officer Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani) before being bailed out by her beloved kindly husband Wayne (David Rysdahl), owner and manager of a car dealership. Dot has a strained relationship with her mistrustful billionaire debt baroness mother-in-law Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who nonetheless loves her tomboy granddaughter Scotty (Sienna King). Not long after seeing them pose for a Christmas card that looks like it’s for a Republican politician’s campaign (rifles in hand all), we see a sort of recreation of the kidnapping scene from the film.

Dot is knitting and watching TV when men arrive, peering threateningly through her windows. Unlike the film, she hides before they enter, then scars and maims the men, and her husband isn’t in on it. Rather, these kidnappers were sent by her ex-husband, Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm), an abusive psychopath rancher who runs the Stark County, North Dakota sheriff’s office like an organized crime syndicate, purchasing surplus military hardware from the federal government to hand off to his militia leader father-in-law (Michael Copeman as Odin Little). Tillman is supported in this role most closely by his son and deputy Gator (Joe Keery) and ranch foreman Bowman (Conrad Coates).[2]

In any case, the kidnappers get stopped on the highway in North Dakota just like in the film and an officer is killed just like in the film, but there are two major differences – for one thing, the officer has a partner this time (Lamorne Morris as Whitley “Witt” Farr); for another, they’re alerted to the situation by Dot jumping out of the car and running away. She’s a wily one, later described by the Welsh kidnapper Ole Munch (pronounced “Oola Munk,” played by Sam Spruell) as “a tiger.” After Dot kills the other and wounds Munch, who had shot Witt (whose bleeding she helps staunch), she returns home claiming she wasn’t taken, she just needed to blow off steam. A big presence in the story throughout the season are the psychological ramifications of Dot’s past suffering – she’s optimistic and sometimes delusional, wanting to simultaneously safeguard her home while claim nothing happened. She just wants to forget, to make the past disappear; unfortunately, it cannot, though she finds her freedom in the end.

Ole goes to settle his debt with Roy and Gator, who try to double-cross him and incite a vendetta that carries through the season. Munch, it turns out, is a centuries-old Welsh sin-eater. For reasons still unclear to me, every season of Fargo except the first one has a supernatural or extraterrestrial element. This one works within the story better than season 4’s (there it felt a bit deus ex machina, in season 2 it was mostly an aside; here it felt like an added wrinkle to an effective murderer). Meanwhile, Roy and Gator continue their pursuit of Dot, culminating in violence at Halloween, Wayne getting shocked by some windows Dot had booby-trapped, and Lorraine having Dot committed to a mental ward, which she quickly escapes. At the same time, Indira’s life is weighed down by debt from her feckless, useless husband Lars (Lukas Gage) and is drawn into chasing Dot alongside Witt, while FBI Special Agents Joaquin (Nick Gomez) and Meyer (Jessica Pohly) investigate Tillman.

This culminates in a ranch showdown with murder and maiming. The tension in the story revolves around a few topics – one is policing and its purposes. When Lorraine is first interviewed by Officer Olmstead and her superior officer about Dot’s kidnapping, she returns a confrontational question: “What purpose do you serve?” going on to state that the cops’ job is to keep a “certain element” in line and support the status quo. The Tillmans use the sheriff’s office to enforce a traditionalist patriarchal ideology based on violent and regressive interpretations of the Bible and the U.S. Constitution. Farr tries to be everyone’s conscience, pursuing Dot to protect her, motivating Olmstead to do the same, and – like Olmstead – treating with the FBI agents in the interest of protecting Dot rather than focusing solely on a pursuit of Tillman.

Another axis is that of women’s rights and roles in patriarchal society – that hasn’t been completely absent in past seasons of Fargo, but everything flows through and around gender roles here. This season might have more to do with the movie aesthetically and thematically than any of the other season’s, with only the first season near as close. But part of its intrigue stems from altering the movie’s premise not just in the provenance and root of the kidnapping but the capacity of the wife as well as making the untrusting billionaire parent the mother-in-law. Jennifer Jason Leigh gave an able performance, but there were occasions where the writing felt confused about what it was trying to say about Lorraine. In painting a portrait of complexity, it struggles to make a clear point. Part of Lorraine’s arc with Olmstead and Dot includes getting Olmstead to come work for her as security chief after Olmstead stands up to her while advocating for Dot. This leads to some sweet and reconciliatory moments, but they stay within the tone of the character – she is clearly a woman who has fought and struggled a lot to get her position, and dealt with a lot of sexism while nonetheless being a ruthless businesswoman.[3]

This arc also includes an argument with Roy that sees Lorraine snipe at his politics for not believing in the social safety net among his general libertarian feelings as a Constitutional Sheriff of not needing to contribute to society beyond his own domain. It strikes as unlikely that a woman enriched by taking advantage of other people’s financial vulnerability and who looks at police as tools to discipline rabble cares much for the social safety net, especially because (before seeing the battered pictures of Dot) she says that everyone in our society wants to claim to be a victim. She is a modern-traditional center-right capitalist; as broader social ideas go, she calls her tomboyish granddaughter a “crossdresser” but doesn’t insist on her changing when they shoot the photo early on, and also says she’s “fond” of her. If she’s racist, it’s never explicit. Her husband is a silly drunk and she dresses down two misogynists whose bank she is trying to buy. She later destroys the life of one of them after he pulls out of the deal because he’s assaulted by Tillman. At the same time, she tries in the first episode to convince Dot to take a less hands-on approach to social betterment (i.e., philanthropic board roles rather than in-person planning to save libraries and protect vulnerable/controversial books), implying that she has an older liberal conception of the role of the wealthy in relation to society at large. Lorraine Lyon also has close relationships with important politicians in the region and is able to pull state and federal strings toward the big showdown at the end (it’s heavily implied she donated to Trump, though he is not named; referred to as “the Cheetoh” or some such).

Juno Temple is very compelling as Dot/Nadine, a wily action hero and survivor of grooming and abuse. Her combination of ingenuity, optimism, and delusion is captivating work. She is fun to follow and, despite her capabilities, we never lose dramatic tension; there’s ample concern for her wellbeing the whole way. The show avoids being too neat in its conclusion, and her final confrontation with Munch is very funny. Sometime after Ole helped Dot escape at the ranch, she returns home from errands with Scotty to find Ole with Wayne (who is as affable and admirable a car dealer I’ve ever seen on screen, saved from being completely unbelievable by his occasional cluelessness and his brain injury).[4] He feels they have unfinished business; she talks him out of it and conscripts the confused 500-year-old killer into helping make biscuits for dinner.[5]

But there’s one other thing that really bothered me – Witt Farr’s death, not as a matter of its execution, just that the only black main character dies, a martyr to the concept of a kind and caring police officer. Perhaps this specific tragedy is supposed to underline the current of injustice around which the show is built. He is unwaveringly honorable throughout the show, but not in a completely unbelievable fashion.[6] My point is that he’s not a paper-thin or two-dimensional character, exactly. He’s a bit of a boy scout but not eerily optimistic or anything. His death, then, feels a bit like it falls into an old trope (culturally ubiquitous in understanding if not in practice) of black characters being damned from the jump, serving as moral upholstery for white protagonists. That’s not the most generous reading, and I still think the show is worth watching. I stayed up until 3 or 4 am a few weeks ago watching the last three or four episodes in a row after taking ample time getting to that point. I guess it just makes me think about current and ongoing trends in television. The rise of prestige TV after the rise of miniseries has created a high standard of quality among some genres, and for this high value of set design and writing we wait several years for a substandard amount of episodes.[7]

Contemporary conversations about this shift over the past two decades have led to audiences and critics lamenting the lost age of 22-episode runs, and many of us squinting to figure out what determines what gets branded a drama and what gets branded a comedy and how that mixing of genre and the air of importance contribute to elevating [in prestige] works that aren’t necessarily “better” (more artistically interesting, narratively satisfying, or “important”).[8] Part of it is a process of trying to turn television into movies and vice versa, but I don’t have a hard stance on whether that’s a perversion of form or whatever.[9] What I find is that, in conjunction with a social media emphasis on enforcing consensus that is also tied to an addiction with objectively quantifying the subjective experience of engaging with art via numeric rating scales, people sometimes feel they’re being had and that we’ve lost something important, in part because the shows that take themselves very seriously don’t always pull it off.[10]

Fargo season 5 succeeds at being a captivating crime dramedy-thriller. It made me laugh, and occasionally gasp, and it got me to binge-watch, something I avoid doing with all sorts of highly-rated shows. I just wish it had also avoided making me scoff or roll my eyes in a finale that was, overall, well executed.

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[1] I haven’t seen all their movies so I’m far from a definitive ranking. I did enjoy No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, and Hail Caesar! quite a bit. Anyway, I recently reviewed Ethan Coen’s new movie Drive-Away Dolls for Paste

[2] Gator is not infrequently racist when he crosses paths with North Dakota state trooper Witt Farr (Lamorne Morris) and Tillman’s deeply connected to rightwing militias, but there’s one person of color he apparently trusts. I don’t know how contradictory this is, but it is aesthetically significant – the relationship feels like an almost unwitting nod to Clarence Williams III in Hoodlum, if more respectful in personal conversation between Roy and Bowman. It could be the case that it was colorblind casting and all the imagined significance is created by this contrast but never explored.

[3] Jan Bos appears as her husband Wink Lyon in a few episodes to check on their injured son and provide a bit of comedy, but he’s otherwise a non-factor.

[4] It should be noted that when I say “believable” I don’t just mean “Oh, this could happen in real life.” I mean the character fits into the world that is constructed in a way that does not disrupt my ability to embrace the story and enjoy the narrative.

[5] After he gives a stirring and unsettling (and arguably inscrutable to the characters in the scene, who have not been watching this whole thing play out like the audience) monologue about how he came to North America in one wave of European settlement and was displaced by another, and can subsist without eating since eating the sin-tainted food that granted him immortality, he breaks into joyous tears at the experience of eating something baked with love.

[6] well, so far as you can believe any police officer going out of his way to do good

[7] I think the prestige model works for some shows – I think it’s fine that Fargo comes out every two years or so and only runs 10 at a time. I think it is substantially less well-suited to Disney+ Marvel and Star Wars shows. I am impressed that The Bear has just kept up year-over-year instead of making us wait a long time.

[8] Genre is a fluid think in the simplest of times, and I think of The Bear as a drama and Succession as a dark comedy, but runtime seems to determine awards categorization as much as anything else.

[9] Except with the Marvel stuff. That should all clearly be like 13-22 episode shows, as evidenced by the fact WB-DC did it successfully under Greg Berlanti’s stewardship, but because it came out of a movie universe they’re all structured like movies with cutting room detritus left in.

[10] See Watchmen, Lovecraft Country, and various seasons of anthology shows.

Formula 1: Drive to Survive (The First Three Seasons)

According to my mom, some of the first words I said as a child were car marques like Mitsubishi and Toyota. When I was little, I played games like Gran Turismo, Midnight Club, and Need for Speed. I watched movies with my family like Driven, Gone in Sixty Seconds, and Fast and the Furious. I wanted to race cars, I wanted to work on cars. These things did not come to pass, but deeply instilled passions die hard, and in a world of endless content, it takes only moderate means to find ways to tickle those parts of the brain. After watching Ferrari (and movies from Criterion’s 70s Car Movies collection like the original Gone in 60 Seconds and Steve McQueen’s Le Mans) I’ve had a hankering. And I’ve found myself drawn into Formula 1: Drive to Survive and I have been absolutely devouring it.[1]

In little over a week, I’ve watched three full seasons of the show. You’ve probably already heard all about the Netflix documentary series that shines a spotlight on the top level of international open-wheel racing. I became vaguely aware of the show because hosts of two of my favorite videogames podcasts (Rob Zacny from Remap Radio, as well as Three Movies Ahead and A More Civilized Age, and Danny O’Dwyer from NoClip) as well as a videogames journalist you may know from a much-used internet meme (Drew Scanlon) host the podcast Shift F1 and from when I used to listen to Bill Burr’s podcast religiously. But, like I said, I’m just absorbed and obsessed now.

Coming off the first season, two of my favorite drivers were the Spanish Carlos Sainz Jr. (son of rally world champion Carlos Sainz) and Australian Daniel Ricciardo. Daniel left Red Bull racing across from now-repeat champion Max Verstappen to join Renault, and Sainz got moved out from Renault and moved to McLaren after the first season; by the end of the third season, we know Ricciardo has already accepted terms to move to McLaren, where Sainz has taken an opportunity at Ferrari. One of the problems with the show is that its interest in showing each season from multiple angles, while providing a depth of feel for each driver, makes chronology confusing, especially in this case. Renault team principal Cyril Abiteboul was surprised and disappointed that Ricciardo had made his move before the season even started, and McLaren principal Zak Brown felt similarly about Sainz, but it isn’t exactly clear which of those two moved first (it follows that Ricciardo followed Sainz as opposed to Sainz being kicked out by Sainz a second time, considering no big muss was made of it within his personal storyline, but that isn’t presented explicitly). It’s fun trying to navigate external knowledge, trying to avoid spoilers from real life events, and then listening to the Shift F1’s preview for the 2024 season of F1 and learn how much has changed in the time between, how much I still get to learn.

What makes the show intriguing is the combination of the personalities of drivers and team principles (combination general manager and head coach, depending on your sports reference points) as well as the wheeling and dealing that determines driver lineups and sponsorship deals. There’s a lot to do with internal politics, though external politics are largely absent. The closest thing we have to that is dealing with COVID in the third season (set during 2020) and national pride – little outright and explicit nationalism – but we’ll get back to that.

What makes the sport interesting is that it’s high speed, high stakes, big money racing in beautiful locales – from Austrian forests to the Mediterranean principality of Monaco. And also that it’s composed of teams of two drivers, most of whom do not like one another. Many of them have driven together for years, back to their days in carts; on occasion, guys are friends outside of the sport but less on the grid (like Monégasque Charles LeClerc and French Pierre Gasly, who I think are no longer friends). Many of the guys can be respectful to one another between races, while competitive to borderline point of violence on the track. But the biggest rivalries are within the teams – it’s like if every football team had two quarterbacks that they were trying to score points against, or if the two most talented players on the same soccer or basketball team sometimes had to guard each other. Again, your sporting points of reference may vary.

I could go on about the drivers who have and haven’t endeared themselves to me. It is easier to feel sympathy for the guys like Esteban Ocan who didn’t come from money than guys born with money like Lance Stroll. In the first three seasons, the only nonwhite drivers are multi-repeat champion Lewis Hamilton (one of the best in the history of the sport), British-Thai Alex Albon, and Sergio Pérez (the sole Mexican driver). I’m generally fascinated by the absolute level of aptitude. Almost all the drivers are *at least* bilingual. Their job is to sit in and drive a car, but the physical strain of that requires physical training like any other athlete – a surprising amount, in fact. But there are other dynamics at play within the structure and the sport and the structure of the show that I think are worth mentioning.

As the sport goes, being the sort of person I am, I can’t help but wonder about, you know, the utility in the face of the constant suffering that our world is built on. All of life is worthy of critique, and besides that I feel guilty for ever experiencing joy, so Formula One must be contextualized within the world it exists in. It’s a gas burning sport in a world with an environment being ravaged by manmade climate change. It’s a machine wrecking sport in a world where some people don’t have homes. That’s hardly the fault of the drivers; it’s just the sort of observation I always find myself making. It’s hard for me, always, to avoid thinking about the current global order as a sinking ship with insufficient lifeboats.

We crave spectacle, and these events are indeed spectacular. Competition is always interesting, but especially exaggerated with these rocket-like cars moving at death defying speeds. Many people have died in automobile racing, including in Formula 1 and its immediate lower tier Formula 2. The FIA have canceled the race in Sochi the last three years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but the race in Azerbaijan continues despite the ethnic cleansing campaign that recently took place there. [2]

I think there is something to a transnationalism in sports like F1 and soccer, if we separate it from the international competition between teams bearing national flags during World Cups and the like. And much like the World Cup, it is an interesting showcase for transnational identity – most of the racers speak multiple languages, many of them have multinational identities. Daniel Ricciardo’s father was born in Italy, his mother’s parents were born in Italy; Esteban Ocon is French . It’s also a showcase for globalization and the easy movement of capital. Everything we enjoy doing or watching costs money, and that money goes wherever money can be made. Italian racing team Scuderia Ferrari has a logo for the Dutch oil company Shell and had American tobacco company Philip Morris as a title sponsor with the subliminal name “Mission Winnows.” They have a racing driver from the city-state principality of Monaco and the country of Spain. F1 is headquartered in England, and therefore so are many of the teams, like Red Bull, owned by the Austrian energy drinks company that also owns soccer teams in at least three countries (German Bundesliga’s RB Leipzig, Austrian Bundesliga’s RB Salzburg, and Major League Soccer’s New York Red Buls). Red Bull’s team principle is English. Mercedes Benz-AMG Petronas’s team principle is Austrian. McLaren’s now-former team principle was American. The Haas team, owned by industrial automation magnate Gene Haas who also owns a NASCAR team, was run by a German.

At the end of season three, British auto manufacturer McLaren has teamed up with American oil company Gulf as a sponsor on their car. Racing Point team owner Lawrence Stroll (father of driver Lance Stroll), became an investor in Aston Martin and they became a title sponsor of that team – while it’s clear this is distinct from their former partnership with Red Bull, it isn’t clear how because it’s all spoken about as “Aston Martin returning to racing” and the like, even right before switching to talking about Red Bull and showing highlights where they have the Aston Martin insignia on their uniforms. It’s clear there’s a distinction, but we’re not privy to the details.

Something else I found frustrating about the end of season three was that Lewis Hamilton’s political speech felt like it wasn’t given sufficient coverage. Now, the first season was focused almost entirely on the lower-tier and mid-tier teams, except for Red Bull, who finished third; Ferrari and Mercedes drivers and principals didn’t interview. That changed in the second and third season, especially as Ferrari fell into the pack because of a bad car design. When COVID was the focus in the first episode as things shut down and then reopened with social distancing, it was mentioned in an early press conference that Hamilton had been outspoken about COVID before the season started, and he says on stage with a mic in his hand that he doesn’t know why any of them are there. But anyway, the episodes that did focus on Mercedes didn’t talk much about Lewis Hamilton’s political speech until the last episode of the season. The biggest flaw in execution here is that they show just enough (Hamilton leading his competitors in kneeling at the starting line before races, Hamilton wearing Black Lives Matter t-shirts under his racing suit, and leaving the suit unzipped and hanging so his “ARREST THE COPS WHO SHOT BREONNA TAYLOR” shirt was visible when he makes the podium) that it is very apparent that this was not a one-time thing for him. His last words on the season, and I think the last words of the season at all, were him saying he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to use his platform and influence to do something positive and meaningful (after also showing highlights from his childhood where he and his father talk about avoiding racists and not being outspoken when they were trying to come up).

It felt like Netflix and F1 weren’t trying to minimize it exactly, but that it was certainly worth more than five minutes at the end of the season. It is a compression due to the focus of the series – what they are allowed to do is to focus on what is happening among the teams in a way that stirs up drama to entice and delight the audience, but there is a lot that gets avoided. Reserve drivers are a part of every team, but we don’t always know who they are, even if they’ve featured in a season of the show before.[3] There are also junior driving schemes racers get put on, but it is unclear to me how similar this is to an American football team’s practice squad or a Premier League team’s academy out of which other teams can sign players. There’s occasional lack of clarity regarding chronology because each episode tends to focus on one or two teams or racers. I still don’t know just about anything about how cars are designed – I know there are good cars and bad cars and that Racing Point seemed to steal the 2019 Mercedes design for their 2020 design, but the show doesn’t get into that too much. [4]

Formula 1: Drive to Survive, is an effective marketing vehicle for Formula One racing. I do not know if it is unparalleled in quality among Netflix sports docuseries (Last Chance U was definitely more critical of its sources) but it has me in a chokehold. It has got me playing Need for Speed and Forza again and seeing when the open-wheel, stock car, and sportscar races are happening all over.[5] It has me intrigued and fascinated, thinking about how cars and teams are constructed. I look forward to continuing watching it, and I remain curious in what new ways the show will shift its revelatory gaze.

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[1] In fact, my film watching dropped off considerably between January and February mostly, I think, because of work… but I also watched three seasons of this show, so I am hoping I can make up some lost ground before the end of this month. And anyway I feel like anything I consume I need to write about, but also this show and sport just inspired me to think about so much.

[2] I read somewhere that sports have become a contemporary substitute for war, as national pride is worn during international competition as an outlet instead of killing one another on battlefields. I’m simplifying the hypothesis in a way that underlines its stupidity. For one thing, war hasn’t gone anywhere. For another, little in the way of resources or territory are managed or directed by who wins the FIFA World Cup or who takes gold at an Olympics competition. There is a more interesting argument to be assessed in the context of “sportswashing,” but only slightly; Anglo and American journalists are keen to point to the hosting of international competitions in Russia or China as exemplifying a tendency of “authoritarians” to downplay internal despotism by putting on a global extravaganza. These journalists are less likely to critique the same thing happening at large in their own countries; we have sports facilitated by universities that pull in billions collectively while not paying their players, while several public university systems are being neutered of intellectual value, HBCUs go underfunded for over a century, and public education at large is suffering for funding. Simultaneous to the Super Bowl, the Israeli government stepped up their bombing in Rafah in the south of Gaza, after ordering Palestinian civilians to evacuate in that direction from further north in the strip, continuing their genocidal campaign while the U.S. government sends them money, weapons, and international sanction. But I go on. I will revisit some of this in other pieces.

[3] I’ve mostly found them when going on Wikipedia looking for details on a season I’ve already seen

[4] they paid Mercedes for information on brake duct design, which was protested by multiple teams, then they were fined but allowed to keep using them, but the body overall looked a lot like the previous Mercedes… Yes, I know, I need to read Adrian Newey’s How to Build a Car

[5] Dayton is ongoing as I type this and I remember my opinion of NASCAR changing for the positive after I watched a Top Gear episode and I think I’m going to have to watch the new Netflix NASCAR docuseries after I finish up Drive to Survive because, without the turns and chicanes, it’s a little bit harder to understand strategy… plus the

Echo

I really wanted to like Echo, but I can’t, because it’s not very good. Its premise is one of inclusion and diversity within the crowded market of superhero origins – Maya Lopez (Alaqua Cox) is a Native American vigilante born deaf and made an amputee through a tragic childhood accident. As has become the case frequently in the later part of Marvel’s blockbuster reign as they have transitioned into television, the scaffolding of diversity does not inherently lead to interesting storytelling, though at least it wasn’t marred by the offensive patriotism of Falcon and the Winter Soldier.[1] Marvel’s most recent(ish?) Disney+ series left much to be desired. I deluded myself into thinking I should have any expectations of quality at all, a misapprehension that was resolved by the end of the first episode. Once I let go of the idea that it would bat above Marvel’s average, I had a decent time, even if I was laughing more at than with the show toward the end.[2]

The positive expectation was mostly based on Echo being rated TV-MA for violence and an unfounded hope that exploiting indigenous heritage and culture to claim artistic importance would mean Disney-Marvel would treat that heritage carefully by building an interesting story around it. As to the rating, Echo is just a teen show with a bit of blood. But that’s not a sin; it’s superhero fiction, after all. And its use of Native practices and beliefs doesn’t feel reckless, even if it is a bit clumsy. No, the problem is it feels stapled together and too neatly resolved. Echo reminded me of Watchmen, HBO’s miniseries that serves as a pseudo-sequel to the 1986 comic maxiseries, because it felt a bit like important history was stapled onto a comic book adaptation. However, Echo’s production values were inferior while its story cohered slightly better by way of avoiding mystery box-style set-up.[3] Still, Echo didn’t give its ideas adequate breathing room or development in a total runtime around 200 minutes.

The show begins with a check into the supernatural mythological origin of the Choctaw (starring Julia Jones as Chafa). This set me up to expect a further exploration of those ancient beliefs. Echo quickly lets go of the supernatural and mythological while taking snippets of historical and prehistoric experiences as cold opens which intend to represent dreams of the protagonist. That narrative context doesn’t make much sense for reasons of visual perspective – besides being all in third-person, one of the sequences, starring Dannie McCallum as Tuklo, is black-and-white with silent movie dialog placards, while Morningstar Angeline plays Lowak in a scene focused on Choctaw stickball which spends some time away from the protagonist completely – and the explanation at the end feels almost too convenient. It detracts from what’s artistically interesting about the sequences by giving them a narrative explanation that doesn’t make more narrative sense. The first episode is mostly comprised of summarizing the early life of Choctaw protagonist Maya Lopez (played by Darnell Besaw as a child), from her childhood tragedies (losing her mother Taloa, portrayed by Katarina Ziergovel, in the same car accident where she loses her foot) to her adoption into working for Daredevil/Spider-Man villain Wilson “Kingpin” Fisk.

Played by Vincent D’Onofrio here, Fisk splits his time approximately 90/10 between antagonizing Daredevil and Spider-Man in the comics and cartoons. He’s also one of the primary antagonists in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. In the MCU’s spin-off TV shows that started on Netflix, D’Onofrio-Fisk was primarily a Daredevil villain before he was reintroduced in last year’s Hawkeye series. That show ended with Maya – who was heading a gang of mechanics and martial artists known as the Tracksuit Mafia – attempting to kill Fisk. She was seeking revenge for the death of her father (who Hawkeye killed) and was convinced by Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) that Fisk set up her dad. Later in Echo, Maya is eventually reunited with Fisk, who survived a point-blank gunshot wound in his skull. He offers to make her his successor if she will come home with him.

You see, she returns to Tamaha, Oklahoma, not to see her family but to destroy warehouses connected to Fisk’s New York-based criminal empire. It is not readily apparent to the viewer how – without any alliances or organization, as the Tracksuits have been dissolved – Maya putting wrenches into the gears of his organization would bring her closer to that goal if Fisk is dead, which she believed him to be until he turned up at her family home. Perhaps she just hopes to be on top as “queenpin” in the sense of destroying his legacy.

The other main emotional arc involves Maya reconnecting with her family and her heritage. The heritage mostly comes in the way of flashbacks, though the audience is treated to references and allusions intended to integrate us into the life experience of Native American reservations as well as portraying an illustrious Choctaw Powwow. Maya never showed any rejection of her culture so much as rejection of her family, so one part is being resolved for the character while the rest is just being put on display for the viewer. In a way, this show is like Watchmen crossed with Reservation Dogs, especially because of shared actors from the latter. Dallas Goldtooth (William “Spirit” Knifeman in Rez Dogs) plays a local community leader in a bit part alongside Jana Schmieding (Bev in Rez Dogs). Zahn McClarnon (“Big” in Rez Dogs) briefly appears as Maya’s late father. Her maternal grandparents figure prominently in the show – rare goods, antiques, and junk salesman Skully (Graham Greene, also in Reservation Dogs) and Chula (the inestimable Tantoo Cardinal, who also figures prominently in Killers of the Flower Moon). Chaske Spencer plays Henry Black Crow Lopez, her paternal uncle that abandoned her in New York and is slow to come to her aid in Tamaha.

It is a collection of quality actors with too little to do. One problem is that, like in Watchmen, the protagonist’s arc is about letting go of anger that is righteous through the powers of a poorly defined resolution (though, unlike in that show and Falcon, it’s not staged like a dismissal of an oppressed group’s deservedness for justice). Maya’s mad at Kingpin for setting up her dad and mad at her blood relatives for abandoning her in her various stages of childhood. Through several conversations with Kingpin, she never really confronts him about that, he just angrily confesses unprompted in the climax while threatening the rest of her family.

The best dramatic scene in Echo is an emotional sign language conversation between Maya and Chula about how Chula’s anger at William over the death of Taloa led her to resent and ignore Maya. Maya storms away but later saves Chula’s life with newfound super-powers in a very goofy scene, so I guess all is well that ends well. She uses these same vaguely defined powers to give Kingpin a psychic shock and stop him from reliving his violent vengeance against his abusive father. Stepping in to stop his father beating his mother is easily the most defensible violence he ever committed, and it is unclear why she feels the need to stop him except to heal him from his trauma. But it’s not like he’s all better afterward, repentant of his violent ambitions, he’s just momentarily shellshocked and leaves Oklahoma to pursue the New York mayor’s office.

In this scene, she is wearing a superhero costume that her grandmother made for her inspired by their ancestry which the ghost of her mother led her to. Never mind that her grandmother has had one conversation with her in the past twenty years, it looks kind of cool and is meant as an apology. Throughout the series, Maya frequently wears a harness with no apparent practical application except that it looks like a comic book costume – it would make more sense if it was a dual shoulder holster, but it is not.

Underpinning this odd resolution of the Kingpin relationship there is, of course, the socially saturated idea that violence is never the answer which continually crops up in these movies and shows which also work from an action movie premise that requires viewers uncritically accepting that violence usually is the answer. I hate when people use “schizophrenic” to describe cultural phenomena of self-contradicting narrative theses, but we need some phrase for this strange recurrence that isn’t constricted to the MCU but is most highlighted in these moralistic action blockbusters. It’s at very least cognitively dissonant. [4]

The most interesting relationship with the most well thought out premise is that with her maternal cousin [whose parents we never meet] Bonnie (Devery Jacobs, an actor and writer on Reservation Dogs who coincidentally plays and helped create Kahhori in the new season of Marvel’s What If…? series). Bonnie reached out to Maya when William died, and Maya has been ignoring her. Unfortunately, this relationship gets the least screentime: the only real conversation between the characters happens while they’re held captive and Maya punches Bonnie in the face as a distraction. It is unclear within the scene why this is the distraction she chose, to say nothing of Bonnie being both the youngest member of her immediate family, besides comic relief Biscuits (Cody Lightning), and the only one who didn’t abandon her. It’s just a colossal waste of a talented and up-and-coming performer and the relationship dynamic that seemed it would become most central when Maya got to Oklahoma.

That same episode features the action highlight of the show, Maya beating some bounty hunting assassins to death or near-death in Black Crow’s roller-skating rink. There are other fight scenes, like one in the first episode with a Daredevil cameo, but the other main action set piece of the series involves Maya jumping on a train to set up the warehouse explosion. The CGI compositing isn’t the worst I’ve ever seen, but it never tricks you into thinking it’s real. Visually, the show is regular at best; the editing and camera work made motorcycle riding feel boring, which is a sin. There’s one dynamic go-pro backpack shot that they immediately cut away from to go back to the mid-distance advertising look; it’s a real shame. The fight scenes are fine; the cultural obsession with close-combat and fake-one-shots started by the Bourne movies and exacerbated by the Wick films is not at its best or worst here. Cox and her stunt stand-ins put on a good show, and both her deafness and artificial limb play into the action and drama in sensible and entertaining ways. The use of ASL and silence are among the show’s more interesting technical aspects, though a more experimental sound design might have nailed the second part better. In any case, a superhero show (if that is indeed what Maya is by the end) where most of the conversations are done in ASL is a nice concept.[5] There is also an incorporation of contemporary indigenous music as needle drops as the series goes on.

All in all, like most MCU shows I’ve seen it would have been better served as either a two-hour movie or a thirteen-episode series, but they had too many ideas for the former and too few for the latter. An interesting premise means little without excellent execution. Echo doesn’t feel alternately stretched and compressed in the exact same ways as Loki or Falcon and the Winter Soldier, in part because it had even less time to put forth its vision, but the payoff for the cold opens felt flimsy and the emotional issues are poorly resolved. If you take nothing else from this, remember: Echo is a show about a girl who was abandoned by her family having to learn to forgive her family. The whole path to resolution is crammed into a finale which is coincidentally the shortest episode.

Echo got a backdoor pilot in Hawkeye and it features a Daredevil cameo that makes me anticipate the new Daredevil show more when I should really just watch the old one. We have a new character developed and I’m not sure what their plan for her is. The problems with this show were in the writing and editing rooms; wherever Marvel sends the character “Echo” next, I hope there’s more clarity of vision, because performances weren’t the problem and I wish Alaqua Cox success. I am glad Disney-Marvel collaborated with and thanked the Choctaw Nation. I hope that, as cultural inclusivity leads to more diverse mainstream Hollywood projects, we as viewers also explore the independent Native and indigenous artists that have been doing more interesting work for a long time, including many of these same actors.

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[1] Whether or not patriotism is inherently offensive is not my argument. I am saying part of the show’s resolution of racial reckoning involves the protagonist telling a predecessor who was tortured and imprisoned by the U.S. government for working for the U.S. government that “just because this country did wrong by you individually and my people historically doesn’t mean I should fight for it” is, at very best and my most generous, extremely reductive and shortsighted, not just considering the past and present of the U.S. (there are black people in the police, military, and so forth, after all), but the context of the story in which the claim is made. There is no real conversation of reckoning, just a hearty dismissal.

[2] I will admit, I skipped Ms. Marvel and didn’t watch the second season of Loki or finish the first season of What If…? I liked Hawkeye, more or less. Marvel has stopped being appointment viewing for me and I am better off that way.

[3] In a way, it almost feels like the show has a mystery box without a mystery. Like I think we’re supposed to be surprised when Kingpin shows up, but it was part of the marketing. I suppose the bigger mystery box is the cold opens but my disappointment with them is more of a structural/stylistic unevenness issue.

[4] This could broadly speaking be said to be a problem of all action movies with peaceful resolutions, back at least to Darth Vader’s redemption in Return of the Jedi (they sure killed a lot of Stormtroopers that day, didn’t they?). But just locking into Marvel television, I’m almost retroactively surprised Hawkeye wasn’t rated TV-MA. There’s a lot of death in it; when do and don’t they matter? Meanwhile, they removed some blood in Falcon and the Winter Soldier to make it seem like the gun shots in the escape from Madripoor were nonlethal; U.S. Agent Captain America gets in trouble for killing someone on camera but the series started with Falcon doing off-the-books military missions via drone strike. There’s very little in the way of consistency; it’s worse than being jingoistically propagandistic, though it’s sometimes also that – big names get mercy because the plot requires it.

[5] Is she a superhero? She starts off as a vigilante on a revenge mission and ends by saving her family from her old crime boss, so I guess so. We don’t see her really *save* people as, like, part of her deal.