Running Commentary 12/9/2024

Hello,

I've finally published "Thirty Years of Waru", my retrospective on Vonda N. McIntyre's The Crystal Star that I've been building toward all year. It's shorter than "Thirty Years of Thrawn", but I think it's a bit more interesting. Or at least as interesting. Give it a read.

Thirty Years of Waru
On December 8th, 1994, Bantam/Spectra published Star Wars: The Crystal Star, which has since become known as the worst Star Wars novel of all time. Looking back, thirty years on, does it still take that title? Did it ever?

Actually, give "Thirty Years of Thrawn" a read too, if you haven't.

Thirty Years of Thrawn
A review of three decades of media featuring Grand Admiral Thrawn, from Heir to the Empire to the Ascendancy Trilogy.

Anyway...

Watching...

Skeleton Crew

We have a new Star Wars show to watch: Skeleton Crew, a show with all-original characters set during the New Republic period. This may come to tie into the other so-called "Mandoverse" shows, but for now it seems to be very much its own thing. The showrunner is Jon Watts, who directed the MCU Spider-Man films. The eight-episode streaming series kicked off on December 3rd with a two-episode premiere. Here are my notes:

  • So far this show is exactly what I was talking about when I said I didn't want future shows to be like Andor but that I did want them to have the same effort toward excellence put in. Skeleton Crew is a quite different show than Andor, but it is succeeding with what it sets out for just as strongly. The acting is good, the writing is pretty solid, creature/droid effects are all quite good, and quite abundant.
  • The first two episodes are basically just there to establish the show's premise, which was only partly described ahead of time. We have our cast of kids, lost in space amongst pirates, which we knew about going in. What's a surprise is that their incredibly mundane homeworld is apparently the El Dorado of the Star Wars universe. This handily provides for two storytelling opportunity: the kids can't just get directions back home, and the pirates are as interested in finding the planet as the kids are.
  • At Attin was a really interesting, well-realized world, and stands out among Star Wars worlds we've seen. I'm not sure how much of it we'll see going forward until the kids' inevitable return, but what we saw in that first episode was some of the more effective worldbuilding we've seen in a Star Wars project. The culture there we don't see fully explored, but what we see from Wim's perspective paints a pretty good picture. It seems At Attin is some sort of closed-system experiment world from the days of the Old Republic. I suspect that its treasure will in some way be its culture and people, not material wealth, in the end.
  • So with a bunch of 12-year-olds as our heroes and a story about pirates searching for lost treasure, you might surmise that this is a kids' show. But, on a scale of Young Jedi Adventures to The Clone Wars Season 7, how much of a kids' show is it, really? Well, they aren't pulling any punches on violence, not that Star Wars is often particularly gruesome, but year, from the opening pirate attack on through the exploration of the crashed ship, there's a decent number of scary moments for little kids. As for whether it's appropriate for adults: unless you really just hate kids you should be fine. There's not really anything too juvenile here. I'd compare it to The Mandalorian in terms of tone, or indeed to Watts's Spider-Man films.
  • I will say that the lead kids all turn in great performances Star Wars is not really known for getting good acting out of kids (or out of anyone a lot of the time, really) but these kids (and their direction) were all fantastic, no complaints. Robert Timothy Smith, who plays Neel, I'll give special kudos for holding his own under heavy Ortolan makeup.
  • Of course, the headlining star is Jude Law, who we've seen very little of, so far. His Jod Na Nawood appears at the very end of the second episode; I'm fairly certain Nawood was also the masked pirate leader from the opening of the first episode (not least because Law is creidited for the episode without otherwise appearing) but I think that's meant to be a surprise.
  • Add Law to The List, along with Nick Frost and Jaleel White.
  • I suspected that we'd see Vane, the Nikto pirate from Mando season 3, again, just based on all of the costuming work done for him there, and here he is.

Endurance

National Geographic has put out a documentary about the discovery of the wreck of the Endurance, Ernest Shackleton's ship that was crushed between ice in the Weddel Sea while conveying what was meant to be the first expedition to cross the Antarctic continent. It's a good documentary, but not perfect.

The feature looks back not just at the story of the Endurance expedition but also at the more recent expedition to find the wreck. That's a decently interesting story in itself but it's quite straightforward. I found that too often the doc cut away from thrilling Shackleton adventure to show a bunch of people huddled around computer monitors watching the video feed from the submersible drone. For scene after scene of that they don't find anything, because of course they don't until the end. And the search process isn't anything fascinating to watch; they lay out a grid and check each square one-by-one. I'd honestly rather have heard more about the drone itself, but we don't get much of that.

But the stuff about Shackleton and his men was quite good. Shackleton had brought a videographer along for the voyage, so there's some actual footage of the Endurance that's been cleaned up and colorized. What they don't have footage of they managed to dramatize pretty seamlessly. This part makes the doc really worth watching. If you're not familiar with the story of Shackleton and the Endurance, I'd recommend giving this a watch.

Bird of the Week

In November, my mind turns to pheasants. This is because Thanksgiving Day is as much a celebration of the turkey (the largest of the pheasant family) as anything. I like to celebrate holidays with the drawing of a relevant bird, when possible, but I don't want to just draw a turkey every year; they're not the loveliest of birds, and besides, I don't often re-draw a bird that I've already drawn. Fortunately, the turkey has dozens and dozens of cousins, including some very lovely birds indeed. Take, for instance, the Silver Pheasant.

Pheasants come in a variety of colors, not only across-species but within individuals, the peacock with its blue throat, green tail, and marbled back; the monals with their shiny, steel-blue heads, chestnut napes, and azure wings; the golden pheasant, golden, yes, but also scarlet, emerald, and sapphire; even the turkey isn't just brown, but a paradoxical riot of dull shades. But beauty is not synonymous with color, as the silver pheasant proves. The male has a red face and legs but is otherwise all black-and-white. His white back and wings are marked with black (to a degree that varies by subspecies), producing, at a distance, the namesake illusion of a metallic sheen. The female, as is the case of most phasinids, brown, and can easily be mistaken for the female of several closely-related species. Indeed, on more than one occasion a rare species of pheasant found in the silver pheasant's Southeast Asian range have been found to be a hybrid between the silver pheasant and one of these cousin species; apparently the pheasants themselves have trouble telling their females apart, if indeed they care to.

Hybrids are an odd thing in ornithology. Some have names, while others don't. Often this comes down to whether the hybrid was initially thought to be a new species or if it was always understood to be a hybrid. In the case of the Imperial pheasant, a mid-sized, dark blue pheasant found in Vietnam, it was thought to be a new species. Jean Théodore Delacour brought a breeding pair of a new sort of pheasant to France in 1924, from what was then called Amann. He named them "imperial" in honor of the Emperor Khaï Dinh, the local ruler of what in reality was a French possession at that time. These became the progenitors or imperial pheasants in many European zoos.1 Delacour's own estate, Clères, in Normandy, was the site of a noted bird park, holding thousands of live specimens; this was destroyed in 1940 by a Luftwaffe bombing amidst the German invasion of France. Delacour briefly fought for his country against the Nazis before the French defeat, after which he escaped to the United States, where he lived the rest of his life.2

The Imperial pheasant was considered a threatened species, subject to conservation efforts, for much of the 20th Century. By the 1990s, it was suggested that the specie was actually a hybrid between the critically endangered Edwards's pheasant and some other related species. Initially, it was thought it might be a hybrid of Edwards's pheasant and the Siamese fireback, but study found that it was a hybrid with the silver pheasant, instead.1

To science, the silver pheasant is Lophura nycthemera. The genus name means "crest-tailed" and was first applied to the Bornean crested fireback; the species name is a compound of the Greek words for "night" and "day", given by Linnaeus presumably because of its light-and-dark plumage.3


  1. Hennache, Alain, Pamela Rasmussen, Vittorio Lucchini, Silvia Rimondi, and Ettore Randi. “Hybrid Origin of the Imperial Pheasant Lophura Imperialis (Delacour and Jabouille, 1924) Demonstrated by Morphology, Hybrid Experiments, and DNA Analyses.” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 80, no. 4 (December 1, 2003): 573–600. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1095-8312.2003.00251.x.
  2. Delacour, Jean. "The end of Clères". Avicultural Magazine. (1941) 6: 81–84. https://archive.org/details/aviculturalmaga561941asco/page/81/mode/1up
  3. Jobling, J. A. (editor). The Key to Scientific Names in Birds of the World (S. M. Billerman et al. editors), Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, Ithaca.

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