Depicting Mormonism in fiction is hard because there’s the obvious bits (which this series mostly gets right) but also so many details that turn a depiction into a general portrayal of generic conservative Christianity with some superficially Mormon elements. This gets a lot right but enough wrong as to bug me.

I have also never been a fan of fantasy stories that riff on Christian cosmology, and while I’m sure that some of that comes to still-ingrained secular/profane distinctions, I honestly don’t get what the cosmology here is and, therefore, what the stakes of the story are. I enjoyed reading this, but I don’t think it was that good.

Même si les évènements de cette série deviennent de plus en plus improbables (et je rappelle que la première saison a vu l’assassinat d’un ministre par un autre), les personnages restent bien intéressants et la série est super bien faite.

This series gets full marks because the people in it are somehow even more awful than in the first series, and there’s something fun about that.

Yes, Minister is a favorite of mine, so this has been on my radar for some time, but my Mormon sensibilities kept me from watching such a sweary show for a long time. (To be fair, I don’t know if I knew how to stream it either).

It is a delightful mashup of the sweary incompetence of Slow Horses with the premise of Yes, Minister, and I’m glad I watched it even if it didn’t always land with me.

I was generous in my review for Season 3 because I was carrying a lot of good will forward. I enjoyed parts of Season 4, but I spent the first few episodes asking myself if the show had always been that zany (probably) and the next few wondering if it was doing all its characters justice. I don’t regret having watched it, and a lot of it was fun, but it wasn’t the best season of the show.

Après avoir lu la première épisode de Haxo sur editions-digitales.fr, j’ai décidé de commander un exemplaire du premier tome de cette série apparamment assez bien connue.

J’ai trop aimé ! Le dessin est impressionnant, les personnages sont intéressants, et l’histoire se déroule facilement sans devoir trop peser avec des explications. J’avoue que j’ai raté quelques détails, mais bon, ça fait que j’ai envie de tout relire tout de suite.

Some MST3K jokes don’t age well (whether because the pop culture references are dated or because, well, values were off), but this was a fun way to introduce kiddo to this series.

This rating is a bit hard, because I enjoyed reading this fine (and the art is great), but after the brief joy of the second volume, I’m even more confused about the premise of the series, and this story was a lousy way to leave things hanging.

This volume was way more interesting than the first, and made me feel like there was potential to the series. Unfortunately, I also read up on Warren Ellis while reading this volume, which caused some hesitation.

This series has some genuinely interesting ideas in it, but it also takes absurd pleasure in beginning in media res and making the reader wait to understand what’s going on. I’m interested in continuing the story, but I’d prefer some more frontloading and less deliberate mystery and obfuscarion.

This movie is mostly well done and taught me about a historical event that I’d previously known nothing about. That (and its inclusion of a Norwegian actor I recognize from Okkupert) earns it some grace, otherwise I would find it a bit tedious for trying to stretch out a genuinely interesting story until it’s transparent and flimsy.

This won me over from the beginning. I’ve been complaining recently about the difficulty of enjoying “robots are people, too” media since the emergence of AI chatbots, but I didn’t feel any of that here.

Part of that is due to the way that Zdarsky works contemporary concerns about generative AI into some throwaway references. Maybe more importantly, he challenges us to think about whether we are all meat machines rather than special soul-having humans, which is a pretty good response, actually, even if I still think Anthropic is teetering on the edge of the deep end.

John Le Carré taught me to love stories where people make dumb decisions and you know things will all end poorly, and this is one of those. I wasn’t sure it was going to work for me, but the premise is interesting on a couple of levels, and it is fun to watch the train wreck play out on page. The art isn’t my favorite, but I think it dulled what would have been some even grosser scenes otherwise.

Sad sack but genuinely good Spider-Man is the best kind of Spider-Man, and I loved this take on that kind of story. Also, making fun of The Punisher while using him as a character is the best possible approach, and I’m here for it.

After watching the movie, I knew I needed to also read (or listen to) the book. I took a big break in the middle of the listening, and I still don’t know if I followed every single detail, but I appreciate the argument and spent a lot of time thinking about Ellulian technique.

A fun and worthy conclusion to the series! I am rating it slightly lower to channel all of my minor complaints from the whole series (and because many of them were present here), but it’s not bad at all.

Still wary of it crossing into sitcom territory (and clearly trying to wrap up plot threads for a finale), but it’s also so damn good at being a cozy little self-contained world that I’m giving it a pass.

Yes, the series is starting to get a little hokey, but it gets credit for exploring all of its different characters and having fun with the world its built.

There are things I could critique about this series, and the last story in this omnibus feels like an awkward not-quite-but-maybe-finale that makes me worried about what’s to come, but it’s so darn cozy that it’s hard to find fault with it. I love a story that combines the fantastic with the mundane, and this does it so, so well.

Adapting two books (and maybe half of another? I have trouble keeping the books straight) at once was an interesting choice, and I thought they were going to pull it off at first. By the end, I was annoyed at how many plot threads were being jammed into a single finale. Herron can be cruel to his characters, but this adaption just did two of them dirty; similarly, the terrible twist at the end makes hardly any sense in the adaptation when compared to how it’s set up in the source material. I enjoyed watching this season, and I’ll always take more Slow Horses, but this ultimately felt like another disappointment.

We stopped following the Alan Tudyk Syfy adaptation of this comic after a while, but I remember enjoying the first season, at least. Rereading the original comics reminded me how different—and how much better—the source material is, though. More subtle, more heartwarming, more interesting. The Dark Horse Humble Bundle I bought a while back only had the first omnibus, but I’m going to have to hold my nose and turn to hoopla to read the rest.

On peut voir que je m’ennuie de mes podcasts en ce moment, car je continue à écouter cette série parfois ridicule mais toujours intéressant.

This got an interesting ending, but I don’t know if it’s a satisfying one. I appreciated some of the ideas it explored, though, so still a good(ish) rating from me.

J’ai fait une grosse pause en écoutant cette série, car l’appli Radio France est bien pénible, et ça m’a empêché de vouloir continuer. Regarder Quai d’Orsay m’a donné envie de reprendre la série, et puis j’ai enfin appris à me servir de la file d’attente sur l’appli pour rendre les choses… moins pénibles.

C’est donc une deuxième saison intéressante. J’aime la façon dont on fait de la fausse radio pour rendre plus intéressante une série radiophonique.

Still good, though I’m ready to get to the end of the story after some clear ratcheting up of tensions.